Rick Zedník

I received “A Country Lost, Then Found” as a GR-giveaway, and I am very happy I did.

What was really special for me in reading this was that it gave me a sense of what walking through the Iron Curtain must have looked like from the other side of it. I was raised and born in East-Germany, and I remember stumbling through West-Berlin for the first time when I was about ten years old. This was supposed to be my country, but it felt like a whole new planet. Rick Zedník experiences very much the same, just coming from the other side of it, finding himself in post-communist Slovakia, where his father was born and his grandparents and other family members still live.

This book is not trying to cover the entire political and social dimension of events during the existence and after the fall of the Iron Curtain, but by telling the personal story of the author’s search for his roots and thereby writing a family memoir, it captures a very vivid image of the time. Sometimes it’s the tiny anecdotes that paint a more precise picture of the essence of a place. Like the french-fries episode towards the end of the book. I laughed. Hard. And felt transported back in time to when the Berlin Wall still existed and I was still wearing those big fury Russian hats.
Only a good book can do that.
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