Fields of Light: A Son Remembers His Heroic Father

by Joseph Hurka

Overview

Winner of the Pushcart Editors' Book Award. Publishers Weekly starred review. Anniversary Edition. Sixteen photographs. In 1993, Joseph Hurka traveled to Prague to walk in the footsteps of his father, a Czech resistance fighter and American spy. The result, FIELDS OF LIGHT: A SON REMEMBERS HIS HEROIC FATHER, won the Pushcart Editors' Book Award (nominated by Andre Dubus), and is now reissued in an anniversary paperback edition. As the son walks through history, he learns that his father, Josef, came of age fighting the Nazis, and later worked in the Underground against the Communist government of Czechoslovakia. He describes in detail--here for the first time--the rescue of the great Czech statesman Dr. Josef Macek and his wife, Bela, on one dangerous night in December, 1949. FIELDS OF LIGHT is also a story of modern Prague and the Czech Republic after the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Hurka takes us with him into the heart of Prague, to Prague Castle--home of ancient kings--and into the "Old Town," where Kafka lived and Mozart once performed. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, in giving the book a starred review, has called the book "gripping." BOOKLIST writes, "It's the story of a man who fought for democracy and...the moving account of a son who finally comes to know his father."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780615817118
Publisher:	Wild Creek Press
Publication date:	09/16/2013
Pages:	180
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.41(d)

About the Author

Joseph Hurka earned his MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and has published his fiction in numerous literary quarterlies. His first book, the memoir, FIELDS OF LIGHT: A SON REMEMBERS HIS HEROIC FATHER, won the Pushcart Editors' Book Award, and a subsequent novel, BEFORE, was published in 2007 to critical acclaim. Hurka currently teaches writing at Tufts University, where he is a Phi Beta Kappa Poet, and in the graduate program at Emerson College. He lives in southern New Hampshire.

Table of Contents

	Prologue	3
Chapter 1	Coming to Bohemia	7
Chapter 2	Ancient Voices	30
Chapter 3	The Martyrs, The Cathedral, and an Evening at 139 Vinohradska	57
Chapter 4	A Reckoning	71
Chapter 5	A Hospital Story	99
Chapter 6	Ghosts in the Golden City	123
Chapter 7	Stones and Castles	141
Chapter 8	The Saint, The Priest, and the Clock	156
Chapter 9	Shadows	169
Chapter 10	Liberation	185
Chapter 11	A Prayer	194
	Selected Bibliography	199

Editorial Reviews

An enduring love song from a son to his heroic father. Immensely moving.

Andre Dubus

Hurka's singular effort has helped reestablish the memoir as an important tool of discovery.

Boston Globe

A riveting read.

Chicago Tribune

In 1991, Hurka traveled to Czechoslovakia with a couple of goals in mind: visit his aunt and learn about what happened to his father's native country and his father during the years of Communist rule. The result is a poignant memoir that intersperses the gripping story of his family's history and his father's anti-Communist fight with more leisurely descriptions of his own visit to Prague. As Hurka visits the Czech capital, he provides a welcome travelogue to a beautiful city that was just emerging from its gray Communist past and being discovered as a tourist destination. The passages on 1991 Czechoslovakia serve as breathers from the drama of this nonfiction thriller. Soon after the Communist takeover in the late 1940s, his father joined the Resistance. With loving prose, Hurka, who teaches at Tufts University, depicts his father's courageous struggle to ferry other anti-Communists into Germany and his time in jail after the Czech authorities caught him. What emerges in addition to Hurka's respect for his father are the difficult choices that Communism forced onto individuals and the dignity that was still possible. For a while after escaping from Czechoslovakia in the early '50s, Hurka's father lived in England and worked as a spy for the U.S. government, his family unaware of his whereabouts. In this era of memoirs that trace family dysfunction and the wounds children suffered at the hands of their parents, Hurka's tribute to his father is a welcome change. This fine memoir is the winner of Pushcart's 19th annual Editors' Book Award (nominated by Andre Dubus). Illus. (May) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Political struggles, lost and won, are full of unsung heroes. Hurka's lyrical work insures that such anonymity won't befall his father, an anti-Communist resistance fighter. In a poignant style that gracefully interweaves thoughts from a travel diary on Hurka's pilgrimage to modern Prague with dream sequences and bitter historical reality, the author traces the terrible and glorious history of the Czech Republic through the lives of his family and particularly his father, who was imprisoned by Czechoslovakia's Communist government and after winning his release continued his work with the Underground. In this book, we get a thumbnail sketch of a centuries-long struggle for independence and are made to feel the sacrifices of "ordinary" men and women. One's heart goes out to the people caught in the unfortunate geopolitical accident of the 20th century that placed Czechoslovakia between Nazism and communism. The reader comes away with the feeling that in the quest for freedom there are very few ordinary people. Recommended for all collections. [This book is winner of Pushcart's 19th Annual Editors' Book Award. Ed.] Wendy Miller, Lexington P.L., KY Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A memoir of a father's life as an anticommunist partisan, combined with an account of the political ups and downs of the Czech nation, from ancient times to the present. Hurka (Writing/Tufts Univ.) toured Prague with his Aunt Mira after the fall of Communism in 1993, and he narrates the story of Czech resistance to the Nazi and Communist occupations while describing his own experiences in the city. Prague became one of the great sacrificial lambs of the 20th century: the author recounts how British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain attempted to placate Hitler by giving up Czechoslovakia during negotiations at Munich in 1938. When the Communists took power in 1944, Hurka's grandfather was killed and his father, Josef, was jailed as a political prisoner on false charges. The author's grandmother and his Aunt Mira were thus left to fend for themselves—enduring midnight raids from the Communist secret police as they attempted to ferret out information about Josef's activities in the Underground. After surviving five Communist prisons, Josef came out of jail determined to fight. He joined a resistance group and helped Joseph Macek (an anticommunist politician) and his wife Bela escape Czechoslovakia in December 1949. After another dangerous mission in 1950, Josef disappeared and was reported dead—but in fact he had gone underground. The author recalls that his father "presented himself as a U.S. Air Force Captain, a meteorologist, a Colonel in the Norwegian army"—and that he "carried two pills . . . one to keep awake, another cyanide." Eventually Josef defected to the US and was able to bring his family there to join him. Before leaving the land that his father hadrefused to return to, the author visited Hradcany Castle—the ancient palace of Bohemian kings, now home to the President of the Czech Republic—and noticed a flag flying from the battlements emblazoned with the motto Truth Prevails. A modest but appealing account.

Kirkus Reviews