The Journalist Association organized a trip to Caorle near Venice in summer 1968. On the morning on the twenty-second a boy came to our room saying, “Russians are in
Prague. We thought that he was just joking. He was not. Our sense of humor completely dissolved in that life changing moment. The crew of the summer camp split into those who wanted to return and those who wanted to emigrate. Everything turned upside-down. Discussions started. My wife, who had never liked living in Czechoslovakia, partly because she came from Israel and they had never believed her in our country, said: ‘I am not going back.’ I would go back. ‘So you would return without children,’ she told me. So I stayed. I had a car, an old Simca, one suit and three volumes of Turgenev, Chekhov and Tolstoy, and Hemingway. Oh! And swimming trunks.”
We got an invitation to Israel. My wife was overjoyed. She said that the Russian occupation was God’s dispensation and that our going to Israel was a blessing. The invitation came from the Prime Minister Eskola, he offered us citizenship and a voyage on the ship, Theodor Herzel, from Genoa to Israel. The consul general greeted us. Shalom, welcome. You have
Israel citizenship, he spoke to my wife in Hebrew. My wife joyously accepted. I said I would wait. I would feel like a rat leaving a sinking boat. I will go to
Israel, but I will use my Czechoslovak passport. He was looking at me. He was not pushing me.
We arrived in Haifa. Everybody knew what had happened in our country. They asked me what I would like. I wanted to go to a kibbutz. At first they sent us to school to learn Hebrew. I did not learn much. I could not concentrate. I would be thinking about Czechoslovakia at all times. And then I had a feeling that seizes many emigrants. They have two types of worries. The first one is a dream which repeats constantly – that they allowed us to return but later did not let us out. The second worry was personal. That for every Hebrew word I learned, I would forget one Czech word. So I did not study. I was sorry for that. It was a state of my nerves. I was telling myself that the Czech language is the only possession I have. It is an instrument. A beautiful language, and I am going to forget it now and I will not be able to write in it. I will speak Hebrew poorly, Spanish poorly, English poorly… but the beautiful Czech…I could hear it as music from inside. The language of poets!
So we were at that school and afterwards we went to the kibbutz. There they told me that I can be writing if my wife is going to work. Thus Věra worked in a kitchen. She used to get up at four in the morning. I was writing. I used to play songs by Marta Kubišová, Václav Neckář, Karel Gott and Waldemar Matuška. Six weeks later they came to me. They said I had already had enough time for play. They did not consider writing a job…”
After some time, Arnošt Lustig was offered to cooperate on a film about Marshal Tito. It was called Pass. He worked on the script in Yugoslavia. Then the Lustigs and their children went to America, to Iowa City, where Lustig had been invited for three months to the International Writers Program. Once, I remember, there was a writer’s party, and I did not even go there. I was not able to have any joy anymore. My wife danced with and emigrant poet. He asked her, “Why are you so sad?
If you had two children, a husband without a job and who had emigrated, you would not be happy either.
And what could your husband do?
As would any other wife, she said: Everything.
Could he be a university professor?
Of course he could! He used to travel around the world and lecture.
He told her: I need a person who writes books and makes films from them.
That is what he does,
she said. They invited me to Washington where I got a post of university professor, without adequate education. That is how the first stage of my emigration ended.”