The Prague Post
July 7th, 2008

Gwendolyn Albert, militant pacifist

A grass-roots activist preferred to live 'in the field' with Roma

Americans in Europe 'can't help seeing things in historical context.'
By Alan Levy
The Prague Post
(June 12, 2003)


From Prague, Gwendolyn Hubka Albert, 36, has declared war on her nation's warrior president, George W. Bush. Having co-founded the International Peace Movement of the Czech Republic -- which demonstrated with mounting success (but in vain) against America's going to war in Iraq -- she's begun work among Americans abroad to bring down the incumbent in next year's election and to encourage an opponent who will speak out against U.S. imperialism.

She met me for lunch on what the Bush White House might consider enemy turf: the garden cafe of the French Institute downtown. Neatly and conservatively dressed and husky-voiced (perhaps from bellowing into too many megaphones), she told me: "I went to Berlin in April for a meeting of Americans Against the War, and I was both impressed and surprised by them. They were from all across the political spectrum: people who don't necessarily see eye to eye on most other issues except that, living in Europe, they're not pleased with the current direction in which the United States is moving.

"They have more access to information than people in the U.S. seem to have and, where they are and we are, you can't help seeing things in historical context. There were professors, translators, an American anchor for Deutsche Welle and lots of straight-ahead, middle-of-the-road businesspeople and members of both Democrats and Republicans Abroad: high-powered folk, some of whom had never been politically active before. Many of them had even voted for Bush.

"I think there are people like that in Prague and I want to reach out to them for a straightforward political-action campaign trying to push the Democratic Party and their presidential candidate to take as strong a stance as possible against all the repressive measures like the Patriot Act [for internal security], absurd visa requirements and trying to take away our tax status. So we want to influence what's happening -- not with street demonstrations but with numbers. We want to draw up a set of principles and publicly pledge as a group to support the candidate who will say these things. Our movement will be called AVA: American Voices Abroad." The group's Web site is www.americansineurope.org .


From babysitting to Om

After six successful years as Prague resident director of the American Institute for Foreign Study, which looks after an average of 35 U.S. undergraduates per semester (as few as 15 when she started; as many as 50 when she finished), Gwen Albert gave up babysitting for the kitchen. She spent the first three months of 2003 streamlining, cooking in and managing the Ayurvedic vegetarian restaurant at the ÓmCentrum in Prague 3-Zizkov.

On June 2, she started work as the Czech Republic League of Human Rights' international-relations and development person. The league is a spinoff from the Ecological Law Service, which became a respected watchdog of police behavior during the World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings here three years ago and the NATO summit last year. Between bouts of monitoring, it focuses on women and children in crisis, domestic violence and Romany (or Gypsy) rights.

The Roma have been Gwen's concern ever since she settled here permanently in 1994. Around then, Paul Polansky, a muckraking American crusader of Czech extraction, unearthed a Czech-run (under Nazi auspices) World War II concentration camp for Roma at Lety, in south-central Bohemia, where hundreds of Gypsies died under particularly cruel conditions. Though she didn't link up with Polansky until later, when Gwen heard that an industrial pig farm was running over Romany bones in Lety, she began a (thus-far) losing battle to remove it from an official Holocaust memorial site.
VITAL STATISTICS

Born Jan. 11, 1967, in Oakland, California

U.S. Career Patent tracer for document-delivery service, San Francisco, 1991-92; in Prague since 1994 (see text)

Publishing Poetry in Exquisite Corpse and Left Curve magazines; with partner Vincent Farnsworth, founded cultural magazine Jejune: america eats its young, Berkeley 1993-94, Prague 1994-2000; weekly opinion columnist, The Prague Post, 2000-01; translator, Baradla Cave, novella by Eva Svankmajerova (Twisted Spoon Press, Prague, 2001); anthologized in Short Fuse (Rattapallax Press, New York, 2002); author, Faustus in Wonderland: The Art of Jan Svankmajer (to be published by Redreader Press, Philadelphia, 2004)

The protesters almost tasted victory when Petr Uhl was Czech human rights commissioner, but his recommendation to relocate the pig farm died in Parliament. At an annual Lety memorial service to which Gwen ran a bus from Prague, a Gypsy mourner from Germany took apart his mother's necklace at the pig farm's gate to cast pearls before swine.

Not only did she house a Kosovar Romany refugee for a month in 1999 in her Prague 2 apartment, but last summer she also spent three months in Kosovo managing a project called Teach Kosovo, founded by Paul Polansky and funded by the Swiss Cooperation Office in the ex-Yugoslav province's capital, Pristina. Working with Polansky, she recruited five Prague English teachers to give intensive language instruction to selected Roma. They live trapped between warring Serbs and Albanians, both of whom look upon them as enemies, in a United Nations protectorate.

"It was the hardest thing I've ever done," she told me.

"We were living with Roma in their homes down at grass-roots level in a Serb enclave just outside Pristina. What disillusioned me most was the enormous gulf between the Roma and the official structures that were ostensibly there to help them -- the UN police, the UN staff, the international aid agencies -- who just radiated contempt for them and kept themselves completely separate from what they called 'the field.' Well, we were living 'in the field' and they'd show up in their gas-guzzling SUVs [sport utility vehicles] to promote abstract political ideas from the developed world, from the global North, like 'direct democracy' and 'political participation' that are just luxuries if you don't have a stable society and a reliable food supply."


A poet under the influence

This is our heroine's third and longest stay in Prague. As the older daughter of two English teachers at community colleges in the San Francisco Bay area, Gwendolyn Albert was middle-named with her mother's maiden name, Hubka, from ancestors who emigrated from south Bohemia around 1850.

While studying linguistics in Berkeley, Gwen decided to be the first in her family to speak Czech and took courses with Bohemian-born Hana Arie Gaifman, later program director of the influential 92nd St. Young Men's & Young Women's Hebrew Association Poetry Center in New York City. (Gwen is also a poet and recently gave a reading at Shakespeare and Sons from her as-yet-unpublished collection, Make Yourself Uncomfortable. See the accompanying box for her publishing credits.)

With four years of Czech plus a 1988 summer language course at Charles University to her credit, she won a Fulbright Scholarship to Prague upon graduation in mid-1989. She arrived here on Sept. 17. Exactly two months later, she was present at the inception of the 1989 revolution, which began on the steps of (appropriately named) Albertov in Prague 2 with an International Student Day "celebration" that turned into a march downtown, where police reacted just violently enough to trigger national revulsion and the downfall of communism. Gwen, who emerged unscathed, wrote in our 10th anniversary issue:

"Most surprising of all was the emotional wave that ran through the crowd -- not one of anger, or violent insolence, or self-righteousness, as could be expected after years of repression, but a wave of peaceful happiness. Gently, joyfully, positively happy, the students chanted and made funny rhymes. They lit one another's candles. They apologized for accidentally tripping on each other's feet. It was an intensely intimate state of almost childlike marvel and wonder, which was to be repeated again and again in the days to come -- all in the face of one of the most absurd and murderous regimes in the world."

The ideals of the 1989 revolution are more than a mystique to Gwen Albert.

Alan Levy can be reached at alevy@praguepost.com




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