The book Split Hearts or Life between Czechoslovakia and Israel brings unique memories of interesting and well-known people who lived part of their lives in Czechoslovakia and part in Israel.
You will find personal testimonies of the famous writer and diplomat Viktor Fischl alias Avigdor Dagan (1912 - 2006), writer Arnošt Lustig (1926 - 2011), writer Ruth Bondyová (1923 - 2017) and the so-called "Czechoslovakian". "They talk about their childhood, the events and hardships of the war, their arrival in Israel and life in the country they chose as their home.
In the book, you will also read the memoirs of Czechoslovak photographer Jindřich Marc (1921 - 2000), who worked in Israel in 1948 and captured not only the War of Independence but also the fate and ordinary life of the local people. The publication also includes the memoirs of Colonel Milan Malý (1923 - 2013), a wartime pilot from České Budějovice, who trained Israeli military pilots at the airport in Plané near České Budějovice in 1948.
An important part of the book is a pictorial appendix by photographer and journalist Dobrin Stoychev (1966 - 2017), who visited Israel several times and captured the life of the local people. In the pages of the book, he also talks about his relationship with the country. Individual chapters are richly illustrated with photographs from private archives, and there are also images from the archives of Post Bellum - Memory of the Nation, which illustrate the lives of personalities as recorded by the 20th Century Stories project. Unique are the archival photographs from the late 1940s, depicting the Israeli struggle for independence, which were provided by the Czech Press Office for the book.
The interviews with the personalities were conducted over the past twenty years for printed periodicals, and some have not yet been published. They have now been published in book form on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the independent State of Israel. The foreword to the book was written by Tomáš Pojar, Czech Ambassador to Israel from 2010 to 2014.
Czech edition