Saturday Extra

When Rachel Weiss decided to abandon her life in Sydney and spend a year finding her bohemian roots, she had two plans.

One was to write the next great Australian novel and the second was to meet the love of her life -- an exotic Czech man with high cheek bones -- in a smoky Prague bar.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Geraldine Doogue: When my next guest, Rachel Weiss, decided to abandon her life in Sydney and spend a year finding her Bohemian roots, and you'll see that that's a genuine word, she had two plans: one, to write the next Great Australian Novel, and two, to hopefully meet the love of her life, an exotic Czech man with high cheekbones, in a smoky Czech bar.

But after spending a few months in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, she realised that uprooting herself from everything she knew, was really no picnic. An eccentric tribe of extended family, the near-incomprehensible Czech language, and a perplexing culture, was something she was not initially prepared to confront.

Well she's now written the book of her new life in the Czech Republic. It's called Me, Myself and Prague, and Rachel Weiss joins me on the line from her adopted home. Welcome to Saturday Extra.

Rachel Weiss: Thank you very much.

Geraldine Doogue: Now a year of living and living in Prague; it looks like the Great Australian Novel didn't materialise, but look, has that exotic Czech man in a smoky bar turned up?

Rachel Weiss: I very much regret to say that the exotic Czech man did not turn up, to my annoyance.

Geraldine Doogue: Nobody even sort of you know put out feelers that you could resist? Or are they too dull to do that?

Rachel Weiss: No, no, actually it's even worse than that. They're not too dull. It's a very sexually open place and everybody is having sex, it's just going on all over the place. People are unfaithful to their husbands and wives all the time. I've never really seen anything like it. But one of the problems, well there are two problems for me. First of all is that feminism hasn't advanced since the early 20th century here, so it's like Australia in the 1950s. And the women are all young and beautiful and cook and clean. So if you're a 40-year-old Australian who's been brought up by Germaine Greer, you don't stand much of a chance in that kind of competition. And the other thing is that I frequently am in bars and people are flirting with me, but because I'm having so much difficulty with the Czech language, so if someone says 'Gosh, Rachel, that's a pretty name', my first thought is, 'Wow! I understood what he said. Great!' So it's only afterwards that I think, 'Wait a minute, he said Rachel's a pretty name! Wait!' But it's too late.

Geraldine Doogue: Now do you speak Czech passably these days?

Rachel Weiss: I speak Czech moderately all right. I can make myself understood in shops and things. Czech, it turns out, is the third-hardest language in the world. It takes you about three years to get to master it. So I've been going for about two now.

Geraldine Doogue: Now your father's a Czech immigrant, he now lives in Australia. Did you know much about Prague prior to this trip?

Rachel Weiss: I knew nothing about Prague. My parents divorced when I was young, so I didn't see my father for a long time, and when I did, Dad doesn't really talk about the past, he's a war refugee, he's a refugee from Communism, and his only way of dealing with the sort of awful bits of his past are things he can never talk about, so it wasn't really till I got here that I discovered a whole lot of things about Prague and about my own history.

Geraldine Doogue: And I notice at the start of the book, you want to leave all of that, your slightly overbearing family, in Sydney, yet as you learn to speak Czech, you begin to reconnect both with the family in Australia, and in Prague. So what in your view, Rachel, is the most compelling part of this journey of yours? Because it really has been a small pilgrimage, hasn't it?

Rachel Weiss: Really to me, the most compelling part was connecting up to my father and my father's history, which had always been for me this huge blank, and I'd always forgotten all the details of for instance my grandfather's death in a concentration camp. Finally, connecting that in such a way that I could remember and cemented into my interior life, was in fact the most important thing that happened to me.

Geraldine Doogue: So you did know that your grandfather had died in Therezenstadt, wasn't it?

Rachel Weiss: In Therezenstadt, indeed, yes. I did know that. A Jewish historian once told me that children of survivors who never talk about their experiences, always forget all the details. Now I've always forgotten all the details of the relatives of mine who died in the concentration camps, and I always felt terrible shame about that. And when this historian told me this, I felt a lot better, but still I felt that what I wanted to do more than anything was to remember what had happened to them.

Geraldine Doogue: And when did the memories start to come back then? I know you stayed in your father's flat in Prague—did that prompt a lot of it?

Rachel Weiss: Actually in the flat there was this 1973 Guide to Prague which had been written in the Communist times, an d I was flipping through it one day, and this piece of paper fell out, and it was a typewritten family history, and it happened in the very early days and I couldn't really understand much of what it said. There were names, but there were also sentences next to the names. And as I learnt more Czech, I realised that the sentences said things about what they had done and who their sons and daughters were. And then later on in the year, I came across the piece of paper again, and I read it again, and I realised that what I had in my hands was the list of people who had died in concentration camps, how and when they'd died, and also the ones who'd survived.

Geraldine Doogue: How extraordinary, you just came upon this.

Rachel Weiss: I know it's bizarre, isn't it?

Geraldine Doogue: You did eventually summon up the courage, though it took you a year, to actually go the village, Therezenstadt.

Rachel Weiss: Yes. I went to Therezenstadt and I found that I could not tell my father what I was going to do. He came to visit me over Christmas,, and I kind of waited for him to go, and then in winter, I went to Therezenstadt. I went on the bus, and I knew that everyone had gone on the train, because my father had a Catholic mother, and he and his mother lived in Prague and his father was Jewish, and his father and all their relatives used to come to my father's place in Prague before going on to the train to Therezenstadt. And they used to fill their suitcases with dry bread, because they knew what was waiting for them there. So when I was on the bus, every time we joined up with the rail tracks, you know, I'd be looking out and thinking What did they see as they were going past? Did they see that house, and was that forest there?

Geraldine Doogue: And what sort of a village was it? What sort of a place was it?

Rachel Weiss: It's just this town. I got off the bus and at first I was looking for a place within the town, because that's where I thought they were, but it turns out that the whole town was a concentration camp. All the Czechs were moved out and the Jews were moved in. And then late at the end of the war, the Germans were moved in when the war ended.

Geraldine Doogue: Did it leave you reflecting on the luck of being born when you were? I mean I'm wondering if you did have profound thoughts or not. I don't expect you to say Yes, if you didn't. I do wonder about it.

Rachel Weiss: No, no, of course I did, and a lot of other things as well. For instance, when I went to see my relatives in—there's a little Czech village where my grandmother's relatives still live and where my father was born, and I do remember thinking I'm so lucky to have been born in Sydney, I mean not just not born in wartime, but also not born in a sort of poverty-stricken little Czech village where I might so easily have been born.

Geraldine Doogue: Look, the Czech Republic itself, just moving, because obviously they have to learn to live with this, and they've lived through so much, it's gone through a tremendous amount of unrest, the 1989 Velvet Revolution, which resulted in the bloodless overthrow of the Communist regime is still very fresh in our mind. And you write about how your father was lucky to leave the country in 1946, because, quoting you, 'Four years after the war the Czechs found themselves saddled with rulers every bit as vicious as the Nazis.' What sort of impact have such events in your view, had on the people of the Czech Republic today?

Rachel Weiss: Now that's really interesting. There are two obvious stars flashed across Prague. One of them is the architectural star, so that Prague is absolutely gorgeous. Because it wasn't bombed during the war, it's filled with 19th century, 18th century, 13th century buildings. It's absolutely superb. But the Communists, for some reason, every building they built was the most ugly thing you could possibly imagine. Hideous concrete slabs, really running like a sore across this city. And the other star that runs across is through the psyche of the people. So that I was actually surprised to find that Communism really is all about denouncing your neighbours and the secret police bashing down your door in the middle of the night. And as a result, people on the surface, are very wary of strangers. Nobody smiles, it's not like being in Australia where if you're bounding down the street, you smile at everybody you pass, and you say Hello. No-one does that here. But I actually think that as a consequence, their deeper relationships are very deep and beautiful things, as a result.

Geraldine Doogue: Along the way, I notice, Rachel, in a way, you were striving so hard to become someone else, but you've inadvertently grown to rather like the person you've always been. So maybe we could say that the Bohemian lifestyle has finally worked for you, and that it's given you choices. I mean what advice do you have for other young women, contemplating such a big shift?

Rachel Weiss: I definitely say do it. It was actually surprisingly, incredibly hard. Because I think I had read all of those books about you know, women going to France and finding the love of their life and having this marvelous time and becoming French, and I thought it would all be easy and I'd be all glamorous and live a life of excitement. Well of course nothing like that happened at all, you know, it's exactly the same life I'd always lived. But I found it refreshing, invigorating I think, to be somewhere where everything around me was so different that my own self became starkly evident to me. And I think apparently for me, because I was going to turn 40, and I just needed to shake things up and leave anyway, that as difficult as it was, it was a really invigorating thing to do.

Geraldine Doogue: And dare I ask the question that I know it's tough for first generation people, but I often get very interesting answers when I pose it: do you now think of your self as more Australian than Czech? Are you more confident in your Australian-ness?

Rachel Weiss: You know I absolutely am, and in fact that's the really nice thing about having moved here, is I'm so proud to be Australian. Hey do you know, that here, under Communism, Skippy was the only western serial they had here, and all my Czech friends grew up watching Skippy! They can sing the silly theme tune in Czech, isn't that great?

Geraldine Doogue: It is, hilarious. It doesn't quite fit in with the exquisite beauty of Prague. That's one thing you haven't mentioned thus far. Certainly I thought that Prague, when I visited it years ago, was one of the most exquisitely contained, just that area over the bridge, cities I'd ever seen in my life.

Rachel Weiss: It's incredible, isn't it, and the whole city is like this. Apart from the occasional Communist blight, the whole city is absolutely gorgeous, and it's a real credit to the Czechs. When they—one thing about the Communists is they let it all fall into appalling disrepair, and at the end of Communism, the Czechs just got out their squeegees and cleaned off all the buildings, started painting them beautiful colours, they whipped up all the asphalt roads and put down cobblestones. It's like a little fairytale city.

Geraldine Doogue: And very quickly, what about the food? The food when I was there was so bad I cannot tell you. I'm told it's improved a lot. I was there in 1989.

Rachel Weiss: Oh yes, it's improved a lot since 1989, compared to Australia I have to say it is still pretty execrable. It's a lot of—I ate a great deal of it at first, it's a lot of fried potato pancakes, fried chicken and sauerkraut. Still the main vegetable is a potato. The one thing I find really hard about living here is the lack of fresh, crisp vegetables, and the lack of chilli.

Geraldine Doogue: Yes, 'heavy' is the word I'd apply to describe their food. Rachel, look, thank you very much indeed for joining us.

Rachel Weiss: Thank you very much.

Geraldine Doogue: Rachel Weiss, who's the author of Me, Myself and Prague, and Rachel's father, Zedonek Weiss, who came to Australia as a refugee, in 1946, is now being contacted by other Czech refugees, people he hasn't seen for 30 years, who've read the book and identified him. So that's really rather a nice postscript, we thought.

Guests

Rachel Weiss
Author, Me, Myself & Prague
Published by Allen & Unwin

Story Researcher and Producer

Muditha Dias