The Twelve Little Cakes

by Dominika Dery

Overview

Equal parts testimony to the struggles of a bygone era and a love letter to a bright-eyed childhood that no outside force could dim, this is Dominika Dery's acclaimed memoir of Communist-era Czechoslovakia.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594481390
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/04/2005
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.56(w) x 8.24(h) x 0.99(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Dominika Dery was born in Prague in 1975. As a girl, she danced and performed in the national ballet and national theater companies of Czechoslovakia. She is the author of four collections of Czech poetry and a play. The Twelve Little Cakes is her first book in English.

Hometown:

Sydney, NSW, Australia and Cernosice, Prague, Czech Republic

Date of Birth:

March 7, 1975

Place of Birth:

Prague, Czech Republic

Education:

State Conservatory of Prague, Czech Republic, and Ecole Internationale de Theatre Jacques Lecoq, Paris, France

Reading Group Guide

1. The Twelve Little Cakes begins the year before Dominika is born, when she appears to her mother, Jana, in dreams. Later, when Jana is trying to conceive, a wise factory worker tells her to leave matters in the hands of "the little god," a powerful character in Czech fairy tales. Is the credence given to dreams, superstition, and folklore particular to Dominika's family or simply typical of Czech traditions? Discuss the references to superstitions and fairy tales throughout the book.

2. In chapter 4, Jana tells Dominika the story of the Czech hero Jan Hus, a figure invoked in times of struggle. What traits turned Jan Hus into such a potent symbol for the Czech people? Do his courage and sacrifice find resonance in anyone in Dominika's story?

3. Dominika's first experience with loss occurs when her neighbors, whom she refers to as her three grandmothers, "go away." Yet only with the death of Barry, the family's St. Bernard, does Dominika begin to grasp the lasting implications of death and how lives are changed by it. Compare your own early memories of loss with Dominika's. Describe how these early losses influenced your outlook and hers. Compare Dominika's loss of her three "grandmothers" with the absence of her maternal grandparents.

4. Jana's parents, members of the Communist Party elite, disown their daughter when she marries Jarda, a member of the working class. Discuss other examples of hypocrisy found among Communist officials in The Twelve Little Cakes. Do you think Dominika was right to force a confrontation between her mother and her grandparents? Might there have been a reconciliation under other circumstances, with less impulsiveness and more careful consideration, or were Jana and her parents too far apart ideologically? Is forgiveness truly a possibility when one is living under a tyrannical regime?

5. While auditioning for the preparatory school of the National Theatre Ballet Company, Dominika reflects, "Even though we were only six or seven years old, everyone in the group knew that the school accepted only one student in ten, and each of us desperately wanted to be chosen." Discuss the political culture that gave rise to this desperation and the pressure for young children to compete and achieve. Is Dominka's motivation that of her peers? What accounts for her particular brand of determination?

6. A poster bearing the slogan "Religion Is the Opiate of the Masses!" hangs in Dominika's classroom, and the headmistress, Comrade Humlova, preaches that religion is superstition. Despite this, and despite the fact that her parents are not religious, Dominika attends church and even manages to be baptized and receive communion. Why is Dominika drawn to Catholicism and its rituals? Discuss why a socialist regime would view religion as dangerous, and cite examples from recent history of religious practice that has survived despite oppression.

7. After falling ill, Dominika is diagnosed with dysentery, but when the Furmans seek medical help, they are told that dysentery does not exist under the socialist health care system. Still, there is an entire ward full of children similarly afflicted in the Infection Pavilion of the Prague hospital where Dominika is treated. Discuss the Orwellian use of "official language" and socialist euphemisms to conceal actual conditions throughout the book.

8. When Jana has an emotional breakdown, her husband exhorts her to be an optimist. She responds, "An optimist? You know what an optimist is? An optimist is a pessimist without information." Do you agree with this view? Was there a place for optimism in the Czechoslovakia of the late 1970s and early 1980s? Were there signs of hope on the horizon? Discuss the differing views of the family's prospects, as seen through Jana's eyes and her husband's.

9. Discuss the differences between the Polish children Dominika meets on vacation and the children in her Prague neighborhood and school. Discuss the differences between the Furman's neighbors and the Polish couple who take them in when the Furman's car breaks down. What accounts for the differences between the two communist countries?

10. The Twelve Little Cakes ends with Dominika and her parents driving home from their mishap-filled vacation in Poland (actually, they must push their broken-down car over the border). Dominika observes, "This was the country of little cakes and sausages," which is similar to the statement she makes at the beginning of the book: "When I think of my childhood, I think of little cakes and sausages, because they were symbolic of the way we lived under communism." Why does the author choose little cakes and sausages as a symbol of life in a communist society?

Editorial Reviews

… this ramble through a childhood that remained full of pleasure and affection despite the efforts of the communist regime is well worth taking.
— The Washington Post

Juliet Wittman

Born in 1975 in Prague, the daughter of former dissidents of the failed Prague Spring in (then) Czechoslovakia, Dery has penned a memoir collecting tales from her early childhood. She lived in a village outside Prague riddled with Communist informers ever-ready to implicate her father, a sometime taxi driver, and her mother, who ghost-wrote books for the Czech Politburo, in anti-Socialist acts. Dery's maternal grandmother was a powerful member of the Communist elite, her grandfather a famed surgeon; both were very wealthy by Czech standards. After the reform movement was quashed by the Soviets, Dery's mother was banished from the family. Written in an old-fashioned style mimicking the fairy tales Dery loved as a child, this account presents every event-the house flooding while under construction, Dery's rejection by her grandparents when she invites them to her Czech ballet debut, the unpleasant death of the family's St. Bernard-in a vacuum. Dery never veers from the perspective of a very young child, thus providing no context by which to judge the story of growing up in the last years of the Communist state. Still, it's a sometimes charming period piece. Agent, Theresa Park. (Oct. 4) Forecast: With a blurb from Nicholas Sparks, the book may appeal to women readers. Foreign rights have been sold in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Born to dissidents in 1975, Dominika Dery grows up on the outskirts of Prague in a small village full of prejudices, politics, and petty informing. Largely shunned because of her parents' association with the failed Prague Spring uprising of 1968, Dery seeks solace in her tight-knit family, the friendship of three kind old ladies she dubs her "fairy godmothers," and her love of ballet. Moving from the Brezhnev era of widespread disillusionment and corruption to the relative hope of the Gorbachev years, Dery charts the daily rhythms of life under communism negotiating the black market and weathering the rampant suspicion that atomized most societies behind the Iron Curtain. But this is no cynical memoir it is a touching but clear-eyed testament to a family's will to survive, and even thrive, through the final turbulent years of a terrible regime. Ignore the slightly plodding start and over-the-top Nicholas Sparks quote, and be charmed by Dominika's simple, child's love of life and her stubborn insistence on seeing the good. Highly recommended for larger libraries. [See "Fall Editors' Picks," p. 40-44.] Tania Barnes, Library Journal Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Poet/playwright Dery makes her English-language debut with a disarmingly sweet and savvy memoir of growing up in Czechoslovakia during the late 1970s and early '80s. She was born in 1975, during the years after the Prague Spring, when life was unpleasant for dissenters like her father. The Dery family (Dominika had one sister) lived in a small town outside Prague. Her mother wrote books for the Economic Ministry, for which others took credit; her father, an economist, took jobs where he could find them, working as a taxi driver for many of the seven years covered here. "Together they had a rare combination: incorruptibility and willingness to fight," writes their daughter. "While life may have been a lot harder than it needed to be, it was the life they had chosen, and they had few regrets." Dery inherited her father's optimism, conveyed in the lovely, childlike pitch and enthusiasm of her prose, and the writing is blessedly free of political moralizing. The family may have been shunned by the community, surrounded by informers, and teetering on the edge of insolvency, but, hey, they owned a St. Bernard that was a film star-beloved by the nation, but unfortunately underpaid. They lived by their wits, making all manner of under-the-table deals that enabled them, for example, to get sole ownership of their house away from the mother's parents (party hardliners who had disowned them) and to send Dery through the ranks of ballet school (a bastion for the party elite). The author's sly humor is evident throughout: she comments on her older sister's developing figure, making witty use of the word in Czech that means both "goat" and "breast"; and she skewers a local busybody who "spoke too fast,running his words into each other. It often sounded like he was speaking Hungarian." Life is hard, and then you laugh-if, like this author, you are wily enough, self-possessed enough, and love the ones you're with as they love you back. Agents: Shannon O'Keefe, Julie Barer/Sandford J. Greenburger Associates

Kirkus Reviews