Literary scholar and translator Charles Sabatos will discuss the life and work of Gejza Vamos (1901-56) which epitomizes the multiculturalism of early 20th-century Central Europe, and his first novel Atómy Boha (God’s Atoms, 1928) offering a distinctly Slovak perspective on interwar Prague.
Born to a middle-class Jewish family in Hungary, Gejza Vamos grew up in present-day Slovakia, and studied medicine at Charles University in Prague. He worked as a doctor in the Slovak spa town of Piestany until World War II, when he emigrated to Taiwan and then Brazil, where he died. God’s Atoms does not overtly engage with issues of Jewish identity, but is influenced by Vamos’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 consider the image of Jewish culture in Vamos'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 Vilikovsky’s novel Ever Green is. . . (Northwestern, 2002).
Free and open to the public. Suggested donation $10.
This event will be livestreamed on Zoom. RSVP through Eventbrite to receive the Zoom link.
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.