But Frank E. Schwelb, senior judge of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, did just that, with relish this year.

"Thanksgiving has not been celebrated here anyway," Schwelb says, laughing. "So I ate some dumplings instead."

The 74-year-old Prague native, a U.S. legal scholar, arrived in the Czech capital in late April to explore his ancestral roots. Some 67 years after escaping Nazi-controlled Prague, Schwelb returned to his homeland to conduct a lecture on his favorite topic, civil rights. Specifically, he spoke at the first Rosa Parks memorial lecture Nov. 29, organized by the Common Law Society at Charles University. He also insisted on speaking his favorite language — Czech.

"I've done a lot of public speaking, and I wondered if I could deliver a public speech in Czech," Schwelb said just hours before his speech.

Before taking the plunge at the country's most respected law school, Schwelb had several chances to warm up, however, with four seminars he led in Prague and Brno during his two-week visit to the Czech Republic.

"All of them finished in Czech except for one. One Slovak student talked Slovak very fast — I tried to slow him down, but he was speaking so fast that finally I could not understand. So he started speaking English and the class deteriorated to English," Schwelb says. "It went against my pride."

The escapist

Given the Jewish roots of his family and the Nazi occupation that dominated his childhood, Schwelb was forced to leave his native country with his parents at the age of 7. Otherwise, as he says, he would've been "a piece of smoke coming out of the Auschwitz chimney."

As it was, the Schwelb family had terrors enough from the Germans well before the Final Solution was implemented. Schwelb's father, Egon, a Prague-based Social Democratic attorney, represented anti-Nazi German clients who came to Prague.

Only one day after the goose-stepping troops marched into Prague March 15, 1939, the SS arrested the elder Schwelb. He was kept in Pankrác prison until May of that year.

Then, Schwelb says, a miracle occurred: "He was released under circumstances that I still don't fully understand."

Two weeks after World War II broke out with Germany's Sept. 1, 1939, invasion of Poland, the Schwelb family decided to flee to the West.

"We got visas to go to Britain, and we left here by train to go through Germany and Holland," Schwelb recalls. "I do know that my parents were very worried that when we get to the Dutch border, they would not let us out. "But they did let us out."

From the UK to the U.S.

Schwelb attended a Czechoslovak school in Llanwrtyd Wells in the north of Wales, where many of the students belonged to the group known as "Winton children" — a group of youngsters saved from the Nazis and transported to Britain, thanks to the guile and derring-do of English businessman Nicolas Winton.

Schwelb later attended different schools, including a Czechoslovak state school in the local Abernant Lake Hotel.

"I was going to Czech schools because the intention was at that time to return to Czechoslovakia," Schwelb explains. "However, my father was not sympathetic to communists. During the war, the direction of Czechoslovakia came close to the Soviets" and my father became convinced that this was not going to be a democratic country after the war. He told me he did not want me to grow up in a nondemocratic country."

After eight years in the United Kingdom, the Schwelb family relocated to the United States.

"In 1947, my father was appointed deputy director of the human rights division of the United Nations. He became one of the world's experts on the international protection of human rights."

American shock

Schwelb lost the illusions he had formed about the United States in his early days at the Williston Academy in Easthampton, Massachusetts.

"I was 15, very naive, and what I'd understood about America was that, in the South, they had slavery and segregation, but, in the North, everything was OK."

"But then," Schwelb says, recalling his first shock, "my parents sent me to a school in Massachusetts. There were about 250 students; only three were black.

"I was in a French class, and one of the black students, Byron Milton, was not a member of that class, but he came into the classroom by accident. He saw he was in a wrong classroom, so he said, 'Excuse me,' and left. The teacher there, Mr. Boardman, said: 'The dark cloud that has hovered over us has now passed.' "

A few weeks later, Schwelb encountered another incident just as unsettling.

"There was a student named Rubin; he was a Jewish student. At that time, there was a black diplomat, Ralph Bunche, who was sent to Palestine to mediate between the Arabs and the Jews. And Rubin said to me: 'That's the worst thing that they could've done! I said, 'What was?' And he said, 'To send a nigger to mediate the Palestine.' This was a Jewish boy two years after the end of Holocaust. The last person I expected to hear this from was a Jewish boy."

Presidential favorite

Schwelb's growing perception of civil-rights inequities set him on the path to becoming an attorney with the power to do something about these double standards. He graduated from Yale University in 1953, before studying civil rights law at Harvard Law School and graduating in 1958. Following law school, he served as an associate attorney at a law firm in New York City and later in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.

In 1969, he was appointed the first chief of the housing section, overseeing the department's fair-housing enforcement program.

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter appointed Schwelb to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia; in 1988, President Ronald Reagan elevated him to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.

"It so happens that I'm the only person who was appointed to judgeship by both the Democratic and the Republican presidents," Schwelb points out. "My wife, Taffy, explains this by saying that it's proof that I have no principles whatsoever."

On June 24, Schwelb turned 74 and, under a law in the District of Columbia, had to retire from full-time work on the bench. He became a part-time senior judge and admits that he has not really settled into that position yet.

Neither did he find a use for one of the Czech flags he used to have in his office.

"As an active judge, I had in my office two huge Czechoslovak or Czech flags. Now, in my new office as a senior judge, which is smaller, there is only room for one, so I have one big Czech flag, and the other one is still in my briefcase."

In touch with the motherland

The flags have hardly been the only means through which Schwelb has maintained contact with his motherland during his busy life as a judge.

As a boy, the future jurist lived through a crucial time for his native country — but then had to watch from afar while another foreign invasion came with the 1968 Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, ordered to quash the reforms of Prague Spring.

"In August 1968, I was a civil-rights lawyer for the Department of Justice, and I had a case in Charleston, South Carolina. So I flew down to Charleston, I came to the hotel and turned on the television, and they showed the Soviet tanks on Wenceslas Square, and they were playing as it happened Kde domov muj? [the Czech national anthem] on American television. So, although I was not there, I have the sense that I kind of witnessed both invasions of my native country."

During the next turning point in Czech history — the 1989 revolution and the downfall of communism — Schwelb became more than a witness.

"When the revolution started, I asked an ethics adviser whether it would be all right to go and demonstrate at the Czechoslovak Embassy. I did not have any cases involving the Czech revolution. I went with my wife; we had a huge Czech flag and we demonstrated. This was only my second demonstration in which I participated in all my life. ' The first was against the Vietnam War."

Singing it out

Now, looking back on those times, Schwelb sits in his Prague hotel room, often switching between English and Czech.

'When somebody is speaking English to me, I speak Czech to him,' he says.

Suddenly, he interrupts his narrative. 'I've been teaching all my audiences this great Czech song.' He begins singing an old melody that only a few people in the Czech Republic are likely to still remember.

'I'm a bit of a ham,' he confesses. 'I can sing about 30 or 40 Czech songs. I just remember them from childhood.'

Despite his patriotism, Schwelb has taught his wife only three Czech words — kmín (cumin), velbloud (camel) and ženy (ladies).

'She knows kmín because I like to have kmín in my soup; velbloud because it's a funny word; and ženy because she has to know where to go to bathroom when she gets here.'

Before finishing the interview, Schwelb stands up and retrieves a tiny booklet titled 'O Františkovi pro Františka' or 'About František for František' — Frank Ernest Schwelb, it states, was born František Arnošt Schwelb in Prague June 24, 1932. The booklet contains a summary of his life, as compiled by Hana Vokatá, a member of a group of people seeking out the former Winton children.

"That's one of the loveliest things that I've ever got," Schwelb says.

Two years ago, he got a letter signed by detektivové, or detectives, a name the Winton researchers gave themselves, written in Spanish, Czech and English. Schwelb wrote back in Czech saying that he was not a Winton child himself, but got another letter back from detektivka Hanka, who thanked him, asked who he was, and began an occasional correspondence.

"She called me her honorary děda [grandfather]. But I never met her. So I told her I was coming here. And, on Thanksgiving, she came to see me and, completely out of the blue, she wrote me this."