“Oh, my God, I don’t believe it! I never thought I would see you here in America!” Mlada Dvořáková cried, throwing her arms around me and kissing me on both cheeks and then the lips.
I hadn’t seen her for fifteen years, since 1976, when I finished my year of teaching at Charles University in Prague. Mlada was then twenty-three, a fifth-year student taking a combined German and English concentration, and I was thirty-three, an assistant professor on a Fulbright, giving my version of American literature to Czech English majors.
We were standing at the top of the stairs under the departures board in Penn Station in the midst of the noontime crush as Mlada’s fellow passengers on the Amtrak train from Washington swept around us. Despite the passage of a decade and a half and the swirl of traffic in the stairwell, we had instantly spotted each other’s face as I waited at the top of the stairs and she climbed them.
George Held, a native of Scarsdale, NY, attended public schools there and graduated from Brown University in 1958. After teaching English at The Kamehameha Schools, Honolulu, Hawai‘i, from 1958-64, he earned a Ph.D. at Rutgers University in 1967 and taught English at Queens College, City University of New York, until his retirement in 2004.
He was a Fulbright lecturer in American literature and the English language at Comenius University, Bratislava, and Charles University, Prague, from 1973-76.