April 23rd is Shakespeare’s birthday and International Book Day. What a happy coincidence… Maybe not a coincidence. (This year, it’s also a day of widespread political protest throughout France, but we can leave that for others.) If I had to choose one book to take to...
A couple of weeks ago, the Los Angeles Times wrote about the upsurge of people learning Ukrainian. The staff writer had posted a request for interviewees on the Ukrainian Language Group I belong to, and his article got me to thinking about language in ways I hadn’t...
Seventeenth November is the 31st anniversary of the Velvet Revolution. The face of that Revolution in his own country and in the West remains Václav Havel, a complex, elusive thinker, writer, resistant and statesman who continues to fascinate. The most recent...
Today is the anniversary of the founding of Czechoslovakia, which existed as a country for just 74 years. Like other nation-states in the region, it was a creation of the Treaty of Versailles in 1918. But there were long-standing tensions between the two peoples which...
I have been thinking about patron saints, because the feast day of Saint Wenceslaus is today. He ruled Bohemia for fourteen years until he was assassinated by his brother in 935 on his way to mass. There were already stories and legends about his piety during his...
