"At first I worked - I was changing wheels on trucks and that's where I worked. But then I gave it up when I was offered a job building a bridge. There I had to start at six in the morning and work until eight in the evening. It was a huge project in the city of Minneapolis. So I started there at 6.00 AM, and when I was finished, I went to the botany professor's house and translated from Russian to English for him, because he was studying the flora of the Arctic. And that was a terrible job because Russian botanists have absolutely no idea of style, so when they describe, say, a flower, they do it based on a list and they don't create any sentences. So there can be a description of a flower that's two and a half pages long. It’s literally untranslatable because it has no grammar! In order to be able to translate it, you have to know the way in which flowers are described. But without any conjunctions, just commas. Well, it was a terrible job, but I managed to translate it. I translated all five volumes, which were then published in Israel. And the third job was at home in the morning. I had a student at five o'clock in the morning, she wanted to learn Russian and go to the Soviet Union. She already had a visa and she wanted to learn at least a little bit of Russian, so I would meet her at her house at five am and then as soon as we finished I would go to the construction site, I had to be there at six in the morning."
"I wanted to become a doctor, that's how I want to continue. I didn't sign the final document that I had to sign as a doctor. I got the doctorate, but I had to sign it. And there was this one sentence I had to sign. And that sentence was that I would not take less than $69 an hour from the patients. And I wanted to treat people for free sometimes when they didn't have money. And I absolutely could not sign that, my mentality wouldn’t allow me, and so I went to study philology."
"So we kept running and they couldn't shoot at us. Because five soldiers came out of the barracks and only one person was sitting at the counter under the tree reading a newspaper. And when he saw us running, he covered his eyes with the newspaper so he wouldn't see us and therefore wouldn’t be considered a witness, and we kept running and we knew they couldn't shoot." - "Why couldn't they?" - "It was because of... according to international law on the division of the borders of Nova Gorica and Stara Gorica... Stara Gorica belonged to Yugoslavia and Nova belonged to Italy. And you couldn't shoot across the border in that town. So we just kept running further and further."
Alexander Levitsky was born on July 22, 1947 in Prague - Strašnice. His ancestors immigrated to Czechoslovakia as part of the so-called Russian Relief Action, a program to protect Russian refugees from Bolshevism. For the first six years of his life he only spoke Russian, he then started learning Czech at school. The family‘s origins were not discussed out of fear, as there was a real risk of Russian emigrants being taken to the Soviet Union after the war. He was abandoned by his mother at the age of three and grew up with his father and grandmother, and later with his new stepmother and brother. In 1964, at the age of 17, he emigrated from Czechoslovakia because, in his own words, he could no longer bear to live in the ubiquitous lies and dissimulation. He made it to America, where his mother initially provided him with a home, but the relationship did not work out well and the contemporary witness soon had to strike out on his own. He earned a living as a laborer and began to study. First he studied medicine and then Slavic studies. He became a professor of Slavic Studies at the prestigious Brown University, besides other things thanks to his knowledge of Czech. He taught there for the rest of his life. After retirement he moved to Sweden with his wife.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
