I enjoyed Fields of Light. It reminded me a lot of another book I truly enjoyed reading in this course, Peter Balakian's Black Dog of Fate. Like Balakian's book, Fields of Light is a young man's exploration into his family's somewhat mysterious culture and history. Though Hurka doesn't seem to be as in the dark about his family culture as Balakian was, he does uncover, through family interviews and pictures, individual research and a visit to his family's homeland, far more insight into his father and his father's family than he ever had, just as Balakian does. Both men are also incredibly moved and forever changed by their visits to their family's homeland. For Balakian, his journey to Armenia brings him face to face with the unacknowledged genocide of his people. For Hurka, his visit to the Czech Republic and to his aunt Mira allows him to truly understand what the Soviet Union's communist stronghold did to the Czech people and how much his father sacrificed in his stubborn fight to free his country.
While reading Hurka's book, I was drawn to his style of writing and the format of his memoir, both of which reminded me of Balakian's book. Both books are written by men who grew up in suburban America so there is a similar sensibility in their storytelling and the way they struggled to understand their fathers, who both seemed to vacillate between being staunchly American and yearning for their hidden cultures. Both men are talented writers who have studied the art for some time, and that is evident in their descriptive, heart-wrenching prose. Their lyrical writing truly evokes images of the people around them and the historical places they visit. They both manage to convey through words the complexity of a culture that has fought against being erased throughout its history. They also manage to give a face to the suffering of their people through well researched and well reasoned imagined scenes. Hurka, for example, imagines the thoughts that must have been running through his grandfather's mind as he waits for a train, shortly after the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. By doing this, he puts the reader in the mind of an average person trying to live during such a precarious time. Balakian did a similar thing when he chose to re-create Dovey's story as a first person narrative passage. Obviously, Balakian couldn't know for sure what thoughts were going through Dovey's head and the exact conversations she had as she was marched across the desert, but he made this creative choice anyway. He did so to make Dovey's suffering more powerful and relatable. And he succeeded. They both followed up such personal stories and anecdotes with detailed historical accounts to give the reader a point of reference and to lend a sense of authority to their memoirs. Hurka, for instance, followed up an imagined scene of his grandfather looking at a newspaper with a picture of Reinhard Heydrich on the front page with a historical account of Heydrich's assassination by two Czech Resistance fighters. Balakian utilizes a similar method when he includes a history of the various Armenian cities after a scene in which he has a heated debate with his aunt about the use of poetry. Both men manage to seamlessly weave the personal with the historical, making for a more enriching read.
Most of all, these two books are similar in that they both explore cultures that have struggled for existence. In Black Dog of Fate, Balakian delves into the history and culture of Armenia, a country that has been persecuted throughout its history. The Armenian people, as a whole, were almost completely eradicated by the Turks during the World War I genocide, which, to this day, is still unacknowledged by the global community. This genocide, along with a lack of global support, had forced Armenians to be without a country of their own for many years, leading to various Armenian diasporas. These diasporas, in turn, led to the dilution and disintegration of the Armenian culture and history. Balakian uses his book as a way of remembering an entire generation of Armenians lost to genocide and to keep Armenian culture and history alive. His book teaches readers about the resiliency of the Armenians, a people forced to honor their traditions and lost love ones in secret for many years. In a similar vein, the Czech Republic, formerly Czechoslovakia, has fought for its own identity and independence throughout history. After years of serving the Habsburg Empire, Czechoslovakia declared it independence in 1918 and became a democratic society, similar in structure to that of the U.S. Czechoslovakia then enjoyed a couple of decades of peace and prosperity before being invaded and absorbed by the Nazis. At the end of World War II, Russia "freed" Czechoslovakia shortly before it enslaved Czechoslovakia in the chains of Soviet communism. For decades, the Czech people fought to return to the prosperity and freedom they experienced under Masaryk's democratic leadership. Hurka's book is a memorial and a celebration of the Czech people's long fight for their freedom from communism. His book reminds the world that the Czech people were unwilling to be absorbed by other cultures. They were a people who fought long and hard against totalitarianism. In essence, Hurka and Balakian both teach readers the importance of bearing witness in an effort to avoid cultural extinction.
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