Fish tales

"Fish Tales is a gift for the 20th birthday of the Paraple Centre. Father Paul gave his consent from heaven. We, that we read into the microphone, we gave our vote, and you, who bought the CD, you donated your money. Don't worry, he won't get lost in the Paraplet. It's a useful house where everything is done to ensure that people in wheelchairs don't lose their confidence and can get back to life. Thank you for helping a good cause. May you enjoy the joyful literature."

Zdeněk Svěrák

Contents of the CD
1. Zdenek Svěrák - The Most Expensive in Central Europe - 16:48
2. Miroslav Taborsky - How We Died on the Fish/ How We Didn't Die on the Fish - 22:23
3. Marek Eben - Potok pana inženýra - 10:27
4. Jiri Labus - Boty made in Italy - 08:26

Music: Petr Skoumal, director: Markéta Jahodová, master of sound: Roman Špála, dramaturgy: Alena Zemančíková

Lone Fish in the Stream
Ota Pavel, originally Popper, was born in 1930 to the parents we know from his stories: father Leo was a business traveller, an adventurer by nature and mother Hermína an interesting and strong woman (with a lit cigarette in her mouth). His father had a keen intelligence and an enterprising spirit, and his mother had wisdom and insight. It is important for the fate of Ota Pavel that his father was Jewish, Leo and his two older sons Jiří and Hugo spent the Protectorate period in Terezín, from where all three miraculously returned. The youngest of the Poppers, Ota, joined the mines in Kladno in 1943 (he was thirteen! ) and only after the war did he get into business school. He started working on the recommendation of Arnošt Lustig at Czechoslovak Radio as a sports editor, that's when the family was called the Pauls ("Back then, we said, that since we live in the Czech country, that we should have the correct Czech name instead of Popper, and maybe we were a little more fucked up, too, than was necessary," Ota writes in one of his short stories. ) Ota Paul admired people who managed to overcome themselves, to win success and recognition by hard work. But he also had a sense of the petty bargaining with the lord god that underpinned his father's business and personal success and failure, and which he incorporated (to a respectful degree) into portraits of athletes he knew intimately. It was only after a bout of madness at the Innsbruck Olympics brought on a hereditary manic-depressive burden that Ota Pavel turned the attention of his writing talent to the environment of his Protectorate childhood in the vicinity of the Berounka River, to the ridiculous heroic figure of his father and to his calm, humourous and wisely tolerant mother and other characters of his childhood. War rages in the background of his stories, Lidice is burning, Gestapo boots and Jewish transports, but Ota Paul writes about fish and the river, that glisten like the pure grains of it, what really matters in life. In every one of his stories, there's a loss, but there's something much more important than a fish behind it, or the stronger partner steals it or the smoker over-salts it or the beautiful hostess refuses, behind every screw-up, humiliation, failure or disappointment is the message, that the price of pride is humiliation, for the violence of losing, and that the great fisherman Death awaits them all. But if a man - like a fish - has a wild heart and a great soul, Death the fisherman will bow down to him in respect at the last moment.

Ota Pavel died prematurely in 1973, he had been struggling with his illness for many years before that, and he captured some of this in his last prose works. His books were long isolated in the Czech literary field due to the conditions known as normalisation; they floated like a lonely fish in a stream that lacked forbidden names. Time, however, that indispensable companion of the fisherman Death, stood at the mouth of the river, along with nature, man's desire for happiness, and the folly of it, waiting for him. Today it is as clear as the summer sun over the river that Ota Pavel's prose belongs to the best Czech literature of the 20th century.

total time 58:05