Czechs Give Asylum to US Family: A "Different" Jazz Ambassador Herbert Ward through the Lenses of FBI Reports
Abstrakt
One of the key characters of Josef Škvoreckýʼs short story Pragueʼs Little Mata Hara (1955) is an American musician named Robert Bulwer. "Music-hungry fans of Prague" skillfully use his political refugeeʼs status to smuggle a jazz revue onto stages of Prague at the time the music style is still viewed as something suspicious. The fictitious character of Bulwer was based on a realistic archetype, American double-bass jazz player Herbert Ward (1921-1994), who together with his wife, dancer and choreographer Jacqueline Ward (1919-2014) and two sons asked for a political asylum in socialist Czechoslovakia in 1954 and then lived in Prague until 1964.
Using declassified files of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), but also information from Czech and other archival sources and period press, the author depicts the life story of the Wards, in particular their presence in Europe, circumstances under which the asylum was granted, and their life in Czechoslovakia. The article is, inter alia, a contribution to a recently started discussion about the English-speaking left-wing community in Czechoslovakia after the beginning of the Cold War, and also illustrates the work of the FBI during the era of McCarthyism in the United States.