"Nobody Care About Old People"

me: You know what I have noticed about the people of Prague?
Katie Cohan: What?
me: They’re very nice to their elderly.
Katie Cohan: That’s because they went through communism.

They went through the Nazis as well.

Last week, NYU in Prague had a film discussion about Fighter. It was made by a college student and it followed his 77-year-old professor as he retraced the steps of his harrowing escape from the Nazi-invaded and then communist-overrun Czech lands. Jan Weiner, the said professor and film's subject, came to present the film. [How cool?!!] I could write a synopsis for you, but I’ll direct you to a long version and a shorter version and a version so short-it does little justice.

The experiences of Weiner and his friend Arnost Lustig were altogether arresting. Though unique, they gave me the remarkable realization of the astonishing commonality that thread through their generation. Their wars make George W Bush’s war on terror seem like a game children would play during lunch recess – only the most fanciful imagination can make it seem noteworthy.

I also was struck by Weiner’s dexterity with language: Czech, German, Italian, English, and assuredly others – skills hardened by necessity. I wish Grandma was as multilingual – or that my skills in Chinese were more refined – and then maybe she could give me her personal account of communism’s arc to China. It’s strange how one man’s utopian ideals have crippled swaths of populations across the globe.

I was shopping at Tesco, the Czech urban mini-version of Wal-Mart sans hunting and fishing section, getting by on the multifunctional word prosim, akin to the Italian prego. Excuse me, please, thank you, pardon, can I have your number? = prosim. My entire time there was spent talking to my most fitfully pensive friend: myself. We had a very intense discussion to say the least.

How intrusive and displaced I felt, though reassured by the fact that this is a mere four month stint – and that I was attending university here, taking classes in English with other students who like me could navigate their way from Greenwich Village or SoHo to Central Park with their eyes closed. I am left with awed suppositions on the decades that have waxed for my English-less grandparents and their time in the United States.

Over the past break when it was just Grandma and me, she turned to me and said, “Nobody care about old people. You know?” I guess it would be easy to come to such a conclusion when your children go off to make their stake in the world – all the more so when your children are your most dear people who can speak your language.