Charles Heller interview on YouTube, Part 4

Merry Christmas! Charles Heller interview on YouTube, Part 3

Charles Heller interview on YouTube, Part 2

Charles Heller interview on You Tube, Part 1

Happy to be part of oral history

The National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library (http://www.ncsml.org/), located in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is the "center of gravity" of immigrants, and their descendants, from the former Czechoslovakia. The NCSML runs interesting programs throughout the year, has a great online gift shop, and its library is the depository of many valuable books and documents. Despite the fact that the library was destroyed a couple of years ago in Iowa's disastrous flood, the treasures were saved and the building has now been rebuilt.

The Museum's current major project consists of collecting oral histories of Czech and Slovak immigrants. I was lucky enough to be selected to participate, and I was interviewed during the summer. The result of the interview was posted just last week on the Museum's web site. You can access it directly on:

http://www.ncsml.org/Oral-History/Washington-DC/20101108/69/Heller-Charles.aspx

Alternately, you can go on YouTube, enter "Charles Heller," and view several of the clips from the interview. Thanks for your interest -- and welcome to my blog!

The Invisible Bridge

I began reading a novel called The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010) as part of my research on World War II, as I edit my memoir of life as a "hidden Child" during Nazi occupation. Only a few pages in, I was totally absorbed in this wonderful love story. Judging from her photo, Julie Orringer is a young woman. Thus, I find it amazing that she has been able to describe so vividly and accurately the horrors wrought by the Germans and their collaborators. Reading between the lines of the Acknowledgement leads me to think that the book may be based on the story of the author's family. Is this true? I don't know. I do know that, while the book is long -- some 600 pages -- and it took me two weeks to read it, I became totally absorbed in it. For the entire period, I was living with Andras, Klara, and the other characters. Now that I've completed the book, I feel that something is missing from my day. I'll have to wait for the movie.

Much harder than I had thought...

It has been more than a month since my last blog. The reason? I underestimated the amount of work that would be required to get my book, Out of Prague: A Memoir of Survival, Denial, and Triumph, translated into Czech. The publisher, Mlada Fronta, asked me to make a few changes so that the book would be more suitable for the Czech reader. My original estimate was that it would take me perhaps three weeks to make these changes, before sending them to my translator in Prague.

The process has turned out to be considerably more difficult and time-consuming. First, I modify each chapter and perform several edits. Then, I e-mail it to Prague. Perhpas a week later, I receive the translated chapter, at which time I edit this Czech version. The latter is the tough part. It is very unusual for an author to know the foreign language into which his book is being translated. Czech is my native language. I know it quite well -- not well enough to do my own translation, but well enough to understand every word. Therein lies the problem. Occasionally, there are nuances and subtle meanings which get lost in translation, and my Czech collaborator and I must work through these. My knowledge of Czech turns out to be both a blessing and a curse.

The good news is that we're making progress. So far, we've completed the Preface and seven of 18 chapters. We're on schedule to meet our target completion date. As I mentioned in a previous blog, the Czech book will launch the first week of May 2011, at the Prague Book Fair, with a book tour to follow.

In the meantime, the search for a U.S. publisher for the English version goes on...