"I am... It might sound stupid, the feeling of freedom was really quite there, that you could come and enrol, be admitted into a school, which I felt I could never do here in the Czech Republic, that it was always in some political context or under some pressure or part of some terrible personal... that it just didn't go normally, either you weren't admitted, or on the contrary you had a bad feeling about applying or being admitted somewhere at all, so suddenly it was completely OK and normal there and nobody cared what you did or didn't do. And that's... just to read that, like suddenly it's totally legitimate to take those long subway rides and read those gothic novels and even get a scholarship to do it, and that you can do it that way, that was an awfully big, nice experience that there's nothing behind it, that it doesn't require any justification in any terms. That you don't have to look for any meaning; the whole point is that it's possible and that you are doing it. The simplicity of it was a great experience. That it can exist without all the things around it that in Bohemia, for that generation of mine, for everybody, was whether you got in or did not get in, or had to apply for something or justify it somehow, either that you were applying for something or not applying for something or what you were doing."
"I think we were all constantly aware that there was a wiretap, that something could be said somewhere. I think my dad was terribly sensitive to that, he always felt it a lot when there was news that somebody was being interrogated and said something they shouldn't have said, so we developed, or at least I speak for myself, that we had to be terribly careful with everything. And then there was this comical incident that in '89, in the summer, I got some kind of travel permission or whatever it was at the time, and I went to West Germany and to Paris and my dad gave me the contact information for Pavel Tigrid and I went to see him at Svědectví and he said, that he would give me some books to bring with me to Prague, and I normally picked up the phone and called my dad at work in Prague, saying I was calling from Pavel Tigrid and what books he wanted to bring. And I think it was... he was just always quite angry with us when we did something careless... but I think at that point he was so amazed that somebody could go, like, crazy when they go out of the border and completely forget about all the safety precautions, that he never even mentioned it again, that complete faux pas here."
"I take that as a normal state of affairs, because things are not being talked about or explained as much as we would explain them to an outsider or from some other historical era, and of course I don't know exactly the origins of the awareness that my dad signed Charter 77. I remember, maybe at the age of nine, being aware of such things, and such different moments of anxiety, when, for example, an older friend told us that our parents could be arrested for listening to Karásek or Charlie Soukup. But it wasn't really that we asked parents about it, we just sort of lived with it as a natural state of affairs."
Veronika Tuckerová, née Lopatková, was born on 9 December 1968 into the family of literary critic, editor and dissident Jan Lopatka and very soon became involved in samizdat culture and independent activities. After graduating from the grammar school Na Pražačce (art class), she wanted to study at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague or at the Academy of Fine Arts, but she was repeatedly not admitted. She worked in the library of the Museum of Decorative Arts and it was not until the autumn of 1989 that she managed to start her studies at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, which she completed in 1994. Before that, however, she met her future husband, Tel Aviv-born political scientist, historian and philosopher Aviezer Tucker, who had been working at the Central European University in Prague since 1992. She went with him for a time to Olomouc, where she worked as an editor at the Votobia publishing house, and then to the USA in 1998. In New York, she first did various occasional jobs, then studied Comparative Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University and German Studies at Columbia University. From 2002-2005 she taught at Queens College, from 2011-2013 at the University of Texas at Austin, and since 2013 she has taught Slavic Studies at Harvard University in Boston. She has also lived partly in Northern Ireland and she continously lives and works in the Czech Republic. She has published in the Revolver Revue and the Critical Supplement of RR and in magazines such as Rosh Chodesh, Slavic and East European Performance Review, Harvard Review, New German Critique, and Journal of World Literature, among others. She translates from English and German (e.g. G. Scholem’s memoirs From Berlin to Jerusalem), she has prepared for publication a selection of Ivan Blatný’s poems The Drug of Art, and written the afterword to the first Czech edition of Gustav Janouch’s Dialogues with Kafka. Her current research focuses on the reception of Franz Kafka’s work during the communist regime. Apart from literature, she also writes about visual art.
