Format: A5

Number of pages: 216

In the entire work of Josef Škvorecký, full of comic plots of human vanity, the painful tone of the lost generation that came of age prematurely during the war, longing for a world without ideology, without regulation, without violence and carrying the memory of the middle-class comfort of the first republic.
However, it was awaited by the primitivism of politicians, persecution for its bourgeois origin, poverty and proletarian culture. Škvorecký's cruelly realistic prose has a lyrical tone that reaches its highest intensity precisely in these two legends - dreams. Beautiful Rebekka, the only survivor of a concentration camp in her family, listens in seven episodes to a tragic story of destruction, a sad testimony of human cowardice, fear and betrayal, which destroyed not only her family. disabled parents from poverty. She finds a way out of the cruelties of life in a religious fervor that her worldly listeners cannot understand. And for her story to possibly foreshadow a love foreplay, the surrounding world takes too many shortcuts and she doesn't take long to get dirty.
Rebekka and Emöke, two dirges about the hopes of youth and the sad world of pretense and lies, about the eternal love game of small deceptions and tricks - and above all over the eternal longing for a lost paradise.