Long Journey Home 
A Prague Love Story

By Helen Notzl
FriesenPress (June 6, 2018)
​
A four-year-old girl survives a harrowing escape across the heavily armed border of Czechoslovakia with her mother and brother after the Communist takeover in 1948. The family leaves everything behind to flee to freedom in Canada. 

Years later, as a young woman living in Toronto, she finds herself drawn to the country of her birth and returns to Prague, along the way finding love, danger, heartbreak, and her family's legacy.

Helen Notzl's poignant memoir takes readers on a voyage between two starkly different and conflicting worlds - from affluence and fulfillment in Canada to passion and revolution in Prague. Must she choose between the two?
​
With intense drama, vivid narration, and brilliant detail, Long Journey Home tells the story of a woman's quest for those things that truly matter to all of us: love, family, identity and homeland.

​Excerpt


​Introduction

One evening some years ago, I’d booked a box at the magnificent Prague State Opera. Rusalka was being performed, the Czech composer Antonin Dvořák’s most celebrated opera. I was familiar with his most famous aria, the “Song to the Moon,” but had never seen the entire work. My father had loved opera, and when I was a child I’d heard its haunting music emanating from behind the closed door of his den at our home in Toronto.

I was born in Prague, but at the age of four was torn away when the Communist party took over Czechoslovakia and my family fled to Canada, leaving everything and everyone behind. As a child listening to my mother’s stories, I fell in love with that mythical place and the mysterious characters – my extended family – that she described. Her grief and longing for that lost paradise set me on a quest that was to run like an underground river through my life.
Over the years, I’d been drawn to Prague again and again, living in Canada but driven by an urgent longing that would not let me go. Coming to see Rusalka was part of my search.

I sat listening, entranced by the soaring, lyrical music. Suddenly I caught my breath and had to stop myself from crying out. This was my story! Rusalka, a water nymph, has fallen in love with a human prince and longs to be with him. Dissatisfied with her lot, she dreams of being human. Her wish is granted. The libretto tells the story of their two incompatible worlds colliding and in their case, since it is an opera, their inevitable tragic end.

Walking home a daze, I realized I needed to write down the story of my own two worlds colliding and the fallout from that collision. A story of exile and the search for my own resolution.
​
And, perhaps, redemption.