Voyen Koreis

A short autobiography - My Beard

or

How does one become an Australian?

I was born on Saint Valentine's Day in the year 1943, in London. My father was a Czech diplomat, and when the war came it caught both my parents in the no land, at Tirana in Albania. Their escape through Greece, and subsequent journey to France and eventually to England, must have been adventurous. Later my father fought as an army major with the Allied Forces, and after the war he took the family back to Prague. In 1947-48 he was at the Czechoslovakian embassy at Belgrade in Yugoslavia, where amongst the children of the staff, who were my playmates, was also the Ambassador’s daughter, several years older than I. I don’t remember much of her, and I doubt that Madelaine Albright, one time the most powerful woman on the planet, would remember me either.
After the Belgrade stint my father was named the Consular General in Berlin, so we moved to Germany, and stayed there until his sudden death in 1950. Rumours naturally persisted about the cause of his death, occurring at such exposed place Berlin was at the time, teeming with spies from all over the world. In the end, he was given the state funeral by the Czechoslovakian government, and that was that.

I sing my song of Havana

With Soviets the Cubans are one

Together they laugh while they’re watching

Kennedy’s troops on the run

With hammer and sickle now forming their sign

Seeing the cosmonauts fly into yonder

The Cubans are saying, there’s no end to wonder

Over Havana the red star will shine!

After the 2 year long compulsory army service, I continued my involvement with the performing arts, combining singing with acting, but I wanted to go on to the Prague University, to seriously study the operatic singing. By then in my mid twenties, I was already a private student of one of the professors, who urged me to shave off the beard I had been cultivating for some time, before the forthcoming auditions. I ignored her warnings only to my peril. My performance was well received by the committee members, except for the chairman, well known for his allegiance to the Communist Party, but not particularly so for his singing abilities. He vetoed me, declaring that “beatnics with beards were unwanted elements at the Prague Academy of the Arts”! Such turned out to be the prophetic words. I soon proved him right by becoming a member of the gang of undesirables, who attempted to create an opposition party to the Communists during the Dubcek’s era, which was to end in 1968 with the Soviet invasion and occupation of the country. I had made up my mind there and then: I was going to keep my beard, but would say goodbye to the totalitarians!

        With my status as “British born” I had no major problems moving to London. Naturally, I had to earn a living somehow, and my opportunities were limited. I was 26 and the last time I had made any serious attempts to speak English was when I was about 2, with the words such as "gaga, mama, dada". Many of the Czech expatriates I knew in London went to the language schools to help them learn English as fast as possible. I chose a different route, remembering my father's legendary method of learning languages (he spoke about a dozen). It consisted of going alone to a strange country and immediately losing oneself amongst the natives during the day, while reading newspapers in the evening. After about a month he would emerge from his hideout, with another language added to his portfolio. Finding a job at a building site as a labourer was a relatively simple matter, but mixing with the natives proved a major problem, as there weren't many about. The accents that I was hearing at the building site were mostly Scottish, Irish, Yorkshire, West Indies, etc., with only a few true Englishmen around, inevitably Cockneys, who with their way of swallowing parts of words were even harder to understand than the rest of them. Though I could soon form basic sentences my ears were not used to all these colourful accents that surrounded me. I kept asking people to speak slowly, and I listened. During the breaks and in the evening I read newspapers and tried to make some sense of the various articles with the help of a dictionary that I carried with me everywhere. And I listened to the BBC. After a time I attempted to read my first book in English. I cannot remember what it was, probably a murder mystery, possibly by Agatha Christie. 

I had tried to continue my singing career, appearing in a few minor operatic productions as a “basso profondo”. It did not lead to any significant contracts for singing the opera. The only major contract I had signed at the time was the marriage contract with another Czech refugee, whom I had invited to one of the performances of Rossini's La Cenerentola (Cinderella), where I sung Alidoro. The London bed-sitters were exceedingly cold, so longing for more open space and warmer climate, we decided to migrate to Australia and start a new life there. We sailed from Southampton to Sydney in February 1973, with seven trunks in the under deck, five of them containing books. We continued on to Brisbane, where we have now been living for more than 32 years. We have a son, who is now 20 and who who studies journalism at the University of Queensland. I had abandoned my singing/acting career (perhaps not entirely so, as in 1983 I played the leading role in Ubu the King by Alfred Jarry, in a local production) and went through several jobs as a public servant, salesman and interpreter/translator. I gradually moved to painting and to teaching the visual arts. I held about a dozen one man shows, at various venues, in the 1980s and the 90s. During the 90s I was involved in the public radio, both as a broadcaster-moderator and as an administrator.  I wrote several radio plays in English, one was produced, another was translated into the Japanese. I also translated television programs for the Czech National TV, including a whole series on the history of dance. I wrote a novel, in Czech, my mother's tongue, and it was accepted by a Czech publisher. Some of my writings, including the as yet non-edited English version of the novel, can be accessed here.

In the more recent times I had decided to make yet another career move and become an online bookseller, starting with the collection of books my wife and I have accumulated over the years and expanding it further to about 25,000, half of which have been listed at the time of writing this profile. No doubt, more books will be coming, though it is getting a little crowded here.

I still proudly carry that same beard, though its once lively brown colours inexorably are being invaded by streaks of grey. I am convinced that the most important decision that I had ever made in my entire life, was the one not to shave it off my face, on the eve of that memorable audition. Who knows what could have otherwise happened? Perhaps I would have been accepted to the Academy, and might have carved up some sort of a career as a singer or a teacher, in the stifling atmosphere behind the now defunct Iron Curtain. Instead, I was able to develop an entirely different career and, most importantly, keep developing as a person, while living a life of freedom in this wonderful country. Occasionally I ask myself the question, do I have anything to regret? The answer has always been: No, I don't regret anything!