A Country Lost, Then Found: Discovering My Father’s Slovakia

Young Juraj Zednik is spending the summer of 1968 abroad when Warsaw Pact tanks invade Czechoslovakia. Sickened by the rot in his homeland, Juraj opts not to return. When the Communist regime forces him to renounce his Czechoslovak citizenship, he embarks on a new - wholly American - life. He changes his name and gains US citizenship. He does not visit family; he does not teach his children his native tongue. After the Velvet Revolution topples Communism in 1989, Juraj's son Rick decides to go and live in Bratislava. He finally connects with his grandfather who is dying and his grandmother who is nursing him. Rick's discoveries in newly-independent Slovakia give his father cause to re-connect with family and friends and to regain pride in the country he had turned his back on decades earlier.

RICK ZEDNÍK co-founded The Slovak Spectator in 1995. He has written for, among others, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Columbia Journalism Review. He is chief executive officer of EurActiv.com, the policy news network based in Brussels, where he lives with his wife and their two children.