Abstract
Ján Kalina’s book One Thousand and One Jokes was censored in Czechoslovakia in 1969. Granddaughter
This is part of the transcript from the trial interrogations of Ján Kalina, my granddad. He was a satirist and a prolific writer of cabarets and radio programmes. His friends called him Laco. He was Jewish and survived the Holocaust thanks to the popularity of his work for Slovak. He thrived in the early years of communist post-war Czechoslovakia, opening the first permanent cabaret theatre in Bratislava and publishing his collection, One Thousand and One Jokes (Tisíc a jeden vtip).
Eventually, though, his way with words, combined with his Jewishness, got him into trouble. He was arrested by the secret police as the regime was clamping down on freedom of expression after the Prague Spring.
Now I have found myself following in my grandfather’s footsteps, improving my Slovak in order to research and write a show about his life so that his story and his jokes can be heard again.
My mother, Julia, is at it too. She is working on a 50th anniversary edition of One Thousand and One Jokes, and what has struck us both is that the most insidious and damaging punishment for my grandfather was how successfully he was written out of Slovak history.
We believe that it is important to tell this story again at a time when my mum and her friends observe a growing nostalgia for the communist regime in Slovakia, a rise in corruption and anti-semitism, and an increase in the susceptibility of young people to propaganda.
Miriam Sherwood performing in her play Rendezvous in Bratislava
CREDIT: Miriam Sherwood
One Thousand and One Jokes was almost ready for publication in 1968 before the Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. At first, my granddad’s response was to add a brandnew section of jokes about the Soviet invasion. But as censorship increased, he took them out and managed to get the book past the censors. It was published in June 1969 and sold out in less than two months, before the regime could ban it.
In 1972, he was arrested. He was in prison for nine months while they worked out what they could charge him with. In the end, he was found guilty of incitement: for having the intention to publish a book of political jokes abroad.
Clearly, the communist regime subscribed to George Orwell’s famous edict that “every joke is a tiny revolution”, even if it couldn’t exactly pinpoint why this was the case. The secret police files from my granddad’s case include a detailed “expert analysis” of One Thousand and One Jokes, which itself reads like satire.
(left) a poster for Miriam Sherwood’s play Rendezvous in Bratislava; (right) a poster for Randezvous v Bratislave, the cabaret written by her grandfather, the satirist Ján Kalina
CREDIT: Miriam Sherwood
Laco and his family were eventually given permission to emigrate in 1979. My grandma, Ági, went on to work for Radio Free Europe, while my mum finally fulfilled her plan to go to university. My mum eventually moved to London, where she began working for Amnesty International, an organisation that was instrumental in Laco’s release from prison. She worked there for more than 20 years, campaigning for prisoners of conscience around the world and, after 1989, helping to set up Amnesty groups in eastern and central Europe and the former Soviet Union.
I never met Laco – he died eight years before I was born. But, luckily for me, he left behind a four-part autobiography (he actually wrote a fifth, but it was confiscated by the secret police and never returned) and countless scripts, photo albums and scrapbooks.
As a theatre-maker, I couldn’t help myself. I began to work on turning his life into a cabaret of its own. In the process, I’ve learnt to love the sound of his voice, his wit, his tenacity and, most of all, his conviction in the power and importance of laughter, theatre and entertainment, whatever the circumstances.
My “granddad cabaret” is called Rendezvous in Bratislava, after one of Laco’s own shows, and last year was performed around England. I hope we’ll be touring in Slovakia this autumn, where people are fighting once more for freedom of speech and respect for human rights. I’m sure my granddad would support this fight today.