“Prague Winter
: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948” by Madeleine Albright
By Philip Kerr,
Philip Kerr
May 11, 2012 09:28 PM EDT
The Washington Post
On the first page of her new memoir, Madeleine Albright writes, “I was fifty-nine when I began serving as U.S. secretary of state. I thought by then that I knew all there was to know about my past, who ‘my people’ were, and the history of my native land. I was sure enough that I did not feel a need to ask questions. Others might be insecure about their identities; I was not and never had been. I knew. Only I didn’t.”
Albright (née Korbelová) was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1937 when the country had been independent for just 20 years. Her father, Josef Korbel, was a Czech diplomat and democrat who fled to Great Britain with his family following the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, and again in 1948, following a democratic election when the country was effectively gifted into the murderous hands of the local communist party. Korbel and his family were granted political asylum in the United States in 1949, and Albright became a U.S. citizen in 1957. Josef Korbel became the Dean of the University of Denver’s school of international studies, where he taught another future secretary of state, one Condoleeza Rice.
(Harper) - ’Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948’ by Madeleine Albright
Albright was raised as a Roman Catholic and converted to Episcopalianism at the time of her marriage in 1958. She tells us she did not learn until a month before she became the country’s first female secretary of state that “my family heritage was Jewish or that more than twenty of my relatives had died in the Holocaust. I had been brought up to believe in a history of my Czechoslovak homeland that was less tangled and more straightforward than the reality. I had much still to learn about the complex moral choices that my parents and others in their generation had been called on to make.”
Some of this episode is recounted in her previous book “Madam Secretary” (2003), a memoir of her time in office. In her latest book, “Prague Winter,” Albright says that around the time of her appointment, on Dec. 5, 1996, she received a letter from a woman who had “been in business with my maternal grandparents, who had been victimized by anti-Jewish discrimination during the war.” Following this, in January 1997 — around the time she took up office — “a hardworking Washington Post reporter, Michael Dobbs, uncovered news that stunned us all: according to his research, three of my grandparents and numerous other family members had died in the Holocaust.”
All of which raises the question: When did Bill Clinton find out that Madeleine Albright is Jewish? After all, at a time when he was trying to play the honest broker between Israel and the Palestinians, how diplomatically helpful would it have been to appoint a Jewish secretary of state? I suspect the answer is, not helpful at all.
The revelation that she is Jewish “is central,” Albright writes, “because it provided the impetus” for this book, a compelling personal exploration of her family’s Jewish roots as well as an excellent history of Czechoslovakia from 1937 to 1948.
As someone very familiar with the period and a little familiar with the place, I read the book avidly, enjoying it very much. I wish I’d had this book with me when last I visited Prague in the winter of 2011. Much about that mysterious and very beautiful medieval city would have been a lot clearer to me.
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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