Full Circle

Vitovec’s debut novel charts a Czech man’s life from his youth under Nazi occupation and communism through his adulthood in exile. 

Following the 1938 Munich Agreement, Nazi Germany annexed parts of the two-decades-old sovereign republic of Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia—which had not participated in the agreement—was then subjected to division and occupation for the duration of World War II. Jan Neuman experiences the occupation as a young boy, witnessing the humiliation of his father and other Czechoslovakian patriots, as well as the persecution and deportation of his Jewish neighbors. The use of one family to represent the massacred Czech Jewish community and one to represent the Nazi-sympathetic ethnic-German community, is a bit narrowly focused, but it allows Vitovec to cultivate his characters. Neuman’s family and community are elated when their nation is liberated at the end of the war, but just a few short years later, a communist coup returns the country to authoritarianism. After Neuman’s newspaper drawings run afoul of state censors, he experiences repression firsthand. He and his friends flee into the American zone of occupied Germany, hoping to join a rumored Czech resistance legion, only to find themselves interred in a Displaced Persons camp. Escaping these confines, the young men wander through Europe as stateless refugees. An older Czech man describes the situation when Neuman arrives in Paris: “Poles, Arabs, beggars. Street people. And now Czechs. Living like animals. Like dogs out in the alley, sleeping on trash and eating garbage.” Eventually, Neuman makes his way to the United States, where he tumbles into a marriage and career in the Air Force, without ever quite finding a home. Later in the novel, Vitovec introduces a forced—yet still moving—star-crossed love story and a convoluted account of revenge against a former Nazi. At 79 chapters, the book is overpacked, seeking to provide an entire fictional biography. Despite these issues, it offers a powerful picture of a refugee’s struggle—a timely subject.

A meandering, affecting tale of a refugee’s plight.