Minerva's Owl: Excerpts from Exile

After the Velvet Revolution of 1989, a young Czech Australian woman returns with her father to Prague, to visit her ancestral city and to discover her grandfather, who was always 'present' in the family, but whom she had never met - Karel Goliath-Gorovsky, the Czech Solzhenitsyn.A rebel from birth, Czech lawyer, Karel Goliath-Gorovsky, was imprisoned in a Soviet gulag north of the Arctic Circle, because of his relentless political idealism. Only his potent black humour enabled him to survive seventeen life-threatening years.His son, abandoned by his father at the age of one, developed his own black humour to survive Mischling status under the Nazi occupation, the Stalinist regime in his homeland, Czechoslovakia, and flight to his new land of opportunity where people crossed the street when they saw a 'wog' approaching.