When Canadian poet Dorothy Livesay returned from the Soviet Union in 1981 and proclaimed its virtues in a Vancouver Sun article, it was too much for Jan Drabek, a novelist who had fled Czechoslovakia in 1948, lived in Germany, France, and the United States, then settled in Vancouver in 1965. Drabek wrote a rejoinder that appeared under the heading: "Poet's Article Shows Her To Be Dupe of Moscow."; Livesay replied scathingly, complaining to the Writers' Union of Canada that its B.C. representative had maligned her. Livesay also mounted a campaign that unsuccessfully opposed Drabek's election as president of the Federation of BC Writers-a position that he recently resumed.

At External Affairs, Drabek campaigned tirelessly for human rights in Eastern Europe, and militated against official visits by writers to Communist countries, on the grounds that such visits legitimized the regimes. He also took on Farley Mowat who, in his Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia (1970), had praised the wonderful lives that Soviet writers enjoyed under Communism.

So the author of His Doubtful Excellency: A Canadian Novelist's Adventures As President Havel's Ambassador in Prague (Ekstasis Editions $21.95) cannot be dismissed as naïve-which makes the contents of Drabek's story that much more surprising.

His Doubtful Excellency describes Drabek's return to Prague at the end of the Communist era, full of optimism for his native land. He planned to be reunited with his extended family and to teach English, but the respect President Vaclav Havel had for Drabek's father, decorated posthumously as a war hero, soon catapulted Jan Drabek into the ranks of officialdom as Czech ambassador to Kenya and Albania.

Drabek also served as Chief of the Czech Diplomatic Protocol Department, during which time he played host to foreign dignitaries such as Pope John Paul II, Queen Elizabeth, Canada's Governor General Romeo LeBlanc, the King and Queen of Spain, Hillary Clinton, and former British Prime Minister's John Major and Margaret Thatcher.

As the Chief of Protocol, Drabek was puzzled by the vague unresponsive smiles of Margaret Thatcher until another diplomat explained to him that she was deaf. Her flamboyant hairdo concealed a hearing aid that worked well in a quiet room, but not in a noisy environment.

With the visit of Governor General Romeo LeBlanc, Drabek soon realized that most Czechs couldn't understand the Canadian concept of having a head of state who was neither royal, military nor presidential. The papal tour went off smoothly, thanks to the Vatican's well-tuned operation, but the Queen arrived during her famous annus horribilis, so her entourage was eager for crowd scenes that exuded "the wild adulation of undulating mobs.";

Drabek says the tensions of the Queen's visit to the Czech Republic were relieved somewhat by the cheerful irreverence of her consort, Prince Philip.
"I know, I know,"; Prince Philip told him, when they were shaking hands for the fifth time. "Never have so few shaken the hand of so few so many times to whom they owe nothing. But in this business you have to expect it.";

Drabek had a special interest in Madeleine Albright because they had Washington, D.C. connections through their fathers. Drabek's father had been active in the Czech underground and was one of the few non-Jews sent to Auschwitz with "Return Unwanted"; stamped on his papers. He was a longtime friend of Joseph Korbel, Albright's father. When President Carter insisted on appointing some non-Jews to the Holocaust Council, Albright suggested the elder Drabek.

Drabek first welcomed Albright to Prague when she was US Ambassador to the United Nations. He expresses surprise at Albright's claim that she knew nothing of her family's Jewish background, since everyone else did.

According to Drabek, Hillary Clinton prevailed upon her husband to appoint Madeleine Albright as the first female Secretary of State after the two women befriended one another during their visit to the Czech Republic under his auspices.

His Doubtful Excellency culminates in a disastrous episode that led to Drabek's estrangement from the Czech regime. With his novelist's eye for human foibles and a fine ironic style, Drabek describes his hair-raising departure from Albania-at his own expense-when he was forced to air-lift his critically ill wife without adequate support from the Czech government. After Joan Drabek nearly died from peritonitis, a perforated ulcer and appendicitis, the Drabeks returned to Canada.

Jan Drabek went to Prague in the wake of the 1989 euphoria because he wanted to be on hand as the Czech Republic thrived, but after seven years he felt he had witnessed only moral and economic decline.

According to Drabek, half a century of Communist rule is not easily shed, nor can the Czechs face their past honestly-that would expose too much sordidness, and too many moral failures. He concludes that although "the democratic machinery is pretty much all in place in the Czech Republic, there is just this woeful dearth of trained, experienced mechanics.";

Drabek remains convinced that democracy is an acquired trait that takes a long time to develop into a workable form. 1-894800-87-7

--review by Joan Givner

[BCBW 2007]