One day in Czechoslovakia, not long after I was born, during the gray decade that was the '70s, my 6-year-old brother came home from school and shared what he'd learned: "Lenin was a kind person. He liked children." Those words have acquired the force of a proverb in our family: we assure each other that Lenin liked children whenever one of us lets fly with a statement that seems dangerously optimistic. The following may fall into that category: Czechoslovakia before 1989, when the Communist regime fell, was not a bad place to be a child. For my parents, who spent a large part of their adulthoods in the country, it wasn't all free health care and underground rock 'n' roll. As everyone knows by now, most people had to keep their opinions to themselves, do without traveling abroad, wait in line for bananas, accept overt and subtle limitations in their lives. As soon as kids started going to school, they too slipped under the arm of the state—witness my brother's first-grade indoctrination. In general, though, a political system that thwarted the better instincts and ambitions of adults seems, perversely, to have been mostly congenial and comfortable for children. Read More

Summer took off my glasses with a swift, practiced motion, the better to wrap her breasts around the bridge of my nose. "Can you still see okay?" Her first move, it must be said, was devastating. Straddling my legs with her knees on my chair, she flicked her long blonde hair over the top of my head so that the two of us were now in a sort of dark, warm tent, eye to eye. My view of her body was foreshortened, so that her breasts, though not large, obscured most of her slim, bare torso, down to the thighs. It is a view you get in only one other context. Read More