Charles Sabatos
The life and work of Gejza Vámoš (1901-56) epitomize the multiculturalism of early twentieth-century Central Europe, and his first novel Atómy Boha (God’s Atoms, 1928) offers a distinctly Slovak perspective on interwar Prague. Born to a middle-class Jewish family in Hungary, he grew up in present-day Slovakia, and studied medicine at Charles University. He worked as a doctor in the spa town of Piešťany until World War II, when he emigrated to Taiwan and then Brazil, where he died in exile. God’s Atoms does not overtly engage with issues of Jewish identity, but is influenced by Vámoš’s cultural background as a triple minority in the First Czechoslovak Republic, providing an intriguing complement to his Prague-German contemporaries, as well as Czech writers of the period. This talk will discuss the recently completed translation of this book, as well as considering the image of Jewish culture in Vámoš's second novel Odlomená haluz (The Broken Branch, 1934).
Charles Sabatos is a Professor in the Department of English Literature at Yeditepe University in Istanbul, where he lectures on American, Slavic, and comparative literature. His research focuses on transnational contexts of Central European literature, particularly Slovak and Czech. His monograph Frontier Orientalism and The Turkish Image in Central European Literature was published by Lexington Books in 2020, and his translations of Slovak and Czech literature include Pavel Vilikovský’s novel Ever Green is. . . (Northwestern, 2002).
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The lecture will be streamed on ZOOM. RSVP through Eventbrite to receive a Zoom link. It will be recorded and available on YouTube.
The event is a part of lecture series Literature by and about Czech and Slovak Jews organized by the Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews and Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences, New York Chapter, with support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic and Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association.
