Cesta do minulosti prostřednictvím rodinných vzpomínek. Připravily Lucienne Erent (1), (2), Eva Nováková (3). Dramaturg David Vaughan. Hudba Barbora Dočkalová (2). Hraje Vít Beneš (2).
Webová premiéra 2. dílu 19. 11. 2022 (ČRo English Radio, 29 min.); 3. dílu 26. 11. 2022 (ČRo English Radio, 26 min).
Obsah: 1. The Thing about Roots – 2. A New Circle of Life – 3. Exile and Return.
Lit.: anonym (= Vaughan, David): A Stitch in Time: a journey into the past through family memories. In web ČRo English Radio, b. d. (článek). – Cit.: In 2021 I was approached by Leah Gaffen from Class Acts, an initiative that works with bilingual children in the Czech Republic, with a particular focus on drama and writing. Leah and her colleagues were interested in family history, and they invited children and teenagers between eleven and eighteen to write a story in English about someone in their family who had inspired them or influenced how they see the world.
Many of the stories are beautifully and sensitively written. At the same time they offer subtle and often unexpected insights into recent Czech and Czechoslovak history, and sometimes into places far beyond this country’s borders – fragments of 20th century history reflected in the stories of individual families. There is drama, sometimes tragedy and loss, but also a great deal of humour.
The participants were invited to the radio, and we recorded them reading their stories and talking about how they developed their ideas.
In this series we join them on a journey into the past, but from the perspective of a generation that is looking to the future.
The title, A Stitch in Time, is inspired by one of the stories, written by 17-year-old Johana Trejtnar. She writes about her great-grandmother and a dress she made that has stayed in the family to this day.
“History is hidden in the stitches in the seams of this dress,” she writes, and I think Johana’s words sum up beautifully the way that each family’s past is sewn into the present. (…)
Lit.: Vaughan, David: A Stitch in Time: Part 1 – The Thing about Roots. In web ČRo English, Radio, 11. 11. 2022 (článek + nahrávka k poslechu). – Cit.: We recently invited children and teenagers from across the Czech Republic to write a story about a member of their own family who had become an influence or inspiration to them. Many of the stories were beautifully and sensitively written, drawing us into the recent and sometimes more distant past through the traces it has left on families. In the coming weeks we shall be joining the children as they explore the world of their family’s history, but in this first episode we offer a foretaste of what is to come.
“The thing about roots, I have come to realize, is that they fulfil the same purpose for people as they do for plants. Roots keep you connected to the world and standing upright, but they do so invisibly, stretching deep into the past.”
These are the opening lines of the story sent in by thirteen-year-old Lucienne Erent, in which she talks about her father’s childhood in Leningrad and his first years in the United States. Her words are also the first we hear in a collage of voices that makes up the greater part of this episode. The authors, all aged between eleven and eighteen, read extracts from their stories and talk about the process of writing them. In the space of just twenty minutes, we are taken on a remarkable journey into the recent and not-so-recent past not just of the Czech Republic and Czechoslovakia, but of lands as distant as India, China and the United States. (…)
Lit.: Vaughan, David: A Stitch in Time: Part 2 – A New Circle of Life. In web ČRo English Radio, 19. 11. 2022 (článek + nahrávka k poslechu) – Cit.: In this episode we continue our journey into the recent past through the eyes of the youngest generation, starting with a classic tale of European emigration in search of the American dream. It is followed the moving story of a Czech family whose world was turned upside down by the First World War and the story of a Moravian village that has disappeared without trace.
We hear from fifteen-year-old Gabby Gartner, who lives in Prague, fourteen-year-old Žaneta Málková from Sezemice, a small town about a hundred kilometres east of Prague, and seventeen-year-old Martin Rada from Brno.
Gabby writes about her great-great-grandfather, Adam Gartner, who left on a ship for the United States in 1876. “I had to fill in some details,” Gabby says. “For example, I didn’t know the name of the ship, But the boy he shared his food with was real, and I also know for a fact that he had just a wheel of cheese and a loaf of bread,”
We gradually find out more about Adam’s journey. Here are a few lines to give a flavour of the story as told by his great-great-granddaughter:
As time passed, the steerage got fuller, and fuller and fuller. People were packed into every possible centimeter in that room. Out of everyone there, I think I had the most belongings. More came empty handed than not.
After what felt like forever, everyone had boarded. Suddenly, the boat started to move. We set off for what were the longest three weeks of my life. (…)
Lit.: anonym (= Vaughan, David): A Stitch in Time: Part 3 – Exile and Return. In web English Radio, 26. 11. 2022 (článek + nahrávka k poslechu). – Cit.: In the third episode of our series looking at the recent past through the eyes of the youngest generation, we hear a story of exile and return. Fourteen-year-old Eva Nováková chose the format of a short radio play to draw us into the world of her great-grandmother, Olga Szántová. Older listeners will remember Olga, who died in 2003. She was a legend of Czechoslovak broadcasting and a good friend to many of us here at the radio.
Eva’s play is called The Story of Radio’s Voice, and it takes us back to 1962, when Olga was thirty and her daughter, also Eva, was seven. By that time Olga had already been through more than most of us would experience in a lifetime. As the Nazi grip on Central Europe tightened, she and her parents fled Bratislava and then Prague in 1939, reaching New York via Norway, Sweden, the Soviet Union and Japan.
The family had good reason to fear persecution. They were Jewish and Olga’s father Dezider Benau was a well-known Social Democrat. (…)