Miriam Prokopová

* 1963

  • „I remember that Aunt Marie came all distraught that they are making that kind of jokes, that they brought a cake with whipped cream and he threw it to someone’s face, someone threw it to someone’s face. That those are such jokes… It was beyond Aunt Marie’s ken. Because they always blessed their food. Food was holy. And that it should not be treated as trash. That it’s like, despect. She could not come to terms with that.”

  • „But what I witnessed in person, when they released Havel from prison, he made rounds visiting his friends and he dropped by in Stará Říše. And in Stará Říše, so, there were the Tatra 603 carps parked, for those who wouldn’t know, big black cars. And there were maybe five or six of them. And they stood by our house, they just stood there, and they went to have a swim so the cars stood by the Kladina pond, they [secret police] looked at them with the binoculars, how they’re bathing. So it was a memorable experience.”

  • „And now, Martin had his guests from Prague, and there was Egon Bondy and they had company and we were, like, fifteen, I was sixteen and my siblings were much younger. They let us sit there. We sat among those adults and they discussed politics. And it was like this in the villa of my grandfather. That the aunts and uncles would meet every Sunday afternoon, at around three, we would go to the villa. All the families met up there. And now, politics was discussed, they talked about religion, about everything. And this was the best school we could have. We knew artists, we knew operas, we knew painters. And then, more distant relatives or acquaintances would come. For example, to that villa up there, for those Sunday debates, Mrs and Mr. Reynek would come from Petrkov. ‘Oh, the Reyneks are coming!’ And, we would sit on such, in summer, on such a long bench, there were several benches and we would sit in the garden. Here, there was the wall of the house, the garden in front of us and that’s where we sat. Who did not want to be in the kitchen could sit on the bench and we chatted. I have a photograph where I am six months old, with my dad sitting along with [my?] siblings right on this bench. And Martin and Juliana would let us among them the same way. When we came, they would never say ‘Not now, we have visitors, come over later.’ No, they invited us to their table, we sat there with them.”

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    Zlín, 30.08.2020

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    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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It is possible to preserve one’s freedom despite the circumstances

Miriam Prokopová in 2020
Miriam Prokopová in 2020
zdroj: Pořízeno při natáčení rozhovoru v r. 2020

Miriam Prokopová was born on the 11th September in 1963 to a liberal family of Karel and Jana Florian from Stará Říše. Her original name was Marie, she changed it to Miriam later on. Her grandfather was Josef Florian, a notable publisher who started the Dobré dílo [Good Work] publishing house. The family cultivated interest in art, philosophy and Christian faith and many notable personalities were among their acquaintaces. In 1976, underground poet and dissident Ivan Martin Jirous joined the family through his marriage to Miriam’s cousin, Juliana Stritzková. Miriam Prokopová was involved in art, she passed entrance exams to the Academy of Art, Architecture and Design but due to her non-comformist family, she was not allowed to enrol there. When she was in the final year of secondary school, she refused to sign an application to the Union of Socialist Youth which meant that she would never be allowed to study at the university level. She thus enrolled a language school where she got two state exams, in German and in Spanish. As there were only a handful of Spanish-speaking people in the 1980’s, she got a job at the human resources department of the Zetor tractor factory in Brno where she was in charge of the Cuban and Angolan work group. There she met the Cuban Rolando Acosta. In Januay 1990, they helped him to cross the borders ilegally so that Acosta and his family would not need to return to the Communist Cuba. The wires should be removed by then but they were not and they had to cut through them. They were arrested but after an interrogation at the police station, they were let go. Miriam and Jiří got married in the same year and moved to Israel for six years to get to know their cultural and spiritual roots. After their return to the Czech Republic, they settled in Prakšice in the vicinity of Uherský Brod. In 2020, Miriam taught Spanish there.