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THE room where I grew up was in a house on the left bank of the Vltava in Prague, in the industrial suburb of Smichov. The railway and locomotive factories of Ringhoffer were there, so it was one of the cheapest parts of the city in which to live. The house had three floors, with small, ordinary shops on the ground floor, facing Palacký Street. Our room was on the second floor, over the shops, with two windows facing the street and one window at the back in the part used as a kitchen. The back window overlooked a garden in the courtyard behind the house.

This room in which the three of us lived contained my whole world. Some of the heavy walnut furniture which my father had bought when he and Mother were married was in it. There were two beds and a cot for me, a few chairs, two enormous wardrobes which were always kept in perfect order, a dresser for china with lace edgings on the shelves, and one very large round table with turned legs and crossbars between them. It was under here that I played hour after hour while Mother worked above me.

In her youth she had sketched, as every young girl in a good bourgeois family was taught to do. Once a professor in the academy happened to see some of her work and at once offered her a scholarship because he was excited about her ability to draw hands. Grandmother forbade the acceptance of the scholarship, and the sketching was stopped. But now she was sketching again, and this time it was all right, because our lives depended on it. The last of the small amount of money left by my father was nearly gone.

First Mother designed patterns for embroidery, and then she bought a few materials and transferred the designs onto linen handkerchiefs and tablecloths. After that she worked the designs in fine embroidery. But she had no skill in selling them, for her experience of people was limited and her knowledge of the commercial life of Prague was nothing at all. A few people bought her linens because they wanted to help her, and then after awhile they forgot and stopped buying altogether.

I remember only vague episodes in these years, and I tend to forget, as one always does, their relation in time. My first clear recollection has been colored by the sound of Mother’s voice, retelling the story many times. But it will explain, better than a basket of generalities, what those years were like.