Peter Kerestur
Peter Kerestur was born into the first years of the Communist take-over in Czechoslovakia, in Pressburg or modern-day Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. He went through twelve years of school under the full Communist regime, and at the age of seventeen he witnessed the Russian invasion. The following year he moved to Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia. There he met his pretty wife of more than thirty years and counting, and was among the first signatories of the Charter 77. In the same year of 1977, he got married; in 1978, the couple officially immigrated to Austria; and in 1979, they landed at JFK. Since then they have lived in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and have two beautiful children.
Peter was born with a congenital heart defect, which caused him to undergo his first surgery while attending the seventh grade. Because of his still being in a hospital when the finals arrived and went, he was offered to attend the eighth grade only under a condition that he would have to pass the finals for both the years by the end of the eighth year or he would have to go back to the seventh grade, if not. He did it. Two school years in one calendar year. Since on, however, his taste for knowledge is voracious and his love for learning unbound. Nor are the subjects any more limited than their techniques to tackle them. The only "profession" that could accommodate all the above was writing. Add to it the love of freedom. The only problem it encountered was the language to write in. He fell in love with languages and as a man of 25 he was learning and studying seven languages simultaneously. His brain was insatiable. He studied Greek, Latin, English, French, Spanish, German, and Czech, his mother's tongue being Slovak. Unfortunately, the country was hermetically sealed from the rest of the world and but for Czech all his knowledge was passive. He translated Albert Camus' Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus) and L'Homme Révolté (The Rebel) into Czech, though with no aspiration to get ever published, since both the books dealt with heretical subjects, absurdism and nihilism. Within three months before leaving for Austria he learned the whole passive German, which was to become his third language to write in. Yet it was not German, either, that appealed to him the most. It was English. Not unlike Joseph Conrad and Ayn Rand.
Both physical and philosophical backgrounds give Peter a unique perspective of what he was living and what he is living; of where we the humans want to be dragged into, but we cannot; of why we are tempted and yet resisting. Did he ever go hungry? As a child, most of the time, and having no place to stay as a young adult and nothing to eat for days on as well was not that uncommon, either. But what does anybody think the Communism, the Dictatorship of Proletariat, was about? If you could not make everybody rich, you must have made as many people as you could poor. Ideally the whole mankind. So what? The hunger, the cold--they were there, and they're gone. All is in the past.
He has discovered that the principles to work with are very few, and the literature, both fiction and nonfiction, built around them is just that, an application of the principles to the everyday world put into words as diverse as their subjects and as voluminous as the main subjects' diversification. All of the nuances are derived from them. Whoever masters the principles will master the nuances and innuendoes.
Fundamentally, there are only two veneers: religious and secular. It's the service one puts them in that counts. To apply these principles, Peter needed to be shown how only once.
Does knowing his background make him more competent or less accomplished? The book is supposed to stand on its own merits, not on its author's credentials. Let the piece be allowed to stand on its own.
His second book to be published and entitled "Diary of an Ordinary Man as in 'Extraordinary' (A Year in the Life)" is in its final production stages. He is working on his next book about the Industrial Revolution.
