Authors

Jan Drabek was born in Prague on May 5, 1935. His father, Jaroslav Drabek, was a lawyer-journalist active in the Czech underground during WW II. Drabek Sr., although not Jewish, was sent to Auschwitz in 1943 with “Return Unwanted” stamped on his papers. Jan Drabek has recalled, "In January 1943 Father was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, which he miraculously survived to hide for the rest of the war in a Prague insane asylum. That was just the beginning: after the Communist takeover he led the family to West Germany on skis (in 1948), then brought us into North America in (1948) where the four of us (my brother Jasha and I besides our parents) established new roots and prospered." Drabek Sr. became chief prosecutor of a Czechoslovak war crimes tribunal and a commentator for “Voice of America”. In 1984, Jan Drabek accompanied his father to Auschwitz for the filming of a 20-minute documentary memoir, Father’s Return to Auschwitz, directed by Czech-born Ivan Horský.

Jan Drabek was raised in Czechoslovakia, Germany, France and the United States. He served in the U.S. Navy (1956-1958) on a U.S. aircraft carrier and on the editorial staff of the Washington Evening Star (1958-1960). He was also a refugee settlement officer in Vienna (1961), a broadcaster in Munich (1961-1963) and a travel clerk for American Express in New York (1965-1966). He immigrated to Canada in 1965. When Jan Drabek first came to Vancouver, he was originally planning to drive down the West Coast in search of work as a journalist, but his wife’s family was already in Vancouver, as was the Czech botanist who had headed his father’s underground group. Drabek stayed, taught high school in Kitsilano (1966-1976) and wrote a non-fiction book about his experiences called Blackboard Odyssey (1973). It compares European and North American education. Much later he recalled his upbringing in Europe in a memoir called Thirteen (1991).

In the Seventies and Eighties Drabek worked as a travel agent, studied at UBC and SFU, served as the chair of the B. C. Federation of Writers and the B. C. representative on the Caucus of the Writers Union of Canada, and published four novels, Whatever Happened to Wenceslas? (1975), Report on the Death of Rosenkavalier (1977), The Lister Legacy (1980) and The Statement (1982). Report on the Death of Rosenkavalier concerns a Czech named Antonin Klima who returns to Prague from Canada in order to execute a sadistic prison official named Rosenkavalier who is killing political prisoners. The Lister Legacy is a post-war spy thriller that revisits the sabotage of a Nazi germ warfare laboratory. The Statement recounts how a political science professor at UBC engineers a revolution in a fictitious country called New Salisbury. “One of the most difficult points for us English-speaking people to grasp is that we are the aberration,” says Drabek’s radicalized professor, “and that the dictatorships and police states are much more the normal thing in the world.”

Jan Drabek and his wife returned to Prague during the 1990s to teach English at the Foreign Ministry there. He wound up being appointed the Czech Ambassador to Kenya and later to Albania. In between he served as the Chief of the Czech Diplomatic Protocol Department. He returned to Vancouver in 1998 not long after the Czech government failed to adequately respond to his urgent medical requests for his wife during an emergency abroad. The Czech ministry in 1997 required him to sign a statement that he would bear the cost of flying his critically ill wife out of revolutionary Albania. He signed and paid for the transport. Then he resigned from his post in Tirana. A former vice-president of the Czechoslovak Association of Canada, Drabek is fluent in English, Czech and German, with some knowledge of French.

In 2005 Jan Drabek returned to the Czech Republic for the launch of his book Hledani stesti u Cizaku [Searching for Happiness with Aliens], coincidental with the posthumous publication of his father's novel Podzemi [The Underground]. His memoir His Doubtful Excellency concerns his years as an ambassador for Vaclav Havel and the Czech Republic. In 2007 Jan Drabek was elected President of The Federation of B. C. Writers at its AGM in Victoria.

In 2009 he published a book about the Vancouver Olympics in Czech, in the Czech Republic, with Oftis Publishers. Besides providing a list of venues and schedules for the games, the volume includes essays, both humorous and pensive; and photos. Drabek, who writes in both Czech and English, has been a columnist for Xantypa magazine, a Czech equivalent of Vanity Fair.

 

Text and photo taken by ABCBookworld.com

This author profile was last updated in 2010.

E jandrabek@novuscom.net

 

An Inventory of his fonds In The Library of the University of British Columbia Special Collections here.