Jan Rozner in B O D Y

Seven Days to the Funeral is a lightly fictionalized memoir left unfinished at the death of the Slovak journalist, critic and translator Ján Rozner, who had emigrated to Germany in 1976. Yet it is also much more than that – it is a document of the process of normalization in Slovakia following the Soviet invasion of 1968 and provides a cultural history of the country from the end of World War II up to 1972. The book also recounts the love between Rozner and his first wife, Zora Jesenská, whose funeral begins the book.

The excerpt is translated into English by Julia and Peter Sherwood.

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