Sedmiramenný svícen, Legenda Emöke – Škvorecký Josef (2014)

In the entire work of Josef Škvorecký, filled with comical plots of human futility, a painful tone of a lost generation resonates, one that matured prematurely during the war, yearning for a world without ideology, without regulation, without violence, and carrying the memory of the middle-class comfort of the First Republic. However, it was met with the primitivism of political officers, persecution for bourgeois origins, poverty, and proletarian culture. Škvorecký's brutally realistic prose has a lyrical tone that reaches its highest intensity precisely in these two legends - dreams. Beautiful Rebekka, the only one from her family to survive the concentration camp, listens to the tragic story of despair in seven episodes, a sad testimony to human cowardice, fear, and betrayal that destroyed not only her family. The otherworldly beautiful Slovak-Hungarian Emöke sacrifices her future to save her regime-affected parents from misery. She finds an escape from the cruelties of life in religious fervor, which her worldly listener cannot comprehend. And for her storytelling to perhaps foreshadow a romantic prelude, the surrounding world takes too many shortcuts, and the stain does not take long to appear. Rebekka and Emöke, two laments over the hopes of youth and the sad world of pretense and lies, over the eternal love game of the small...