Czech Television interview with Peter Kussi (2000) Epigraph Old age is sad, but so far it is the only

way we know of to live a long life. Czech Television, Anna Beckov creative group, presents Im Still Here: Interviews about life, history, and old age Peter Kussi: I apologize to you and your viewers if I make mistakes or sound crude, Im very aware of it. ELLIS ISLAND Peter Kussi: Theres an immigration museum there, with some very beautiful photos of the people who came here in the 19th century from Greece, Finland, the Czech lands, from all sorts of countries and you get the feeling of all these individual people who came here. You see that each person is completely different and you get the feeling, when you see the whole thing in panorama, of the enormous variety and diversity of the people who came here. But what fascinates me about it is how at that moment all of their faces are the same, all their expressions are the same, theyre the same. You see their faces, the look of relief that theyre finally off the boat, the fear of what will happen next, the anxiety, where is their luggage and so on. In other words the whole mixture, as you might imagine. It wasnt great big crowds that came here, great big crowds dressed in black, but individuals, individuals who were all different from one another. I think this egalitarianism we have here now isnt entirely justified. I think actually there are very considerable differences, in every aspect, thats the beauty of the world, isnt it? As the French say, Vive la diffrence. But in certain situations, in similar situations, people become the same. When they make love theyre the same, when theyre on the beach theyre the same, in all of these situations, during a funeral probably everyone looks the same, and so on and so forth. I was born in Prague, in 1925. My family was, as they said in those days, assimilated Jews. We were a Jewish family who, apart from our religion, felt completely Czech. My parents spoke Czech perfectly, I went to Czech schools. My father was born in America, which is what allowed us to emigrate here in 39, and Ive lived here ever since. I was in the U.S. Navy during the war. I did various things after the war. I wanted to go to medical school, but at that time it wasnt possible, since I would have had to wait a year, and a year for someone at that age seems like an eternity. Well and finally I got into academia and now Im a professor at Columbia. Tereza Brdekov: So, if you had to answer, are you Czech, or are you American? PK: One time somebody told me I was an American who spoke Czech, and that seemed like an excellent definition. I was thirteen when I left, which means only five or six years as a creature with a thinking brain, since the time I was a little kid, and the strange thing is that all my life Ive drawn on those years, those five or six years that I was there, for my understanding of things, for my Czech, and especially for my emotional life. It was a beautiful era, the Masaryk era. Of course there were people who felt differently, but for us it was, and for me it was sort of like a fairy tale actually, a very beautiful childhood. As I said, I felt completely Czech. That means, I dont know, when we learned about Jan ika, I felt like it was us, we beat the Crusaders, and I didnt realize

until later that actually my ancestors probably hadnt been there fighting with him. My parents were Czech citizens. It wasnt until the Germans came that my father suddenly remembered he was American and applied for a U.S. passport, for the whole family, and we got it within several days. So naturally it was a great relief. On the other hand, almost all of my relatives aunts, uncles, cousins, and so on all of them died in the Holocaust. TB: Did coming to America strengthen your relationship to Judaism or weaken it? What was it like in your family? What was your attitude about what was happening in Europe? PK: As I said, almost all of my relatives died, and of course that was an enormous shock for my parents. My mother had a breakdown because of it and she never fully recovered. My father also suffered a great deal. Eventually he had a heart attack, and my brother was also affected by it. So of course it was a terrible catastrophe for us, though I cant say it changed me in any way, or my relationship to Judaism, except that I thought the concept of whether someone was assimilated or not, if they were this kind of Jew or that kind of Jew, that basically Jewishness was something very deep-rooted. How the world outside looked at it, and what we considered important, if you spoke Czech or German, if you were in the army or not, all of these things were quickly forgotten and what was important remained the fact that you were Jewish. TB: Do you remember the journey by ship? That must have been an adventure. PK: Our arrival here in New York was very exciting for me. The whole shore was covered with these big beautiful steamliners, luxury steamliners, and also the Worlds Fair was going on, so the whole American war fleet was sitting on the Hudson, all these warships shining their floodlights into the sky, and of course with the skyscrapers in the background, truly a beautiful memory. TB: You must have been wondering, Whats in store for me here? Am I right? I would be wondering that. PK: Well, I thought that somehow they found out that we were coming. TB: That they set it all up, with the ships, just for you? PK: That they set it all up, yes. Soon after we arrived that is, two or three years later I joined the U.S. Navy. TB: How old were you? Sixteen? PK: I was seventeen and a half or so. You had people there from South Carolina, which seemed very exotic and no more or less exotic than someone being Czech or having just arrived. One of the few things Im very proud of is how fast I learned English, since I didnt know any English at all before I got there, and I spoke so well they even made me a radio operator, which means I was transmitting military signals, which of course could have led to several ships being sunk, since it wasnt as if I spoke that well, but the fact is I did learn it quick. At that time I felt very American, but later I began to have, I saw aspects of American life that I didnt like as much TB: You werent able to accept them

PK: I wasnt able, or I still felt very foreign, a sort of alienation. I think one of the basic things was the whole concept of home, which is something entirely different in the Czech lands, or in central Europe, and in America. Theres an American saying, "Home is where you hang your hat." Your home is where youre going, not where you were. But its something much broader, I think, the whole thing, the sort of temporary nature of life, and its getting stronger and stronger. These days when you look around the street in New York you see everyone has a backpack, everyone has sneakers, everyone has a bottle of water, and theyre running somewhere, so this nomad way of life is very strong here. Of course you never know, and thats something very basic I think that comes from America, thats American, which is that something new appears here first and then becomes universal in other places also. In any case, that was something I missed. And then the whole relationship to nature, for instance, where a Czech tree is something very organic, someone planted it, someone took care of it, the tree has its own history, maybe somebody made love under it, or died there, or is buried there, or what have you. Whereas in America a tree is either a natural phenomenon, like a cliff or a lake or what have you, or its there for decoration, some little forest around an office park or whatever, but that direct relationship to nature, I think, is missing here, and for that matter its also missing in a broader sense. JOKE TIME TB: Michal, what are you shooting now? That picture of Masaryk? Are we shooting? Oh, excuse me. Now tell me, you were PK: Excuse me, could you also get some shots of that giraffe? My niece gave it to me and Id like TB: Thats a zebra! PK: Zebra, pardon me. Id like to show her how famous it is, that its famous now. TB: Wed be happy to. You didnt speak Czech for so long, you almost completely forgot it. How did you find your way back to the language? Or did you completely forget it? PK: I didnt completely forget it, but I did get to the point where I only spoke what we call "kitchen Czech." That means I spoke it with my parents sometimes, but my vocabulary was very small and I did almost forget it. Actually what brought me back to Czech was vejk. I had always loved vejk and when I read it in English I saw that the translation was very poor, or lets say it had major shortcomings. TB: That was when, roughly? PK: That was approximately 1960 or so.
AT THAT TIME,

CZECHOSLOVAKIA WAS BLOCKING PUBLICATION OF VEJK IN THE U.S.

PK: Instead of vejk I translated several of Haeks short stories, which were eventually published in magazines, but that tempted me to start translating from Czech, since those stories, as well as a

few stories I did by kvoreck at the time, met with some success. That was a very beautiful part of my translating work, that I was fortunate I had the opportunity to work with so many writers. Its quite rare for a translator to be able to work with an author either hes dead or he lives somewhere else or he isnt interested and so on but in my case it was very nice. For example, I worked with Milan Kundera on several novels and he was extremely kind. He invited me to France and to Paris. We even spent some time together once on a little island off the coast of Brittany, where we worked on a translation. So of course these were wonderful experiences for me. TB: You were his exclusive translator into English for many years? PK: [hemming and hawing; I think mainly because he doesnt want to embarrass her by pointing out that shes wrong] I was, well, yes, I would say, more or less. I translated three of his novels. I think what fascinated me the most was my work with Grua, Ji Grua, on Dotaznk, on his novel The Questionnaire. I consider it one of the truly outstanding novels of the last fifty years, I think its a wonderful novel, and I was fortunate enough to translate it. Grua helped me a lot with it when he was here [1980], but the university helped me with it even more. Theoretically the reason a university exists is so people can exchange opinions and help each other and so forth, but unfortunately most of the time the way it works is that each department is a world unto itself and the people are scattered all over the place, especially in a city university, and there are very few meetings, except when they run into each other in the hall and talk a little bit. But when I was translating Grua, and as you know, Gruas novel is full of new words and new various sorts of things that he invented, or half-invented, so I was always running around the different parts of campus asking my colleagues what ponornost ["submersiveness"] actually means, genetically speaking, or whether its the right term or not, so for a short time I experienced university life the way it was . . . TB: The way it was truly meant to be. PK: The way it was truly meant to be, precisely. TB: You said something that really fascinated me, that to understand whats good about America, or whats better about it than Europe, you have to live here a really long time. What is good about it, or whats better? PK: I feel good here, and often when I come back from Europe, even though I enjoy it very much there, I breathe a little easier here and its hard to define exactly why. I have a friend who said that whatever you say about New York its true. And I think whatever you say about America is also true. Its so incredibly complicated and big and so on. Its always impressed me the way America looks at minorities and how to a great extent the new attitudes toward women, say, or toward sexual minorities, or other minorities come from America. Not that I like everything about it. As always, of course, some of its exaggerated, some things about it arent good, but on the whole I think its extremely important, and its something that was born here. TB: The idea that humanity is made up of minorities. PK: That humanity is made up of minorities, yes, and that many of the prejudices we have need to

be broken down. On the other hand, of course, there are also things that disturb me, for instance the sort of abstraction, the way everything becomes abstract. I often think, lets say, if we look at the Holocaust and the other terrible things that happened that began with the First World War, what was so terrible about them, or what made them possible, was the level of abstraction. That it became just a matter of numbers and statistics, how many and where and how, instead of about people and peoples lives. For instance, when we think about the war in Vietnam, or the events connected with it, about the student TB: You mean the student uprisings, in 68? PK: The uprisings, yes, in the 60s. To a certain extent it was an uprising against the puritanism that reigned here. One part of it was this fanatical cleanliness. People showering all the time and needing to be clean and spraying deodorant under their arms. There was an advertisement with a character called Mr. Clean, who would instantly clean everything until it sparkled. But there was also what Id call a metaphorical side of it, where for instance the Viet Cong werent viewed as people but as insects that needed to be removed. TB: Do you think you could say what was the most important event in the United States for America in the past fifty years, since World War II? PK: Well, of course one extremely obvious thing is the attitude toward black people. When I first came here, for instance, if you were walking along Fifth Avenue at 6 in the evening you didnt see a single black person, and if there was a black man an officer would probably come along and say: What do you think youre doing here, beat it, and so on, and it didnt occur to me that it was odd that there werent any black people on Fifth Avenue. I just thought they would probably rather go home, they didnt like it here, or I just didnt think about it too much. It was only later that I began to think about it. So the new attitude that exists toward black people, toward the issue of blacks and racism and so forth, I think is a very, very important change. TB: You teach Czech literature. How many people are interested in that here, and what sort of people are they? PK: My classes arent big in comparison to French or Italian or other languages, but theyre fairly decent, usually 13, 14, 15 students, and very good ones for the most part, students who know a lot about literature, people interested in comparative literature, Slavic studies majors who are familiar with Russian literature and want to learn another one. And then, after all, writers like kvoreck or Kundera, their work has really made a big impression on young people here. TB: Youve done a huge amount for Czech literature since the 60s, as well as for your old homeland in general, as they say. And I think in terms of official thanks youve gotten practically zip, you might say. Does that bother you? PK: There are times when I think the patron saint of translators is Werner Masoch, the founder of masochism, and that translating is an extremely masochistic job. But only when Im feeling bitter. The rest of the time it feels very nice and its a joy to do. TB: Do you feel youve missed out on anything in life?

PK: Yes, I feel that very strongly, because to a great extent I missed out on having a normal love. Ive had very unpleasant experiences in that respect. After the war, for 20 years or so, when I had to take care of my family, almost every day, because for various reasons, as Ive said, my parents were very bad off. My brother is still doing very poorly psychologically, so I really missed out on those 20 years. So I have the feeling Im still behind, that I still have to catch up. But I also must say, not just to be evenhanded, but I truly do feel that the further away I get from it, the greater perspective I have on it, the more I see that there was also something positive to it, that it saved me from something I have a tendency toward, which is taking life a little too lightly perhaps. TB: What would you say is the most important thing in life? PK: Well, I think one thing thats extremely important is to live life like an adventure, to see life as an adventure. And thats purely a matter, I think, of perspective, or attitude. What I mean is that you can see everything either as a terrible pain in the neck and something unpleasant, or as an adventure. TB: Do you believe in anything after death? PK: Not in the conventional sense, but I do think we dont completely understand yet what time is and what it means, what time means after death. So I see it more from that standpoint. ***** Translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker.