Charles Novacek
Charles Novacek was born in Ožd’any, Czechoslovakia on May 11, 1928. He graduated from the Industrial College of Engineering in Brno, Czechoslovakia with a degree in mechanical engineering and attended the Masaryk University School of Law in Brno. After escaping his homeland in 1948, Novacek fled to Germany, then Venezuela and was finally able to immigrate with his family to the United States in 1956 where he taught himself English as his seventh language.
Novacek was a registered professional engineer and spent thirty-three years in the Detroit, Michigan, metropolitan area as a civil engineer, project, design and quality assurance manager. In retirement Novacek studied Mandarin Chinese and earned a B.G.S and an M.A. in Liberal Studies from the University of Michigan-Dearborn and an M.A. in Painting from Eastern Michigan University. Novacek wrote and painted all of his life, but didn’t start wring his memoir Border Crossings: Coming of Age in the Czech Resistance until the year 2000. He died in July 2007.
“Why should I be frightened of dying? I did not know what death truly was; no one did. Who had made dying a bad word? Yes, it was universally considered awful—unwanted, painful, feared—because when it happened it stopped us from moving and being, and we interpreted that as if something had ended. But what if it were actually a beautiful experience? What if, with death, something actually began instead?”