Summary Of Heda Kovaly Under A Cruel Star

This book review will define the failure of communism in the autobiographical memoirs of Heda Kovaly in Under A Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968. In the first stages of the memoirs, Kovaly (1986) defines the first stages of her life under the Nazi Occupation of Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s, which resulted in her isolation from the local community. During this time, Kovaly expresses the isolation and fear that she felt under Nazi Occupation, and how she lost most of her family to Concentration Camps. Ironically, this was the first stage of her interpretation of alienating social conditions, which would continue to haunt her as a Jewish woman living in the communist Stalin-Era. After the war, Kovaly (1986) is a loyal communist that

The problem was that everyone envisioned these goals differently.”

In this political context, Kovaly had to come to terms with the different views of “communism” that were being applied, which resulted in her husband’s death and her alienation as a “people’s enemy” in Czechoslovakian society. The difference in “goals” was primarily based on Stalin’s anti-Semitic policies, which sought to remove any person of Jewish origin from governmental positions. Certainly, this type of communism reveals the underlying problem with a “communist” ideology, since Kovaly and many other Jews were forced into poverty and isolation due to these ethnic conflicts in post-WWII

More so, the collectivity of social relations illustrates why Kovaly (1986) sought to remain committed to the socialist political ideology, instead of the Stalinist communist ideology. This form of corruption defines how Kovaly understood the “foundations” of a truly socialist society, which could not be realized under the threat of the totalitarian regime of Stalin’s policies in Soviet Bloc countries, such as Czechoslovakia. Of course, it is now well known that Stalin sought to eliminate the Jewish people jut as Hitler had done during WWII. Surely, this is not he “communism” that Kovaly (1986) had envisioned when Hitler was defeated. The death of Rudolf and her own exile defines how she suffered in poverty and social isolation, which reveals the massive errors of a so-called communist government that is meant to serve all people without religious or ethnic biases. In this context, the personal and motive value system that Kovaly expressed defines the inability of the communist ideology to bring these social interactions into her life:

You have to live in a social system with whose fundamental principles you agree, under a government you can trust. You cannot build a happy private life in a corrupt society anymore than you can build a house in a muddy ditch. You have to lay a foundation