His life, just like those of the other youths who lived in Europe during the late 1930s and early 1940s, was shaped forever by the dangers, horrors, and unsettling events he experienced. In this memoir, Heller, born Ota Karel Heller, narrates his family's story-a family nearly destroyed by the Nazis. Son of a mixed marriage, he was raised a Catholic and was unaware of his Jewish roots, even after his father escaped to join the British army and fifteen members of his family disappeared.Prague: My Long Journey Home tells of his Christian mother being sent to a slave labor camp and of his hiding on a farm to avoid deportation to a death camp. With the war coming to a close, Heller tells of how he picked up a revolver and shot a Nazi when he was just nine years old.Heller, now an assimilated American, left the horrors of the past-along with his birth name-behind to live the proverbial American Dream. In his memoir, he recalls how two cataclysmic events following Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution brought him face-to-face with demons of his former life. On his personal journey Heller discovered and embraced his heritage-one which he had abandoned decades earlier.

    A Czech Jew who narrowly avoided being sent to a concentration camp, Orten was hit by a speeding German car in Nazi-occupied Prague in 1941. He was refused admission to a nearby hospital and died shortly afterwards (at the age of 22) in a "Jewish Hospital" which was basically a warehouse. "Jiri Orten is a powerful, visionary poet whose work has been beautifully translated by Lyn Coffin. These are poems we can return to again and again-for their courage, for their sustenance." - Sam Hamill "Lyn Coffin's translations do justice to a great poet. I can think of no higher praise for a translation than that." - Joseph Brodsky (about Lyn's translations of Orten's Elegies) "I can now die a happy man.... These are the poems my brother would have written if he'd written in English." - Ota Ornest, Jiri Orten's brother ... How dark it is outside! What was I going to say? Oh, yes, now I remember. Because of all those hours I slept soundly through calm nights, because of all those loved ones who are deep in dreams-- Now, when everything's running short, I can't stand being here by myself. The lamplight's too strong. I am sowing grain on the headland. I will not live long.