University professor wins Pushcart prize, presents tribute to father

Seldom is the cancellation of class by a professor met with crestfallen disappointment on the faces of adoring students, but when professor Joseph Hurka, who prefers the more familiar "Joe," announced that there would be no class last Thursday, the students in his two evening Creative Writing classes demanded, "Why not?"

His answer? Hurka was the featured author at the most recent Friends of Tufts Libraries Authors Talk that Thursday night. The Authors Talk welcomed Medford and Somerville residents, University students, and personal friends to Hurka's reading from Fields of Light: A Son Remembers His Heroic Father, the novel that earned Hurka the 19th annual Pushcart Editor's Book Award.

"It's important for you to write about your parents and where you came from so that you can learn about yourself," Hurka said. Josef Hurka's skiing accident at Killington provided his son with an opportunity to sit down with his immobile father, listen his to his story, and put it on paper. "[The accident] messed up dad's leg and broke all his ribs _ I had had him right where I wanted him," Hurka chuckled.

"I attended a previous reading before the book was supposed to come out, and because of the quality of that reading and at the recommendation of one of his students, I bought the book," junior Rebecca Anderson said. "It's really a wonderful narrative about a father and a son; it almost makes me jealous of [their] wonderful relationship."

Other students made up for lost class time by attending the reading. "Joe has been a wonderful mentor to me, and I wanted to come support him today," senior Rachel McPherson said.

Not surprisingly, the unplanned novel, based on his father, brings out passion in Hurka. "It's a bit of an emotional thing for me, these readings, as they are for listeners who are Jewish," Hurka said. "I was in Prague and Copenhagen and I was going to write [a travel article] for National Geographic, but things got too personal and I wrote a personal story about my aunt Mira and my father, who was in the Czech resistance at the time of the Holocaust."

An orange-brown mandolin lay propped on a chair beside the podium from which Hurka read. "When I was a boy, [the mandolin] sat on the mantle in my parent's house in Vermont," Hurka told the audience. In the excerpt of the novel that Hurka read aloud, Nazi soldiers were sent to inspect the Hurka home in Czechoslovakia. The Nazis strummed the mandolin's strings in front of the author's terrified grandmother as her husband lay ill in bed in the bedroom above them. "In Vermont, my father played an old bohemian tune over and over as often as I wished," Hurka read.

The author hopes that the novel, which is being promoted before its release in paperback, will eventually be translated into Czech, although this "might be dangerous for the communities involved."

Josef Hurka senior, at one time a professional alpine skier, joined the Czech resistance against the Communists. He smuggled endangered citizens out of the country as a young man, eventually resettling in the US and becoming a spy for the Allies. "I came to the US and went back and forth to Europe," Josef Hurka said. "I was working with US intelligence on secret missions."

The elder Hurka sat beside his wife in the front row of the audience throughout his son's presentation. "It brings some memories certainly and puts it into the past, but there is also a lot that I couldn't tell him (for security reasons)," Josef Hurka said. "[Helping my son to write the novel] was good and at the same time I would rather forget it; it's like looking at your mother-in-law going over a cliff in your brand new Cadillac."

"The events [Hurka] read about were so horrendous, completely foreign to most of our tranquil college lives," freshman creative writing student Laura Silver said. "His writing made the reading incredibly powerful _ you could see its effect on him and his father."

Prospective novelists used the Author Talk as an opportunity to garner advice from a successful writer. "Writing has to become a way of life; you have to be objective and not let your personal life get in the way," Hurka counseled the audience in response to a question from senior creative writing student Rah-nee Kelly.

Story writing is most difficult when the writer attempts to discuss his own life objectively, according to Hurka. "[Writing is most challenging] when I'm not happy about something I've done as a human being and I try to write about it," Hurka said.

Hurka's mentor, the celebrated Andre Dubus, nominated Fields of Light for the Pushcart Editor's Book Award. Hurka's latest project is a novel about an older man living in Cambridge, "a former translator who was also in the resistance, who notices that there's a stalker following a girl in the neighborhood."

Former Tufts student Anita Shreve, author of The Pilot's Wife, will present her latest novel at the next Friends of Tufts Libraries Talk, according to Tufts Library Director Joanna Michalak.