She was not like the others, this Lenka. – not at all like the other Lenkas (the Lenkas are everywhere in Prague, as abundant and prized as the Pilsner beer). It is a testament to an undeclared adversity to diversity that nearly every female one encounters in Czech Republic answers to the name Lenka. Well, there are the Jitkas too – the Jitkas, the Janas and the Petras. But the Lenkas, they are the embodiment of Czech womanhood. They are usually blond (either natural or affected), tall and thin but undeniably sturdy- hard, angular features and old lady eyes set in otherwise youthful faces. They laugh occasionally, though humor and gaiety are not their nearest companions. They are haunted by a brutal past, hardened by a history so gripping that they cannot quite embrace the promising future that lies ahead. They are all short skirts and long necks – barely animated tree trunks trudging through the daily pain they call life.

But she was different, this Lenka – eyes so wide and shiny you could not help but stare. Smile so sincere and unusually permanent, you could not help but smile back.

“So you were here in the 80’s…I mean, you grew up under Communism, right?” I was thrilled that this new American visitor (this Josh from LA) had now replaced me as the most naïve young westerner in the group. It had taken me months to shed that air of skeptical “other.” Only recently had I been able to dull the obvious ignorance and awe that I used to display every time I met a Czech peer who (yes, of course!) had been taught to hate the ‘capitalist pigs’ while I had been buying up Boardwalk and Parkplace and contemplating the life lessons learned in a game like Monopoly.

“What?” Lenka asked with her usual well-meaning smile.

“You were here when the Communists were in power, huh? Wasn’t it…?” Josh could hardly find the word for what he thought “it” must have been like.

“Oh, yes, yes. I was here.” She paused for a moment. “But no, it wasn’t so bad, you know. I mean, it was nice then.”

“Nice?” I asked with obvious doubt and a not too well masked sense of disgust. I had never heard this type of response before.

“Jo,” she nodded. “You know, it was, well, easier sometimes. You know, now, you go the store and you want a pair of shoes. There are like, well, fifty different kinds and you have to choose from them. And back then, it was, well, here, these are shoes. Just one kind. And you wear them. And everybody wears them. They’re just shoes, you know – for your feet. So who really cares?”

None of us were quite ready to respond.

She went on, “And it wasn’t too bad, you know. Everything is simple and you go to school and you have your friends. And it was not like a prison. In the summer you go the cottage in the country. And there are mountains and there is sun- so, you know, this is our childhood.”

Not even prior exposure to Lenka’s unwavering optimism had prepared me for this response. After four months of studying Czech history and reading Czech literature I had yet to hear an account of life under Communism quite like this. I knew about the hardships, the loss of opportunities, the stifling of intellectual life; but the joys of simplicity? This was not a perspective I’d encountered before.

I found her acceptance of Communism unnerving. It seemed to affront every instinct of my democratic soul. She continued to speak about her childhood, laughing uncontrollably about some incident involving her sister and a lake. I stared at her wide, forgiving eyes, wondering why the bitterness was absent from her voice. And slowly, as the stories continued, I began to see the origin of her contentment. It was not so much that she liked living under Communism, but that she liked living as a child…and she just so happened to have been a child when the Communists were in power. Her positive perception of Communism was nothing more than a young adult’s nostalgia for the jollity of childhood.

“But some things were strange,” she finally admitted. “Like being Jewish, you know. We were Jewish but we didn’t really know it.”

“So your family hid it from you?” Josh asked. “They weren’t allowed to say they were Jewish?”

“Oh, no, no,” Lenka explained, “No, we knew we were Jewish, you know. Sometime, they told us, like, well, ‘we are Jewish.’ But really, I didn’t know what that means. Well, sometimes my grandmother did some prayers. But that was it. And no one taught us about it. So now, it is like, oh, this is what it is to be Jewish.”

She was referring “now” to our group – to the way we all met. We had come to know each other by going to the Chabad House here in Prague. These young people – Czechs, Americans, Israelis, whoever – we had all been going to the Shabbat services at this orthodox synagogue. Not one of us was orthodox (not even close). I suppose we all had our own reasons for going there – to connect to other Jews and to Judaism, to find something welcoming and comfortable when so far from home, to learn a bit more about our religion and our culture in a place where that tradition had deep historical roots.

I’d never gone to synagogue regularly when living in the U.S. I hadn’t seen the point. Well, I hadn’t exactly looked very hard for the point, either. But since I’d been living in Prague, I’d been going to Chabad nearly every week. It hadn’t changed my lifestyle tremendously. The rest of the week I was my old secular self. But come Friday evening, I gave myself a little reminder- you are Jewish. You are here in Europe, thousands of miles away from your Jewish home and your Jewish family, but you are still Jewish. Perhaps it was because those reinforcements were absent that I needed Chabad. I needed it to remind me I was Jewish and more so, to explain what Judaism was. Because I, like Lenka, had always known I was Jewish, but I (like Lenka) had not always known what that meant.

Listening to Lenka, I began to realize that oppression comes in many different forms. It is not only by the punitive hand of a totalitarian government that religion and personal expression are suppressed. Sometimes it is something as subtle as an attractive dominant culture that keeps us from practicing an inherited tradition or from understanding the origins of the self. I had been looking at these people with such assumed superiority. With my proud western perspective, I alone (among these Czech friends) knew the joys of liberality, the value of a democratic tradition. I, the veteran of a democratic state, looked with pity upon these virgin capitalists, these poor, struggling people trying desperately to shed the memory of oppression and rebuild their nation in the model of my western utopia.

And here was this Lenka, this child of an “underprivileged” nation, showing me, for the first time, that what she had suffered was perhaps not terribly different from what I myself had experienced. We had both known suppression in varying forms. We had simply been inhibited by different forces. And perhaps I had needed to come this land where religious expression was historically restricted in order to recognize how the freedoms of my homeland had somehow kept me from fully practicing my religion.

It was not so much that I was equating the horrors of the Communist regime with the smaller inadequacies of my own political system. But by understanding the limitations of my great American upbringing I was somehow able to conceptualize the realities of forty plus years of Communist rule. What was once, to me, merely an episode of historical trauma, a chapter in the history of a foreign peoples – distant and surreal – was now a sort of personal reality. People not only suffered through the Communist era, they actually lived through it. Someone my age had had a childhood under this a regime; and more than that – she had fond memories of her childhood under this regime. She, like I, had enjoyed her upbringing despite obvious challenges. And now, from our vastly divergent childhoods, we were together, as young adults, trying to recapture a tradition and a culture that, for varying reasons, had previously been denied.