HERE IS ANOTHER WIDE-WORLD PREMIERE FOR YOU! 

A documentary film parallel to the 5^th edition of my printed book,

FOR THE LOVE OF PRAGUE

 Produced for Czech TV, and never shown before outside of this country.
Starring Gene & Zdenka Deitch, playing themselves in amazingly realistic
and revealing performances, in their home and studio locations!

So please remain seated at the end of this chapter. Have your popcorn ready!
Go where few have gone before, into the private world of Gene & Zdenka –
See&Hear How&Why we found ourselves in the fix we’re in.

 (Don’t be alarmed at Zdenka’s opening machine-gun attack in her personal Czech language. This movie basically tells it all in improvised English!)

“If you like, I go with you shopping on Satur-r-r-day.”

Zdenka Hrachovcová-Najmanová-Deitchová – the person who turned my life around.   In 1959 I felt myself to be in the pits. At 35 years of age, I seemed to have already peaked my career.  In May, 1958 I’d been outed as creative director of CBS-Terrytoons, the top job in American animation at that time. My only recourse was to establish my own studio, even though running a business was and still is my weakest ability.  Gene Deitch Associates, inc, nevertheless got off to a great start.  We had plenty of clients and interestineg work, but I had the constant worry of running a company – paying my staff, which made it tough for me to concentrate on the creative work that was all I knew. At home it was even gloomier, never coming to terms with my wife Marie.  She could not abide my intense absorbtion with my work.

That didn’t at all mean that I was tempted by the wildly absurd words of the quirky stranger that appeared in my Manhattan studio in mid-1959, that I was going to fall in love with a short blonde blue-eyed woman behind the Iron Curtain! I considered myself to be permantly married to Marie despite our conflicts.  Yet, this highly unlikely event actually happened and led to a complete change in my life!   It brought me to Zdenka Najmanova.

The full-length version of that part of my story is told in my book, For The Love of Prague.  It was Prague where William L. Snyder had sent me, on what he assured would be a mere 10-day stint.  I don’t think I need to point out, if you know me at all, that at this writing I have been living here so far for over 50 years, which put another way is half a bleeding century! And nearly that entire half-century so far has been spent living in happy marriage with that very Zdenka, who is now Zdenka Deitchová.*

Her first words to me, in her patented version of English, were, „If you like, I go with you shopping on Satur-r-r-rday.“  So we went shopping together that Saturday, and bought ourselves a new life.

Zdenka was just 5 feet of blonde dynamism, only a tad diminished 50 years later.  Of course the shyness has gone and the assurance has grown, if not her height. She was just 30 then, but even in her 80s, her tough resilience remains.  She only does optimism; absolutely daunt-proof! And though she can still charm any creature that comes her way, neither of us has had any reason or occasion to stray.  If 50 years of fidelity and mutual devotion don’t show an unbreakable bond, name your parameters!

When I first arrived in Prague, nervous and only marginally oriented, Zdenka was already production chief of the animation studio group set up to produce films for William L. Snyder; separate from the main studio which was devoted to work for the local socialist media – movie theaters, and the still nascent television.

Bill Snyder’s commitment to supply eight stories a year for them to animate, prompted the studio honchos to provide premises in another part of town for this new type of custom work, and to appoint diminutive Zdenka as production manager of the unit.

Her workaholic devotion and skill with people made her the obvious choice, even if Bill hadn’t almost jokingly insisted on her!  Our love affair may have been foretold to me, but not to her! She was also married, to a persistent suitor, Stanislav Najman, and had a five-year-old son, David.  I was 16 years married, with three promising sons. So in the first scene of our story the plot-line ahead was dim and unfocused.

Zdenka’s beginnings were as Zdenka Hrachovcová.* She was the daughter of František and Zdenka Hrachovec.  Her father was a carver of gravestone lettering and a railroad telegrapher.   Her mother managed the household.  She had an older brother. They lived at one time on the top floor of a small railroad station in a Prague quarter. No inside toilet.  Heating was from a coal stove. The coal was hauled up from the basement, often by tiny Zdenka.  Water came from a single outside faucet.  When it was Saturday bath time, water was heated bucket by bucket and poured into a large wooden tub.  Bathing was in a routine order; first little Zdenka, then her brother, then mother, and last, father; all in the same progressivly murky water.

Zdenka loved to sing, and didn’t refrain from doing it in public. She remembers embarrasing her mother when she was taken on a tram.  She would spontaneously burst into song, and the other passengers would give her coins.

One tragic day, Zdenka’s mother was too vigorously shaking a throw rug over the edge of their balcony and fell to her death.  Zdenka told me that her brother Fanina, shouted, “Stay here,” then rushed down the stairs.  In Zdenka’s words: “When my brother reached her, mother was quite dead!”

Tiny, seven-year-old Zdenka then became the family “mother.” She stood on a wooden apple box to wash the dishes.  She learned to cook and clean. When her household chores made her late for school, she often arrived when the other kids were already inside, and the street door was closed.  She was too small to reach the doorknob, and had to wait for a passerby, whom she would ask to open the door for her! Today she still does our housework in addition to her profession.  No stopping her even now!

By the time she was ten years old, her country, Czechoslovakia, was occupied by Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and was plunged into war.  American Bombs struck close to her house.  Many years later, when I was first able to take her by ship for a visit to America, we made our initial New World stop in Nova Scotia, Canada. We disembarked to have a drink at a dockside bar, and got into a conversation with a local gent. When he asked Zdenka where she was from, and she answered, “Czechoslovakia,” he said,  “I know that country! In World War II, I flew a bombing run over Prague!” 

Oh, what great news! It tells you just what a miracle it was, that Zdenka and I were sitting there together.  I realized that if I had actually become a wartime pilot, I may well have killed her!  That was just one of the string of miracles that brought me to Prague, where I somehow captured this remarkable woman, who perhaps survived because my pilot training program didn’t!

OK, that’s a stretch, but it conceivably could have happened.  What did happen was that somehow Zdenka survived the dangers and deprivations of war.  Good Lord, she could have been Jewish! What also did happen was that having survived the war and the Nazi occupation, her country was soon absorbed into Soviet style communism.  She was not allowed university. She was not allowed to travel outside the barbed wire borders of her homeland.

In the very short period between nazism and communism, in 1945 at the age of 17, she had gotten a job in the just forming animation movie studio named, “Bratři v triku,“ (“Trick Brothers,“ but comprised at least 50% “Sisters”) Over the years, she performed nearly every function from cel inker to animation in-betweener, to animator, becoming a production manager before my arrival in 1959, and ultimately, Studio Manager.  As I write this, 65 years after she started as a member of the founding studio, Zdenka became its last surviving employee, having never worked anywhere else in all those 65 years, and barely missing more than a few days once with the flu.  The misguided virus never had the temerity to bother her again! She did have a short matenity break when David was born in 1954. For the past 20 years she has been the chief of the studio, and for the past 50 years we have been colleagues; she produced all but one of my Prague films. (The exeption was my live action film, ZLATEH THE GOAT, available from Weston Woods).

Zdenka’s brother František, called “Fanina,” died shortly after I arrived. I never had a chance to meet him. I wasn’t introduced to her family until she obtained her divorce.  Her mother had died many years earlier, but her father embraced me, and we became very close. He was a great guy, and helpful to us.

What was it about Zdenka that so intensely fascinated me?  Well, it wasn’t just me. She has a magnetic charm, and before it became known that we were lovers, I nearly had to use sticks and stones to ward off the buzzing of other males.  In the first few years of my work here, I was able to convince Bill Snyder to arrange with the studio to import an Oxberry animation camera stand.  At that time, the Czechoslovak ”socialist” currency had no international value, but the income of US Dollars from Snyder’s projects, made it possible, and when the parts actually arrived. John Oxberry himself came to install it, a project requiring several weeks.  John was a dashing blade,  and it was all I could do to keep him from groping Zdenka. It was the delicate period, when I could not reveal to anyone our relationship, without the danger of being expelled from the country. One night as we took John to a musical performance, he began making moves on little Zdenka, murmuring. “You are the cutest thing I’ve ever seen!”

That’s not say that Zdenka looked like a movie starlet. She has a long nose and a short body.  This country surely boasts the highest concentration of gorgeous women on the planet.  And let’s face it, when I arrived here, still a good enough looking and comparatively rich holder of a genuine USA passport, a goodly number of these exotic beauties were willing to jump into my bed at the slightest hint from me.  But unlike Bill Snyder, I was not here with that in mind.  Zdenka had a magnetic beauty beyond all the others.  She could charm the spots off a Dalmation.  I simply could not take my eyes off her, or get involved with some Czech Barbie Doll.

Whereas every other Czech woman I spoke with moaned forlorn hopelessness at being trapped in the communist cage, Zdenka exuded assurance that she would somehow overcome.  She wasn’t awaiting “Prince Charming” me to come and rescue her. But it became my goal anyway.  What makes her great is that even though I actually accomplished that goal, she will now say, 50 years later, “I would have somehow managed it by myself!”

I had other more hopeless goals, like one day winning an argument with her. No chance. In fact, though we are as one on the basics, there is much we disagree on. But our disagreements/arguments do not tear us apart, but rather act as sharpening agents for our opinions. We don’t grow grudges. What a contrast from my first marriage, where all my misdemeanors were “kept on file,” to be brought out and used as ammunition against me at every later opportunity. However fierce an argument may be between Zdenka and me, , it evaporates in minutes. Any such argument finds us both modified.  Our working arguments always force my rethinking and improvements in our animation productions. She earns her credits on my Prague films.

Zdenka is an amazing woman with a vast array of family, friends, and colleagues who rely on her for advice and help. Our phone is Zdenka’s Help Hotline. She has facilitated many other love affairs and marriages!  She has often eased financial distress.  She offers hope to the ill.  She has kept me afloat.  There is simply no one like her! You can see her in  live-action in the documentary movie right here, just below the following photos!

I could write an entire book about Zdenka in hopes of getting a clearer portrait. The little anecdotes in my cold war memoir book, “For The Love of Prague,“ fill in some of  the dots.

Najmanová = „NYE-mahn-o-vah“  Hrachovcová =„HRAKH-ove-tso-vah“

Deitchová  = „DYTCH-o-vah“\\