A Song for Bohemia

by Anne Marie Kenny

Prague in the 1990s, an extraordinary place and time. The Cold War had ended. The Berlin Wall had fallen. Soviet-bloc countries like Czechoslovakia had just liberated themselves. The atmosphere was intoxicating, the future unmapped. And Anne Marie Kenny was there-a singer-turned-entrepreneur. Her true-life story reads like fascinating fiction-enduring family tragedy, singing at 21 on the Champs Élysées, enjoying an artistic career in Paris and Nice, and performing in Prague at the invitation of Václav Havel before moving there to start a business.

Readers meet remarkable people along Kenny's her attorney father who drowned in a boating accident when she was two; her Czech-American mother left to raise five children alone; François Mitterrand's economist who engaged her mind and heart; Catholic cardinal who, under communism, heard confessions while window-washing; a secretary whose grandfather had been forced into slave labor at Jáchymov uranium mines; a photographer whose parents were married at Terezín concentration camp; and Kenny's beloved war-hero husband-to name a few.

In the decade following the Velvet Revolution, the author lived and worked alongside Czechs discovering their place in a new democratic society while coming to terms with their past under totalitarian rule-a past they rarely spoke about. Likewise, Kenny kept secret the inner turmoil beneath her outer success. In her raw telling, these vices often threatened to destroy her, until the hand of music, artistry, and love extended a reprieve. She and those around her moved forward with Havel's message as their driving force, building a civil society that is "humane, moral, intellectual, spiritual, and cultural."

A Song for Bohemia is a love song and a tribute to the spirit of the Czech people, a story of a personal and collective journey to freedom. With the voice of an impassioned artist, this memoir does not merely speak, it sings.

374 pages, Paperback

Published December 16, 2024

Reviews

[Ann Baker · Rating 5 out of 5]

The singer Anne Marie Kenny (whose ancestors immigrated to the US from Moravia) writes of her personal journey in Prague, during the inspirational first decade of the 90s after the fall of Communism in 1989. It starts by a poem/song written by Anne Marie, who at the time was living in Nice, to celebrate the Czechs new freedom. She sends the poem to Vaclav Havel who then invites her to perform at the famous Reduta Jazz Club in Prague. Anne Marie moves to Prague, and becomes an entrepreneur (one of the very few women independent business owners at the time). She sets up a successful staffing and training company. The book recounts her professional journey, in those heady and exciting days when businesses were flooding into the Czech Republic. But it is also the emotional and moving story of a woman, facing the difficult personal obstacles of alcohol addiction, while caring for her husband John, the love of her life, through the end of his life.
Highly recommended.