Ján Rozner was a leading Slovak journalist, literary, theatre and film critic and theorist, and translator from German and English. Following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, Rozner and his wife Zora Jesenská, a distinguished translator of Russian literature, both of them active proponents of the Prague Spring, were blacklisted and lost their jobs. When Jesenská died of cancer in 1972, her funeral turned into a political event and everyone who attended it faced recriminations. In 1976 Ján Rozner emigrated to Germany with his second wife. He died in Munich in 2006. Sedem dní do pohrebu (Seven Days to the Funeral, 2009), a recollection of the events leading up to his wife’s funeral is an important account historically as well as personally, as are his two other books, Noc po fronte (The Night after the Front, 2010) and Výlet na Devín (A Trip to the Devin Castle , 2011) that were published posthumously from his writings.
