Innocence

Nearly lost to censorship, this rediscovered gem of Czech literature by renowned Holocaust memoirist Heda Margolius Kovaly depicts a chilling moment in history, redolent with the stifling atmosphere of political and personal oppression during the early days of Communist Czechoslovakia.

In 1985, Czech Holocaust memoirist, literary translator, and political exile Heda Margolius Kovaly turned her pen to fiction. Inspired by the stories of Raymond Chandler, Kovaly knit her own terrifying experiences in early 1950s Socialist Prague—her husband's imprisonment and wrongful execution, her own persecution at his disgrace—into a gorgeous psychological thriller-cum-detective novel.

Set in and around a cinema where a murder was recently committed, Innocence follows the unfolding of the investigation while telling the stories of the women who work there as ushers, each of whom is forced to support herself in difficult circumstances. As the novel brings this group alive, it tells their various life stories that have brought them to this job, the secrets they share with one another, and the secrets they keep. When the detective trying to solve the first murder is found slain by the cinema, all of their secrets come into the light.

A smart, evocative, and deeply stirring literary crime novel with international appeal.

Heda Margolius Kovaly, a Czech writer and translator, was born in 1919 in Prague to Jewish parents. In 1944 she and her family were taken to Auschwitz. Her parents were immediately killed, but Heda managed to survive by getting selected for a work detail. After escaping from a transport to Bergen-Belsen, she was reunited with her husband, who had survived Dachau and become a devout Communist. In 1952, he would be tried for conspiracy and killed in a Czech jail.

Under a Cruel Star, Kovaly's memoir of her time in Auschwitz and the early years of Czechoslovak communism, was first published in 1973. It has since been published in many languages all over the world. Her crime novel,Innocence, is based in large part on her own experiences in early 1950s Prague. Kovaly died in 2010 at age 91.

Alex Zucker has translated novels by Czech authors Jachym Topol, Miloslava Holubova, Petra Hulova, and Patrik Ourednik. Honors he has received include an English PEN Award for Writing in Translation, an NEA Literary Fellowship, and the ALTA National Translation Award. In 2014 he did new subtitles for the digitally restored version ofClosely Watched Trains, the 1966 Czechoslovak New Wave classic based on the Bohumil Hrabal novella. Alex lives in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Visit his website at www.alexjzucker.com