New Resource to Help Calm Children in this Time of Crisis Since the pandemic began, a lot of children have been struggling with how to cope. Charles’s Bridge may be just the tool they need. “Charles’s Bridge is a beautiful and inspiring tribute to the power of imagination, human creativity and the power of …
I recently received a message from a reader of Border Crossings: Coming of Age in the Czech Resistance. He commented “Kissing the ground of his Southfield backyard really stayed with me.” This is in reference to Charles’s statement in the book, “when we returned home, I kissed the ground in my Southfield backyard.” Charles was …
Tonight, as I drove past the Detroit Institute of Arts, I remembered Yoko Ono’s Freight Train installed on a short stretch of railroad track on the museum’s front lawn in 2003. It was a 1930s German boxcar riddled with bullet holes signifying violence and murder. I remembered how light flickered mysteriously through the bullet holes …
The scene in this contemporary nocturne photograph is the train station in the town of Náměšť nad Oslavou where Charles and his family lived in Czechoslovakia during World War II. Charles loved these night scenes as he also loved the “dreamy pensive mood” of nocturne paintings (and I do, too). On our frequent visits to …
One of Charles’s favorite painters, Frederic Edwin Church’s work was greatly influenced by one of his favorite scientists – Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian naturalist. I’ve been reading a newly published graphic novel by Andrea Wulf, The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt and her Humboldt biography The Invention of Nature and have discovered some interesting things Humboldt …
Charles’ love of the High Tatra Mountains of Slovakia deepened when at the age of nine in 1937, he was sent there to a special sanitarium for children to recover from tuberculosis. “I was told that the mountain air cured me,” Charles said. There “I became acquainted with the territory where years later I would …
