A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [172]
In 1977 a defiant declaration of human rights, Charter 77, was circulated. Twelve hundred people —a wide range of academics, disgruntled Communists, and religious activists—had signed this dissident declaration between the late 1970s and late 1980s. But the authors, Havel and Kohout, and all of the original signers, including Sidon, came under intense harassment. They would regularly be arrested for a day or a few days and then be released. It was impossible to hold down any job. Sidon could not even be a coal stoker anymore. Each time he was arrested, government agents, strangers in dull suits, would arrive at his apartment and search it, shuffling through his and his family's possessions, upsetting his wife and terrifying his three children.
Sidon had been thinking more and more about his Jewishness. Technically, he was not a Jew because his mother was Christian. His Jewish father had been deported and killed when Karol was only two years old. He and his mother had survived in hiding. After the war his mother had remarried another Jew, and while Karol was not Jewish, his stepfather and the legend of his father gave him a sense of Jewishness. He had grown up thinking of his home as a Jewish household, but he had no understanding of Judaism being a religion. In the Dubcek era he was one of many people in Prague who had started pursuing an interest in Judaism. But Sidon's interest did not wane with the normalization, and in 1978 he began studying under Viktor Feuerlicht. In time he had a symbolic, though legally dubious, conversion. His wife, and therefore his children, were already Jewish.
It was not a good time to be a Jew, but since Sidon was already a Charter 77 founder, he had little standing to lose. It seemed that one day soon he would be arrested and not released. And he could not work. The regime wanted it to be impossible for him to live in Czechoslovakia anymore. Other writers, such as Kohout, had been permitted to leave and then were not let back in. When in 1982 Sidon was offered a scholarship in Jewish studies at Heidelberg, he moved there with his wife and children. Someday, he reasoned, the regime would fall and he would go home.
In 1984, Tomas Kraus's jazz group was dissolved, and three of its members were sentenced to two-year prison terms. Kraus went on with life, marrying the following year, hoping for changes, not certain what to do. He did not think playing jazz was as dangerous as being active in the Jewish Community. People would be called in and interrogated for being seen at the synagogue: Why are you going to the synagogue? Who did you meet? Why? What did you talk about?
THE OVERTHROW of the government was almost an accident. By November 1989, it had already happened in Poland and Hungary. Then the wall had been torn open in Berlin, and people were selling chunks of it as souvenirs of the past. The unthinkable now seemed possible, even inevitable. But Czechoslovakians were still playing the game they had long played, pushing the limits—some jazz, some theater, an underground newspaper, a peaceful apolitical public event—going as far as they could without spending time in prison. Some miscalculated and really did go to prison.
The first mistake the regime made was on November 17, 1989. On that day fifty years before, nine Czech students had been executed and all Czech universities were shut down by the Germans. In