Read of the blacksmiths, shop owners, and the elderly painter Pitock meets on his exploration of the Czech countryside, with memories of World War II and the region’s complicated Jewish heritage buried just beneath the surface.

 ***

I came to the countryside to get out of Prague. The Czech capital is enchanting, a colorful bricolage of buildings—yet perhaps even too charming, attracting herds of tourists who stampede down from Hradcany, the castle on the city’s highest hill, across the Charles Bridge and into Old Town Square. It threatens to turn the city into not only a canned experience, but an effacing one.

I wanted to get deeper inside the place, away from the noise of pubs, to somewhere I could hear stories. Now was a good time. Twenty-four years after the Velvet Revolution introduced a period of democracy and relative prosperity, some Czechs were digging into their past, which had been buried under layers and debris of twentieth-century calamities: falling empires, rising nationalism, Nazis, and Communists. The proxim- ity of the anniversary made people reflect on the strange turns of their lives.

“My father was a high official with the Communists,” one woman from Telc told me. “After the revolution, everyone was outside singing and dancing and celebrating, and he was inside his room with the shades pulled down. He didn’t want to watch. But he also went straight to the phone and began calling people he knew. He was making busi- ness. It was like that with all the Communists. They lost the government power, but they had the contacts. The people who celebrated were still poor after and the people who were sad got all the money.”

“So he became a capitalist?”

“No. He still says he is a communist—a communist businessman.”

 ***

Read more in Issue 7, out now.