Previously: 40 Years in Beer, Part Seventeen: Uncle V’s beery introduction to Bohemia (June 1989).
In 1989 the city of Ostrava (population 330,000) was communist Czechoslovakia’s hard-knock, grit-inflected, coal-fueled, factory-filled equivalent of the robber baron era in Pittsburgh. It would have been an unlikely tourist destination if not for my émigré friend George’s parents, who lived in Ostrava and graciously consented to house me for almost two weeks.
Uncle Vlasta refused to let me take the train, and instead we drove to Ostrava from Prague, a distance of 230 miles via Brno and Olomouc. Our destination was a mid-century house situated quite literally in the shadows of smokestacks belching the residue of Nové Hutě Klementa Gottwalda, a sprawling postwar steel mill named for one of Czechoslovakia’s founding communist luminaries, who incidentally was a syphilitic alcoholic with an attitude problem.
George’s father Vladimir worked at the mill as an engineer, and his mother Ilona was a secretary at a nearby firm. Vladimir was a hearty, extroverted, hard-working man. In addition to his responsibilities at Czechoslovakia’s largest steel mill, he maintained a cow, a copse of plum trees and a tidy vegetable garden on a minuscule plot of land behind his home.
Each day in Ostrava unfolded as a study in meticulously planned perpetual motion, punctuated by phrases in Vladimir’s native Czech, as well as Slovak, Russian, Polish, German and the English he’d only started amassing when his stepson defected to America three years prior to my visit.
Illona was eager to hear about her son’s life in Indiana. She had engaged the services of Ladislav, a retired teacher, to help her learn better conversational English. Eventually I’d come to meet Ladislav, who inadvertently played a huge role in my subseuent travels. It’s a story I’ll relate in due course
My first full day in Ostrava began as rainy, sooty and thoroughly bleak morning fully in keeping with the prevailing industrial landscape. Vladimir had a few hours off work, and he took me on a tram trip to the city center, but only after we visited a nearby potraviny (grocery) to buy transit tickets and cross off the items on Ilona’s list.
The tram trundled past block after block of work spaces comprising the vast grounds of the steel mill, culminating with the barracks-like campus of a technical school. Then came what might...Read more
