Word: czechs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Ironically, the very success of the Czech tennis program has brought the country a continuing headache: emigration. Since the Communists took power, 14 top Czechoslovaks besides Navratilova have defected to the West, along with dozens of lesser talents. Lendl, though nominally still playing for his native land, has not returned home since 1980, and now refuses to play in team competitions. Those who do stay face the problem of conformity. "The system is fine for ordinary players," says the unconventional base-line worker Srejber, who rose from 120 to 32 in less than a year. "But it doesn't adapt...
...countries where American pop is officially discouraged or limited, however, playing a Huey Lewis tape or wearing Jordache jeans can be an implicit political gesture, a tiny, tinny blow for individual liberty. One young Czech puts it bluntly: "Coke equals America. America equals freedom." In the Soviet Union, VCRS and audiocassette players are inherently democratizing devices. "The new communications technology has changed things completely," says one Moscow father of teenagers. "Tapes can be played over and over, exchanged, copied." In the '50s American moral vigilantes sometimes claimed that rock 'n' roll was the creation of Communist subversives out to undermine...
...Magnus' betrayals also smell of the cradle and the grave. His acts of treason are not rooted in greed or politics. They are delayed rebellions not only against a criminal father but against a system that appears only slightly better. "You have a lawyer's training, you have Czech language and Czech expertise," a personnel bureaucrat tells a reassigned spy. "More appropriately you have a thoroughly sleazy mind. Apply it . . . We expect terrible things of you." This sort of thing comes dangerously close to self-pity: the best and the brightest suffering the scorn of their intellectual inferiors...
Lanzmann makes no attempt to indoctrinate or to educate; he wantsonly to encourage each story in ultra-realistic detail, to bring out the unimaginable on the faces and in the words of his subjects. In particular the Czech Jew Filip Muller, who survived Auschwitz as a member of the "special detail" assigned to clearing out the gas chambers after each use, is remarkably lucid and eloquent. White-haired, handsome and soft-spoken, Muller tells how the victims scrambled once the gas was turned on, what he encountered when it was turned off. His are some of the longest and most...
...film's most powerful scenes, Lanzmann visits Israeli Jew and former Czech Abraham Bomba in Tel Aviv. With some coaxing from the director, Bomba recounts the story of his years at Treblinka. A professional barber, Bomba and several of his colleagues were chosen for the camp's special detail, spared the gas chamber but forced instead to prepare its victims, by shaving their heads. Day after day, he remembers, he and several others cut the hair of thousands of women, moments before their extermination, unaware of their fate...