Zdena SkvoreckaHenri Pribik/Courtesy of family
Writer and publisher Zdena Salivarova, who died of respiratory complications in Toronto’s Hennick Bridgepoint Hospital on Aug. 25 at the age of 91, became an iconic figure in Czech and Slovak literature and a legend among her countrymen and countrywomen.
At a time when her homeland was under Soviet occupation, she published, from modest offices in her adopted city of Toronto, over 200 original titles by authors who had been banned or driven into exile. The company she founded in 1971 with the support of her husband, novelist Josef Skvorecky, was not only a lifeline to its writers and a beacon of hope to its readers, it was an act of defiance, one of the many that helped, in the end, to undermine the regime.
“For two decades Sixty-Eight Publishers remained a symbol of a free Czechoslovakia,” University of Toronto English professor emeritus Sam Solecki, a long-time friend of the couple, wrote in an email. “It was a space beyond the control of the communist government.”
Ms. Salivarova (who also went by her married name, Skvorecka) was uniquely placed to fill that space. A passionate reader herself, she understood the existential importance of writers and books to her compatriots. “Many of us,” she once wrote, “would not think of getting into a streetcar, let alone into bed, without a book.”
Toronto publishing house Sixty-Eight Publishers was founded in 1971 by Czech émigré Zdena Salivarova.Jiri Bores/Supplied
Sixty-Eight Publishers stood out among other exile publishing ventures both by the range of its offerings – novels, poetry, philosophy, memoirs, dictionaries, anthologies – but also by the care that Ms. Salivarova and Mr. Skvorecky devoted to the selection, editing, proofreading and colourful graphic presentation of every volume.
Over its 23-year existence, the company shipped hundreds of thousands of books to Czech and Slovak readers in Canada and around the world, and donated thousands more to be smuggled into Czechoslovakia, where they circulated clandestinely among avid readers.
Mr. Skvorecky once aptly described his wife’s childhood as “Dickensian.” She was born in Prague on Oct. 21, 1933, the third of four siblings. Her mother, Evzenia Salivarova (neé Nosalova), was a seamstress; her father, Jaroslav Salivar, was a bookseller and publisher who struggled, unsuccessfully, to keep his business afloat during the Depression.
Throughout the 1930s, with the father unemployed and the mother working from home, the family suffered a poverty so extreme that when she was seven or eight, young Zdena had to be sent away for nine months to a home for destitute children. Ironically, the family fortunes improved during the Second World War, when the country was a Nazi protectorate and books in Czech were in high demand. Jaroslav’s business flourished and the family moved from their one-room flat in Prague’s Old Town to more spacious quarters. Zdena developed her natural musical talent by taking violin lessons and singing in a local choir.
When the communists seized power in 1948, they shut down the family business for good. Jaroslav served two years in prison, then fled to the United States. Zdena’s brother, Lumir, was arrested and sentenced to 10 years of hard labour in the notorious Jachymov uranium mines.
Unable to get into the Conservatory of Music because of her “bourgeois” background, Ms. Salivarova won a place in a song-and-dance folklore ensemble that performed abroad, mostly in “friendly” countries like the Soviet Union, Mongolia, China and North Korea.
In 1957 she met Mr. Skvorecky at a social gathering and they were married six months later.
“It’s funny,” she told Mr. Solecki, “but I knew when I first saw him that he would become my husband.” It was the beginning of a lifelong partnership and literary collaboration that lasted until Mr. Skvorecky’s death in 2012.
The early years of their marriage coincided with a hopeful time in their country’s history that saw a gradual loosening of the regime’s grip on civic life, a change spearheaded largely by writers, artists and filmmakers. In 1965, Ms. Salivarova was admitted to the Prague Film Academy (FAMU), where one of her teachers was the novelist Milan Kundera. Her first major published effort was a collection of three novellas, Panska jizda (Stag Party), which she wrote partly in response to a collection of stories by Mr. Kundera she felt were misogynistic.
Zdena Salivarova with her husband, prominent Czech author Josef Skvorecky.Courtesy of family
“His Laughable Loves made me so mad,” she recalled, “I felt like a feminist and decided that I had to pay him back and write something from a woman’s point of view.”
Ms. Salivarova also appeared in two films that became classics of the Czechoslovak cinema’s New Wave: Jan Nemec’s Of the Party and the Guests, and The End of a Priest, co-written by her husband and the director, Evald Schorm. She also wrote a screenplay, about a mother’s visit to her son in prison camp, which was scheduled to be shot later in 1968.
It was not to be. On Aug. 21, 1968, Czechoslovakia was invaded and occupied by Soviet-led troops. Ms. Salivarova and Mr. Skvorecky left the country in January, 1969 on a temporary exit visa and travelled to California, where Mr. Skvorecky had been offered a short-term position at Berkeley.
With time on her hands, and to allay her homesickness, Ms. Salivarova started writing a novel about a young woman who, like herself, sang in a folklore group and because of her unfortunate “class background” suffered the unwanted attentions of the secret police. She finished the first draft in three months, and then she and her husband, “in a huge, five-hundred-dollar V-8,” set off on a road-trip across the country to Toronto, where Mr. Skvorecky would take up a teaching position at the University of Toronto.
“Wherever we stopped,” she told Mr. Solecki, “the first thing Josef carried into the motel was the suitcase with the manuscript of my novel. It was very touching.”
Mr. Skvorecky began teaching film and English literature at the U of T, while Ms. Salivarova finished work on her novel. It was published by Harper & Row in 1973 as Summer in Prague.
The saga of Sixty-Eight Publishers began almost accidentally. In 1971, they received an offer from a wealthy Czech émigré to bring out Mr. Skvorecky’s as-yet-unpublished satire of army life, Tankovy Prapor (The Republic of Whores).
Ms. Salivarova feared that an older generation of émigrés would misunderstand the book and try to censor its salty language and ribald episodes, so she proposed that they bring it out themselves. Skeptical at first, Mr. Skvorecky finally agreed and the couple sank their entire savings at the time, $5,000, into printing and distributing the book to a mailing list that quickly grew from 300 to 2,000. (It eventually reached 12,000 names.) The book sold out and provided the capital for the next one.
And so it went, sustained by Ms. Salivarova’s passion and entrepreneurial skills, for 23 more years, with Ms. Salivarova managing the office and Mr. Skvorecky editing the books and writing catalogue copy. The list of their authors, including Nobel laurate Jaroslav Seifert, Milan Kundera, Vaclav Havel, Bohumil Hrabal and tennis star Martina Navratilova, reads like a Who’s Who of mid-century Czech culture. When the communist regime collapsed in 1989, the couple decided to wind the company down. Its final volume, “Tales of a Tenor Saxophonist,” by Mr. Skvorecky, appeared in 1994.
Ms. Salivarova wrote three works of fiction after leaving Czechoslovakia. (She also co-wrote six murder mysteries with her husband.) Her second, a novella called Ashes, Ashes, All Fall Down, about a young Czech woman’s unhappy love affair with a basketball player from the Soviet Union, earned high praise from Robertson Davies and Alice Munro. Her final novel, as yet untranslated, is Hnuj zeme (Manure for the Earth), an intimate account, told in letters, of the tribulations of a Czech publisher in exile as she establishes her business in the face of skepticism and sometimes outright hostility from her community.
Meanwhile, long-overdue recognition began to arrive. In 1984 she received the Ontario Bicentennial Medal for outstanding service to the community. In 1990, she and her husband were each awarded Czechoslovakia’s highest honour, the Order of the White Lion, presented to them by Mr. Havel, who was now the country’s president. And in 1992, Ms. Salivarova received an honourary degree from the University of Toronto. In her acceptance speech, she answered a question immigrants are frequently asked: Which country did she consider her true homeland?
“Czechoslovakia is my natural mother and I’ll never forget that,” she said. “But in the past, she has been a rather nasty mother, often quite cruel to me. Canada, my stepmother, on the other hand, gave me everything my natural mother had denied me. I became a publisher, and even a writer, for my stepmother doesn’t ban books, no matter who writes them. She gave me social security, which I had so badly lacked as a child and a teenager. But above all, my stepmother gave me the most precious possession one can have: she gave me freedom.”
Ms. Salivarova’s “natural mother” had one more nasty trick to play. In 1992, a struggling Prague weekly illegally published a long list of people who had allegedly collaborated with the secret police. Ms. Salivarova’s name was on the list. It was clear to all who knew her that the accusation was groundless (many names on the list, including that of Vaclav Havel, were there merely because they had come in contact with the police). But Ms. Salivarova was crushed, and though her name was cleared by a Czech court, she fell into what her friend and literary historian, Alena Pribanova, described as “a deep and long-lasting personal crisis that had a devastating impact on her psychological and physical well-being.”
Ms. Salivarova, bent but not broken, fought back with the very tools she still possessed. The penultimate publication by Sixty-Eight Publishers, Osoceni (Accusations) is a 600-page broadside consisting of 94 letters written to Ms. Salivarova by people describing in painful detail how the Czechoslovak secret police had used blackmail and false accusations to compel them to collaborate.
The book stands as a monumental condemnation of how an authoritarian regime, once established, can weaponize the police to invade and ruin the lives of ordinary people. That, too, is a part of Ms. Salivarova’s enduring legacy.
Zdena Salivarova leaves her caregiver and niece, Zuzana Novotna, three other nieces and one nephew, and every one of the 227 books she midwifed into the world.
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