Richard Katrovas (The Year of Smashing Bricks) is a poet, essayist and novelist. Raising Girls in Bohemia, his third memoir, is a slim, poetic collection of more than 20 essays about his family life in both the Czech Republic and the United States.
Before his divorce, his family divided their time between Prague, New Orleans and Kalamazoo, flying back and forth at least once a year. Katrovas often uses the word bifurcated to refer to the cultural divide evident in his two daughters' lives, his struggles with their cultural upbringing, and the divide in his own nature.
Kastrovas wants his daughters safe, but doesn't want to control them to insure their safety. "A reflective person cannot be an American father of females and not be, in the most fundamental sense, feminist, even if he considers himself a social conservative, which I do not."
Each essay begins with an anecdote that he spins into a broader commentary, as in "School in Nature," which first addresses the Czech practice of sending young children away for several days to study in the outdoors and then develops into a meditation on preparing children for the larger world away from family. "Adjacent Room" compares his American parents' circumstances to those of his daughters' maternal grandparents in the Czech Republic--they divorced but lived in separate rooms in the same apartment--as a way to examine the two cultures' different attitudes about death.
Raising Girls in Bohemia is by turns political and personal, honest and full of insight into the human condition, all filtered through a poet's thoughtful lens. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor