Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968

Heda Margolius Kovály was a Czech memoirist and translator. She was born Heda Bloch in Prague Czechoslovakia in 1919, where she lived with her family until 1941, when they were rounded up with the city's Jewish population and taken to the Lodz Ghetto in central Poland. She was separated from her parents when they were taken out of the ghetto and transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. She was chosen to survive and sent to work in the Christianstadt labor camp, but her parents were immediately gassed. When Soviet troops approached the camp, prisoners were evacuated and she managed to escape back to Prague. Between 1958 and 1989, she translated German, British and American fiction into Czech and would eventually become recognized as one of Czechoslovakia's leading literary translators, known for her interpretations of novels by Arnold Zweig, Heinrich Böll, William Golding, Muriel Spark, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, H. G. Wells and John Steinbeck. Her translations of Raymond Chandler inspired her to write a detective novel in Czech, "Nevina" ("Innocence"). When Soviet troops once again invaded Prague, Margolius Kovály fled to the United States, and she would eventually work as a reference librarian in the Harvard Law School Library at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An English translation of her memoir appeared as part of the book, The Victors and the Vanquished, and separately under the title I Do Not Want to Remember, in 1973. She re-published her memoir entitled Under a Cruel Star - A life in Prague 1941-1968. In 1985 she published her novel, Nevina (Innocence). The English translation was published by Soho Press in 2015. Margolius Kovály died in Prague, at the age of 91, after a long illness.