Slovak Family Quotes

Collinwood has two Catholic churches, St. Joseph’s, where most go, and St. Mary of the Assumption, strictly for Slovenian families. Even among Greiners, there is a pecking order, though it’s completely baffling to Fritz why Slovaks should be lower down than the rest of them when they all struggle for the same bread and coal.

My grandfather Alexander and my grandmother Shlomit, with my father and his elder brother David, on the other hand, did not go to Palestine even though they were also ardent Zionists: the conditions of life there seemed too Asiatic to them, so they went to Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, and arrived there only in 1933, by which time, as it turned out, anti-Semitism in Vilna had grown to the point of violence against Jewish students. My Uncle David especially was a confirmed European, at a time when, it seems, no one else in Europe was, apart from the members of my family and other Jews like them. Everyone else turns out to have been Pan-Slavic, PanGermanic, or simply Latvian, Bulgarian, Irish, or Slovak patriots. The only Europeans in the whole of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s were the Jews. My father always used to say: In Czechoslovakia there are three nations, the Czechs, the Slovaks, and the Czecho-Slovaks, i.e., the Jews; in Yugoslavia there are Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Montenegrines, but, even there, there lives a group of unmistakable Yugoslavs; and even in Stalin’s empire there are Russians, there are Ukrainians, and there are Uzbeks and Chukchis and Tatars, and among them are our brethren, the only real members of a Soviet nation.

He's an exceedingly polite person. I don't push too hard with Bill and I think he respects that. When I was editing [his novel] The Royal Family I thought there were perhaps fifteen too many scenes in bars with prostitutes, but that was really the point of the book. So he cut two or three of them out.