Seven Days to the Funeral

Ján Rozner (1922-2006) was a leading Slovak journalist, critic, dramaturg, and translator. Julia Sherwood is a translator from Slovak, Czech, Polish, Russian, and German into English and Slovak. She was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (now the Slovak Republic). She administers the group Slovak Literature in English Translation and co-curates the website slovakliterature.com and lives in London. Peter Sherwood is a translator and critic. From 2008 until his retirement in 2014, he was the László Birinyi Sr. Professor of Hungarian Language and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in London.

A dissident's deeply personal and unflinching view of Soviet oppression in Czechoslovakia in the wake of the 1968 invasion. Seven Days to the Funeral is the fictionalized memoir of Ján Rozner, a leading Slovak journalist, critic, dramaturg, and translator. Rozner and his wife Zora Jesenská were champions of the Prague Spring and were blacklisted after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. When Jesenská died in 1972, her funeral became a political event and attendees faced recriminations. A painstaking account of the week after his wife's death, Seven Days to the Funeral is a historical record of the devastating impact of the period after the invasion. Through ruthless portraits of key figures in Slovak culture, the book provides a fascinating cultural history of Slovakia from 1945 to 1972. It is also a moving love story of an unlikely couple. Although Rozner began the book in 1976, it was left unfinished upon his death. The book was published posthumously in 2009 by his second wife Sláva Roznerová.