Tag #136431 - Interview #78028 (alena munkova)

It wasn't until later, in 1968, when we had a three year old daughter, did I think about emigration, but my husband was afraid of it. One of the reasons was that nowhere is there as beautiful a city as Prague. So dramatic, in an architectural sense. Because my husband is an architect. For my part, I wasn't able to imagine not using Czech. Not as my livelihood, but that which I had inclinations toward, to that miscommunication, would be even worse. Not that I wouldn't learn the language, at that time I could more or less speak English, that I would have learned. German for sure. But I think that the loss of your mother tongue is terrible. And not only for people that work with it. A few years ago, my brother gave some lectures here at the Faculty of Philosophy, where he said that emigrants, because they couldn't speak the language properly, had to being making a living with images. In television. That was a very interesting notion.