Through chance dinner conversation, I learned from Jára of his mother’s letters. He kindly translated a few of them, and Kevin and I found ourselves enchanted by her voice and her candid disclosures. We felt fortunate to vicariously experience the Bohemia of 100 years ago as known to Tonča, her family, friends, and neighbors. Jára agreed to translate the rest of her letters that contained memoirs, and we then began reorganizing the material for presentation in this book.

The image on the right is an excerpt from one of Tonča's original letters to her son.

We felt it was important to preserve Tonča’s voice as well as her words. We needed to transform disparate letters into a coherent narrative, but still keep the informal flavor of the original letters. We accomplished this by using a flexible combination of thematic and chronological ordering.

Further, we saw a clear benefit of providing you, the reader, with context for many of Tonča’s stories, but we wanted to do so without interrupting the flow. To address this need, we worked with Jára to write an opening for each chapter.

His mother’s letters describe family dramas complicated by the trauma of two world wars and the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. This larger context frames her experiences, but she rarely explores them directly. Jára’s introductory notes fill this gap and, in addition, explain details and oddities that give his mother’s letters more clarity and meaning.

Together, Jára’s introductions and Tonča's letters produce a poignant yet often whimsical historical memoir.