Judge on Trial

There is no question that the Czech people have a true love for liturature. What other nation would elect a playwrite as President? And from this nation comes a true giant of liturature, Ivan Klima. Judge on Trial is a compelling read about a troubled individual who is forced to make a choice between doing what is morally right and what would save his own career. He is forced to judge a defendent charged with a grizly crime of murdering his landlady and her neice. The defendent is presented as disturbed and somewhat pathatic figure. The title figure is Adam Kindl, a judge with humanistic ideals whose sense of faith in his fellow man is put to test. Under pressure by his superiors to have the defendent put to death for this crime, he must ponder his own value system. As this story unfolds we see Kindl's own life go through a chrisis as his neglected wife takes a lover and he must make the most difficult decision of his life. This story is in the true tradition of all great writers and is a dark reflection into the human soul remenissant of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Camus or Franz Kafka.

One of the features of Czech writing that is most evident in any genre -- from Havel's plays and letters, to Kundera's novels, and to Dubcinski's autobiography -- is the burden placed on the Czech character to weigh political expediency with moral imperatives. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Klima's masterful novel of a judge who, given the choice of trying a case in a kangaroo court or resigning in something more terrible than disgrace, decides instead to resist these choices by using the case as a way of filtering his past through the lense of his uncertainties about the facts of the case before him. Klima weaves the story of the case -- a man gases two people to death -- with that of the judge's own life of surviving childhood illness, World War II, and the moral opprobriums of post-1968 Czechoslovakia. What comes of this experience is a dual biography of the same person: on one hand a judge who has had to compromise his own sense of justice for the sake of his career, and on the other, a man whose every compromise seals his fate to tragic mediocrity. It is as if the lessons of his childhood have sentenced him to know only the memory of heroism. Distributed underground for years in Czechoslovakia by Klima's admirers, the novel was published after the opening of the east. Its sense that every decision (even the decision of what to remember and add to the judge's own self-incrimination) strengthens the idea that of the people of Eastern Europe, the Czech are among those who truly understand the weight and consequences of memory.