Shadow Jiří Křižan

The Shadow by Jiří Křižan (1941–2010) is the story of an orphaned country boy raised by an almost old-world just grandfather, interspersed with "stupid" stories from substitutive military service. A narrative that makes it almost physically felt what it is like to grow up on the fringes of society as a politically arbitrary branded "class enemy" and therefore an incomplete "former person."

Křižan wrote this narrative when he was twenty-seven years old, using many strong biographical elements but he did not live to the age to its publication in his native tongue: in the early 1970, column corrections were scattered by the normalization purges, and in the late millennium all efforts to print were useless.

Now the Shadow was finally published. This was not due to the mere obligation to repay a debt growing for almost half a century, not even in an effort to convert an unknown work by a well-known author into money, but simply because it is a text that is still alive - unpretentious, extremely impressive and topical.

"I wanted to die three times in my life - when I carried home a tiny coffin and drove to our first son's cemetery. From the cemetery, I went home through the woods around the creek and it smelled of honeysuckle and the sun was shining… then I thought I would not survive… And when I was burying your grandmother, it was the same. At that time the forest smelled of mushrooms and my heart hurt… but in a month they showed you to me, my grandson, and it didn't hurt so much anymore, and as the winter and spring went and the summers and autumns went and you grew up, the pain passed too… But the pain never leaves, it waits and always returns…

You were too small when your dad and my son was hanged, when your mother was killed and we were left alone. I'm too old and you are too young. You don't remember how people didn't greet us, how they looked at the dirt on the ground or at the clouds in the sky so they wouldn't have to see how you hold the old man's hand… how people were afraid to stand next to us in the store… Then the pain came back and squeezed my heart, of which only a tiny piece is left for you, as the rest remains empty today… That's when the second half of the century began and I began to die, and I don't know what it was, if not God, what kept me here for you, what gave me the strength and health so that I can finally send you to Prague… Jarka, sell the cottage and finish your studies! ”