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Irena Brežná is a -Swiss author and in her book,An Emigrant’s Observations, she documents the complicated emergence of her identity (linguistic, ethnic, civic) in the context of historical events which individuals can hardly influence. 1968. A Czechoslovak girl who has just finished secondary school defects to the West with her family to avoid the trauma of the Soviet occupation of her country. Unlike her parents, Irena did not live through the era of show trials and persecutions, but she was still affected in childhood by her mother’s arrest, an event she briefly refers to in the first part of the book about the Prague Spring. Even in the country of the Helvetian cross, however, for all its positive macroeconomic indicators, not everything is ideal: votes for women, for instance, were only legalized in Switzerland on a federal level three years after Brežná’s arrival. How does the author describe her new home? Not so appealingly – to her it is a ‘cold paradise’.
"The writing of the Swiss- writer and journalist Irena Brežná has been shaped by her experience of leaving Czechoslovakia in 1968. The both forced and chosen addition of another place she called home became a source of her unusual observations about the society in both Eastern and Western Europe. The texts of this particular selection which isalready the author's sixth bookpublished in were written between 1981 and 2007. They present the reader withvarious topics interconnected with a way of thinkingthat is thoughtful, essayistic, playfully poetic and at the same time factual as it ponders the misuse and also (cosmpolitan) civil use of power, fear of the other and the shaping of a society, lies and ideals, distance and proximity, cohabitation or simply the uniqueness of life - in Czechoslovakia, Russia, Guinea, Chechnya, Switzerland or in ia..."
(Jana Cviková, the book's editor and one of its two translators from German)
