Ján Rozner

Ján Rozner was a leading Slovak journalist and literary, theater, and film critic and theorist, and translator from German and English. Following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, Rozner and his wife Zora Jesenská a distinguished translator of Russian literature, both of them active proponents of the Prague Spring, were blacklisted and lost their jobs. When Jesenská died of cancer in 1972, her funeral turned into a political event and everyone who attended it faced recriminations. In 1976 Ján Rozner emigrated to Germany with his second wife. Throughout his thirty years in exile, Ján Rozner worked on a series of autobiographical works, lavishing particular attention on Seven Days to the Funeral, which he regarded as his seminal work and kept rewriting and fine-tuning it. He died in Munich in 2006. (Photo credit: literalab.com)