The story of a young Jewish girl’s nightmarish adolescence during the Second World War, written in raw language.

Literary fiction

Zuzana is of Jewish origin and the daughter of a confectioner from Holašovice. She has been loved by two men since she was young, though she is only interested in one of them. The story depicts the German occupation and the war-torn end of a girl’s “sweet” world, which had been full of the sunlit certainties of childhood. The environment of the transportation and concentration camp in which Zuzana finds herself during her adolescence is described naturalistically and realistically, which is further enhanced by the raw, harsh language of the narrative. Zuzana survives but there is not even a sweet homecoming as her childhood friendship with two boys has been disrupted. The book is divided into three parts – childhood, adolescence and adulthood – describing the transformation from childhood to womanhood during a period of transformation in society.

Jakuba Katalpa (1979) is a writer who made her debut in 2006 with the novella Je hlína k snědku? (Is Soil for Eating?), for which she was nominated for the Magnesia Litera Award for discovery of the year. In 2009 her novel Hořké moře (The Bitter Sea) was nominated for the Jiří Orten Award. In 2013 the prose work Němci (Germans) was awarded the Josef Škvorecký Prize, the Czech Book Award and was nominated for the Magnesia Litera Award for prose. The novel has been published in translation in five countries, including Germany, and an Italian edition is forthcoming. In 2017 she published Doupě (The Den), her meticulous, multi-level novel set in the present day. Her most recent novel is Zuzanin dech (Zuzana’s Breath, 2020).