Since his childhood when his father gave him his first jazz record, Skvorecky had been fascinated by the West. In the years following the Second World War he moved among the intellectual circles of the Czechoslovak democracy that lasted until 1948. It was at this time that Skvorecky made a name for himself as a writer, poet, scriptwriter, critic, editor, translator, and novelist.

In the following years, Skvorecky’s worked at a state publishing house where he translated Faulkner, Hemingway and Raymond Chandler. He published his first novel, The Cowards, in 1958. The Cowards brought him immediate renown both domestically and abroad, but was banned soon thereafter. It was, according to The New York Times, “the first great underground classic of postwar Czechoslovakia.” Dealing with subjects such as adolescence, everyday life during the war, and jazz musicians, The Cowards was “quite unique for its time,” said Michal Schonberg, retired U of T professor and close friend of Skvorecky.

After tanks rolled into his hometown during the Prague Spring in 1968, Skvorecky moved to Toronto with his wife, Zdena. He was offered a position at the English Department at U of T, where he taught American literature and creative writing until 1990.

In Canada, he remained active in the Czech dissident network. Rather than distance himself from the problems of his homeland, he immersed himself in them. In 1971, he and Zdena established Sixty-Eight Publishers, a lifeline and quasi-underground operation for Czech writers including Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Sixty-Eight contributed to Czechoslovak dissident intellectual life and introduced Czech writing to an international audience. Skvorecky published the works of Czech writers, any literature written in Czech, and stories based in Czechoslovakia. Subversive Czech manuscripts were smuggled out of Czechoslovakia, printed in Toronto, and smuggled back in. “They became a kind of conscience of the resistance,” said Schonberg.

Most of Skvorecky’s major novels were written in Toronto, but nearly all of his output met Sixty-Eight’s criteria. He won the Governor General’s Award in 1984 for his novel, The Engineer of Human Souls, the term which Stalin used to praise writers.

“Josef was a very modest man--and quiet. Whatever he needed to express, he did it in literature,” said Schonberg. What Skvorecky expressed was a deep sense of justice and human freedom, ideals that transcend the boundaries of East and West.