A book presentation by the author DANIELA GROLLOVÁ SPENSER in conversation with DAN LA BOTZ
Thursday, October 23 at 7 pm
Bohemian National Hall
321 E 73 St, Manhattan
A presentation of Echoes of Exile, a deeply personal yet historically grounded account of Czechoslovakia from the 1930s to the 1990s.
In this new book, historian and anthropologist Daniela Grollová Spenser offers an intimate portrait of her family’s experience—beginning with her grandparents, who were marked by the tragedy of the Holocaust, and focusing on the lives of her mother, translator Ruth Toseková, and her father, prominent editor and journalist Vladimír Tosek. Active in the cultural and political life of 1950s and 1960s Czechoslovakia, both were key figures during the Prague Spring. Following the Soviet invasion in 1968, they fled the country and became part of exile circles connected to leaders such as Jirí Pelikán. The book concludes with a thoughtful exploration of the relationship between political exiles and Czech society after 1989.
The English edition was published by the University of Alabama Press, 2025. Receive a 30% Discount with Promo Code BAMA.
The book was published in Czech under the title Rozpolcená doba, rozptýlené životy za druhé sv?tové války a studeného míru.
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Daniela Grollová Spenser, born in Prague, with roots in Morava, in exile since 1968, is a historian and anthropologist living in Mexico. She received her M.A. in 1987 from the University of Mexico City, and PhD in 1994 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Later, she taught history at the Ibero-American University in Mexico City, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and the Autonomous Institute of Technology in Mexico. She has published several books, including The Impossible Triangle: Mexico, Soviet Russia, and the United States in the 1920s (1999).
Dan La Botz is a retired professor who last taught at the School of Urban and Labor Studies of the City University of New York. He is the author of a dozen histories and novels and a member of the editorial board of the journal New Politics. His latest books are Riding with the Revolution: The American Left in the Mexican Revolution, 1900–1925 and Radioactive Radicals: A Novel of Labor and the Left.
This event is organized by the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), New York Chapter, with the support of the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association (BBLA) in New York.
