Book Review: Don't Cry for Me

Book Review: Don’t Cry for Me

Author: Klara Jarunkova

Translator: George Theiner

Date: 1963 (Slovak), 1968 (English)

Publisher: Four Winds / Scholastic

ISBN: none

Length: 287 pages

Quote: “Being sick in bed with a temperature is great. Just one evening with 104 and you get whatever it is you’ve been longing for.”

What readers liked about this school story from Soviet Czechoslovakia was that Olga is just like the fourteen-year-old heroines of Betty Cavanna, or even Judy Blume. That would also have been what they disliked about it. Olga’s dreams, crushes, mood swings, rebellions, and love of the younger children she baby-sits have a European cultural flavor, but in the end they’re about as mundane as those of American fourteen-year-olds.

Even the beatings? Well, actually, yes; in the United States too, in this period, many parents and teachers believed in corporal punishment. Adults were always threatening to beat kids black and blue, and actually giving them a whack with a wooden spoon, in the 1960s. Although the warmer climate, richer diet, and genetic diversity in the U.S. seem to have lowered the average age of puberty; American adults usually displayed some qualms about hitting a fourteen-year-old...but then all the fourteen-year-old girls in my class wore adult-sized bras, and most of us were taller than a few of the teachers.

In the course of Don’t Cry for Me Olga hangs out with her friends and relatives, defies her father and persists in baby-sitting the otherwise unsupervised children of the trashiest couple in the apartment building, tries to become a real artist, indignantly rejects the attention of unsuitable older men of sixteen, eventually has a sweet chaste age-appropriate romance with one, goes skiing with relatives, worries that her parents might get a divorce, feels guilty about the probability that she’ll do better than her friends on the competitive examinations that determine which kids go to high school and which to vocational courses, gets her hair cut, and makes a happy ending where she finds one.

Who shouldn’t cry for Olga? Maybe it’s the trashy couple’s children, when the mother, a prostitute, finally attempts suicide and the children are finally offered places in an orphanage; Olga won’t be baby-sitting them any more but at least (she hopes) they’ll have regular meals. Maybe it’s the teenaged girl readers who might not have realized that a teen romance that reaches its natural end can be part of a story that has a happy ending. Or maybe, just possibly—oh, how subversive this thought would have been in 1968!—it’s the English-speaking readers who are shown that, although Olga and her friends aren’t quite as well off as teenagers in the English-speaking world, their lives aren’t altogether miserable. Even behind the Iron Curtain.

Times have changed, and this novel is certainly no longer a story about what living in Czechoslovakia is like today, but some readers may enjoy it for its historical interest. And there may even be a few radical, subversive, artistic high school girls who appreciate the adult perspective Olga takes in narrating the realistically happy end of her first romance.  Editors used to doubt that girls who could accept that their first hormone reaction was less than True Love existed, but they did, and they do.