Stalin Ate My Homework

What's the ultimate symbol of capitalism? McDonalds? The World Bank? Santa Claus?

The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is Bambi.

Unfortunately for the 6-year-old Alexei Sayle, his staunchly communist parents deemed the Disney character counter-revolutionary and therefore strictly off-limits. Instead of being allowed to join the other neighborhood kids when Walt's magnum opus hit town, young Alexei was taken to see Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky.

"I had begun to suspect that we weren't like other families. There were things we believed, things we did, that nobody else in the street did," Sayle writes.

None of this might have been so out of the ordinary had Sayle been raised behind the Iron Curtain rather than in postwar Liverpool. Stalin Ate My Homework tells the tale of the comic's unconventional upbringing. The good news is, unlike many celebrity memoirs, this book is actually quite enjoyable.

Sayle will need no introduction to British readers. Although he may have been a ubiquitous presence on the small screen during the 1980s, his aggressive stand-up wasn't everyone's cup of tea. This writer's mother, for example, who doesn't have much time for alternative comedy, would yell "It's that gobby Scouse git again!" whenever Sayle was given airtime. There was plenty of hollering at the box in the Sayle home, too - puzzlingly, the family invested in this consumerist icon before anyone else on their street - but Alexei's mother would scream "Don't forget the Rosenbergs!" or "Remember Stalingrad!" at any program she considered too congratulatory about the British Army's performance during World War II.

Sayle's mother, Molly, was a formidable redhead who delighted in terrifying his teachers and swearing copiously. His father, Jo, was a mild-mannered goods guard who converted to communism after reading Jack London's dystopia Iron Heel. One of the perks of being a railway employee was free travel throughout Europe, and where else would the committed socialists head for but the Soviet bloc?

Significant chunks of Stalin Ate My Homework are devoted to family holidays to Czechoslovakia, "a place so foreign it had a 'Z' in its name," Sayle writes. In some ways, the family's experiences differed little from those of tourists who would descend on Prague after the Velvet Revolution: They are charmed by the city's stunning churches and labyrinthine cobbled streets, go to see black-light theater and even visit a Švejk-themed pub.

However, the family's first trip to witness the wonders of socialism in action begins disastrously. They somehow end up not in the capital but in out-of-season Karlovy Vary, where they stay in a sanatorium until being forced out by a group of tubercular Slovak strip miners. All seems lost until the upper echelons of the Party hear of their plight and ensure the family is mysteriously whisked away to the capital in a fleet of futuristic black Tatra limousines to stay in a top hotel at the government's expense.

"Like Kafka's Metamorphosis but in reverse, we had gone to sleep as insects and woken, in the very city where he had written that story, as people. And not just ordinary people, but people of the highest importance," Sayle writes.

Young Alexei's trips to the Eastern bloc had a big impact on his boyhood imagination. He believed that, like Emil Zátopek, the "Flying Czech," he could grow up to be a great athlete and grab an Olympic gold medal. Having been given a lavishly illustrated book about the Reinhard Heydrich assassination by a translator, Sayle spends hours recreating complex ink diagrams of the bombing back home. Later, Sayles proudly rebuffs the local vicar's attempt to recruit him into the Boy Scouts by announcing that he's the only English member of the Czechoslovak Young Pioneers.

Ironically enough, it is a souvenir from one the family's trips to Czechoslovakia - Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk ­- that first causes Sayles to question his parents' beliefs. "It was as if a stick of Blackpool rock you had bought as a memento of a day out contained an offensive message running right through the middle of it [...] The worrying notion niggled away for years at the back of my mind that the governments of communist states might not always know what they were doing," he writes.

Sayle has made a career out of telling jokes, so it's no surprise that his autobiography has its fair share of laugh-out-loud moments. The book is more than just a string of gags though: While there is plenty of humor, there is a serious, reflective undertone, too. Sayle's writing also evidences a novelist's eye for detail. Take this evocative description of the dreary shops located at border checkpoints, for example: "They were like badly attended museums of failed products, their dusty shelves lined with crudely made folk items, kitchen implements of no conceivable use, jars of peas in vinegar and brandy that had long ago evaporated, leaving nothing but a toxic sludge behind."

Stalin Ate My Homework is welcome proof that some former stars really can write.

Lisette Allen can be reached at
features@praguepost.com