Zdena Tomin
Czech dissident writer, Charter 77 spokeswoman and broadcaster
ZDENA TOMIN, the Czech-born writer and translator, who has died aged 79, published her first experimental short stories and poetry in her native country during the period of comparative liberalisation that culminated in the “Prague Spring” of 1968; but when the Russians closed down Alexander Dubcek’s tentative democracy she found herself, aged 29, banned for life as a writer.
She went underground, emerging during the 1970s as a spokeswoman for Charter 77, the human rights movement, which she once described as “a strange natural elite, pushing through like tulips or irises which spring up in the middle of a barren field after years of waste.”
She was hounded by the secret police, who set up a round-the-clock checkpoint outside her door, subjected her home to regular raids and followed her wherever she went. In May 1979 she was badly beaten in a doorway by a masked assailant.
The following year, after she had been, as she put it, “subjected to unspeakable humiliation by the worst breed of state security agents,” she and her husband, Julius Tomin, a philosopher, secured exit visas and left Prague for Britain, where Julius had a temporary fellowship at Oxford University.
Nine months later the Czechoslovak authorities denounced them as enemies and deprived them of their citizenship.
Her marriage soon broke up, however, and Zdena moved to London where, in 1986, she published her first novel, Stalin’s Shoe, an autobiographical work about a divorced expatriate Czech mother of one who leaves London and her job as a freelance Kafka expert and disappears to a cottage in Wales, where she writes stories and remembers her childhood in Prague, first under the Nazis, then under Stalin, with whose propaganda image she had developed a youthful infatuation.
One reviewer described it as “the best kind of first novel … naive and intent with a sincerity that makes you want to take it in and give it a good home”.
Zdena Holubova was born in Nazi-occupied Prague on February 7 1941 into a working-class family. One type of repression morphed, after a brief interval, into another with the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948.
She studied philosophy and sociology at university, but her refusal to join the Communist Party meant that she was not allowed to progress to a doctorate. She worked as a translator while her philosopher husband, whom she married in 1962, did various menial jobs.
In Britain Zdena Tomin became a broadcaster for the BBC Czechoslovak service, reporting on the overthrow of communism in her native country, and published a second novel, The Coast of Bohemia (1987), a geographically inaccurate quotation from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Though politely reviewed by some, it left The Telegraph’s Nicholas Shakespeare unimpressed. “She has been compared with Conrad in that she is writing in a language that is not her mother tongue,” he noted, but he found the novel “frenetic and dreary”.
After the end of communism Zdena Tomin returned to Prague as a BBC correspondent.
In an article in the Independent in 1992, Zdena Tomin speculated that the so-called “velvet divorce” of Czechs and Slovaks might have been “a political accident”. It left her with mixed feelings: “I would like to pray: ‘Hurry into being, integrated Europe of a myriad regions, ruled by the golden thumb of subsidiarity, where no state need assert itself by building yet another set of borders. Farewell Czechoslovakia, and thank you for not exploding into another Yugoslavia. Best of luck, Czech and Slovak republics, and never let hatred come between you. Amen.’ ”
Zdena Tomin had two sons, one of whom took his own life in 1995. Her other son survives her.
Zdena Tomin, born February 7 1941, died May 24 2020