David Hochman

* 1964

  • "I came here, which I wondered... I asked my dad if I could apply for a visa, and surprisingly they gave it to me, I was very surprised. So my parents were very nervous that I was even coming here like this, but I came anyway. There were no problems and I saw all these people and it was incredible, we didn't know that the regime was going to fall. Although I remember Kamila Moučková telling me that it was a matter of time and that it was already agreed that Havel would be president. That's what she told me before it fell, before the revolution. And I remember telling this to a friend of mine, his mother, because his dad was some kind of high official and he often worked abroad, in embassies and so on, God knows who he worked for. So I told her and she laughed. But then it really happened."

  • "But anyway, what happened is my dad lost his job. We couldn't be in Prague. So we were, because actually those people couldn't be with people like that. I don't remember the numbers, but if there were more than 50 people or whatever, he couldn't be like that. So then he worked as a locksmith, and that was somewhere, I can't remember exactly now, but I know it's documented. He learned all these things in the concentration camp too, so he could do things like that and he had a workshop all his life and he could fix everything. But I remember suddenly the first time I saw him, instead of going to work as a journalist, he was there in overalls and he still had some, I don't remember, some box or whatever he had that he was taking to work. And he had this strange look, like he wasn't feeling his best of course, but that's when I remember he lost his job. Like all those intellectuals."

  • "So my dad was one of the most important Czech journalists. I was very lucky to have such a father. He was a very brave man. His name was Jiří Hochman and he was a terribly decent, incredibly nice man who was born in 1926, in the 1930s, in the Depression. They were poor. It was very difficult, it was similar to the story actually with Pavel Kohout, because we talked to him about it, he had a very similar story. My grandfather couldn't find a job for several years, so it affected him terribly. And then my dad was in the resistance as a seventeen year old and he was caught by the Gestapo and then he was in Sachsenhausen for two years. So, of course, these are circumstances that affected him terribly."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Praha, 14.04.2025

    (audio)
    délka: 01:38:46
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
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    Praha, 26.05.2025

    (audio)
    délka: 01:05:16
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
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The American way of life has never suited me

David Hochman, Prague, 2025
David Hochman, Prague, 2025
zdroj: Post Bellum

David Hochman was born on September 1, 1964 in Washington, D.C. to Zuzana and Jiri Hochman. His mother worked as a journalist at Czechoslovak Television, his father worked at the Red Law daily (RP). His parents left for the USA in 1963, where his father worked as a foreign correspondent for RP. In 1967 they returned to Czechoslovakia. During the Prague Spring, his father worked at the magazine Reporter. He was affected by the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops and refused to accept the coming normalisation. He spent seven months in detention. In 1974, the family moved to the USA, where they settled in Columbus, Ohio. Jiří Hochman became a university teacher at Ohio State University. Among other things, he published in the exile publishing houses Index and Sixty-Eight Publishers. David Hochman graduated from a Catholic secondary school, after which he went on to study engineering at Ohio State University. He graduated in 1988. He spent the next four years in France. He then lived in South Africa for more than 20 years. He devoted himself to writing. He writes in English, and his novel Apology to Julia, translated by his father, has been published in English. In 2025 he was living in Prague.