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Kateřina Tučková: Zítkovské bohyně (The Last Goddess)

Our heroine is Dora Idesová, a young child when the book opens. It also opens quite dramatically. Her father has returned home and has proceeded to kill first the cat and then his wife.While the death of her mother obviously does have an impact on her and her younger brother.Jakoubek , who is both mentally and physically handicapped, it does not seem to have had it as much impact as you would expect. The two children are immediately taken in by their aunt.Surmena who, as far as they know, has no children though much later in the book this will turn out not to be the case. It is.Surmena who brings them up.

Surmena is a goddess which, in that part of what was then Czechoslovakia, in the Mora region, a goddess is what we would call a faith healer. When she gets a bit older, her, Dora becomes her angel i.e. asssistant.

The way it works is that people come to the village by bus and they told by locals where the goddesses are. Dora’s job is to tell them that she knows one and leads them to Surmena. On the route she takes them she finds out what is wrong and then leaves them, tells them which way to go. She herself takes a shortcut and reports to.Surnena what she has learned. When they arrive io their surprise to find that Surnena knows their problem and, with a bit of hocus-pocus, is able to help them.

Dora eventually thinks this is cheating butSurnena says it is not as it helps client have confidence in her, as she points out many seemingly physical illnesses are really mental problems with which she seemingly helps.
We move forward and Dora is working at the Ethnography and Folklore Department of the Academy of Sciences, a job she got thanks to her dissertation on the goddesses.

She discovers from a friend-that Surnena is on the list. This is a list in the post communist era of people who helped the communists. Dora is astonished by this and eventually, though it takes some time she gets to see the report. Much of the report in consists of documents from the communist era. It turns out that they were spying on.Surnena because they felt she was cheating the people as proper doctors were available. She is eventually arrested and we learn what happened to Dora and her brother who were still minors and living with their aunt.

From both these archives and her memories we we learn a lot more about what happened to Dora,Surmena and her brother. In particular Dora was put in a hostel where she was ready badly treated by both staff and the other girls but she managed to survive. Her brother was put in in a special institution while.Surmena was put in a mental institution and subject to brutal electric shock treatment. We read some of Dora’s dissertation. how goddesses. and similar women were brutally treated in the past. Tthere is an obvious comparison between what happened to those women and what happened toSurmena under the communists.
We also go back to the war and it seems that quite a few of the Nazi shad recourse to the goddesses and therefore they were accused of collaboration. Dora interviews other local ggoddesses on various visit, learning a lot more about their background and what they went through, particularly under the communists.

Dora had been able to visit her brother and she managed to obtain permission to take him out for weekends though it seems that he was not unhappy in the institution. However, when she visit sSurmena she is horrified by how much she has changed and, indeed, she will die shortly afterwards.

At this point, the story seems to get much more complicated as Dora follows up all sorts of links to information about what happened to her family. Firstly she will eventually learn that another goddess had put a curse on the family. Though she does not believe in such things, it is clear that her family have really suffered and, in virtually all cases, they have not had easy deaths nor, for that matter easy lives.

She manages to meet a whole range of goddesses, but also track down archives not just in the Czech Republic – and the Czech government continues to release more documents relating to the activities of people in the communist era, which Dora attracts down and find useful and relevant information. Her research takes her also to Germany and Poland where she finds more information.

In particular, she finds a lot more about what happened during the German occupation and the involvement of German-Czechs in finding out about the goddesses and their alleged connection to early German tribes.
The problem with these people is a change of regime. One day they are running the show and the next day they are enemies of the people and we follow the stories of both goddesses and others who get caught out switching sides.

Dora’s main focus of course is on her own her extended family, including, in particular Surmena, her sister who is of course Dora’s mother and a couple of others. it seems that they have not always been on the right side of the law and have had problems as a result.

For some, such as the communist authorities, the goddesses are dangerous and enemies of the people while for others they are more accepted, particularly by some of the Germans. They are still tolerated in the modern era. There are complaints about them as they do things such as assist in abortions, put curses on people and at times use hocus-pocus as a means of curing illnesses.

It is a very complex book as just as we are getting a hang of where it is going, Dora takes us off on another tangent even including her own decidedly murky private life. However, of her family is cursed and the curse would surely extend to her as well as to her mother, father, aunt, and brother.

Publishing history

First published in 2012 by Host
First published in English in 2022 by Amazon Crossing
Translated by Andrew Oakland