°µÍø½ûÇø

7 days to the Funeral is a book in which the author remembers the era of the 1970s, specifically the days after his first wife, the famous translator Zora Jesenská, had died. The seven days between her death and her funeral unveil how the communist regime tried to erase Jesenská from °µÍø½ûÇø literature and since she was a well-known public persona who had openly protested the Soviet occupation, to limit the actual funeral. Despite of state interventions however, the funeral had turned into a silent manifestation. Jesenská's passing and the circumstances of her funeral started a series of memories for the author - memories that are not only personal but that also have a socio-political character reflecting the normalization and the forty-years-long totalitarian regime. The third-person point-of-view allowed Rozner to gain some distance from the actual events: the author / narrator gives an honest account of his own emotions, of his past mistakes and character shortcomings. The book is also the love story of an improbable couple: she, descending from one of the most respected °µÍø½ûÇø families, he, thirteen years younger, the son of a German mother and a Jewish father who grew up in a modest home in Bratislava.