Authors
Ota ULČ
He was born on 16th March 1930 in Pilsen and in 1953 graduated from the Faculty of Law at Charles University in Prague; after completing his studies he did his military service with the “black barons” (PTP) and for several years he worked as a district judge in Stříbro in West Bohemia.
In 1959 he was able to emigrate to the West and he soon settled in the United States, where he studied political science at Columbia University and then for a long time lectured in politics at the State University in Binghamton (in the state of New York). Since 1989 he has frequently spent periods of time in the Czech lands too.
Although Ota Ulč is a lawyer by profession, the real “university of life” for him was the years he spent in the paramilitary units of the Pomocné technické prapory and later a period of judicial practice in the border region of West Bohemia, where he did his best to avoid all politically motivated cases and trials. Perhaps by then he had already discovered in himself a great talent for presenting people’s stories and social backgrounds in journalistic form, even though his first book, written in English, came out relatively late – in exile in North America. Under the title The Judge in a Communist State (from 1972) he described in it precisely his everyday experiences from the fifties, when in the spirit of the ideal of detailed labour he had to face an adverse political period. Eventually Ulč’s book also entered into the Czech exile literature scene: Josef Škvorecký published it for him immediately after the launch of the Toronto publishing house Sixty-Eight Publishers, with the title Malá doznání okresního soudce. Already in this publication there appeared distinct signs of the author’s hand: an instinct for the small details of life and for a gripping story, as well as a decidedly detached overview of the events described and their integration into the wider social and political context. These creative gifts were later employed by Ulč in his gradually composed tetralogy about a “refugee” – an adventure (but also, in its own way, humorous) story about the exile Pravoslav Komenda, who spends turbulent years in the USA and in a Filipino prison, then makes his way back to his native country and enters the service of the StB as a repatriate, only to end up meditating at length from the heavenly realm on the philosophical and moral values of human society. In the character of the typical “little Czech” Komenda, the writer succeeded in linking his picaresque adventures with a portrait of the archetypal post-war chameleon, a little man behaving like the proverbial weather-vane, without opinions and without ideas or ideals. As a peculiar counterpart to this “Komenda cycle”, carrying on from similarly structured works in our post-war prose tradition although set in the exile environment, can be considered quite a number of Ulč’s journalistic books, to some extent castigating, but also for a change interpreting with considerable insight the so-called Czech national character – firstly faced with the post-February 1948 regime, and secondly confronted with illusions about the post-November 1989 development in the Czech lands.
Apart from these accounts, linking issues of exile with the response to conditions in the author’s homeland, from the seventies Ulč became a noteworthy representative of literary travel writing in the form of fiction and especially columns or reportage-based work. He remained faithful to this genre for the next decade, concentrating each time on particular historical twists and turns which have marked the life of this or that country, this or that continent – and the one constant of these descriptions and reflections is always a considerable interest in the activities of his Czech compatriots, in the conditions in which they live – and in their view of the situation in which they live their lives far from their homeland. In these travel books, thoroughly exceeding in their scope the conventional boundaries of the genre, Ota Ulč also takes on the role of a direct commentator on a number of diverse, however on occasion also relatively similar circumstances of civilization on a specific as well as general level: he usually becomes a witness to the situation in a given locality and at the same time is also its objective judge – most often at a distinctive and expressive journalistic level.
