The Assistant

Pomocnik
Slovaška
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Ladislav Ballek
He has various intentions, he plans to play all kinds of tricks on them, but at the same time he works for them as if for his own family; he thinks he has sized them up exactly, and yet he doesn’t really know anything about them. Each and every one of them is a mystery to him, impenetrable, as if he were standing in the sun and they in the shade.

The story of Pomocnik – The Assistant takes place in a small township of Palánk in southern Slovakia, recovering after the trauma of WWII.  The residents of Palánk do not dwell on the past, they fix their attention to the future. Life bursts out in this small town with all its might, tastes, colours and passion. The need to compensate themselves for anything they were deprived of by the war becomes the strongest drive for its inhabitants. They start, in the first place, to fulfill their basic needs of flesh: need for food and lovemaking. Hunt after food, pleasures and riches becomes the purpose of everyday existence. In the post-war Palánk “to be“ means “to have“.

To this atmosphere arrives a butcher from northern Slovakia, Štefan Riečan, with his wife and daughter, to start his life anew. At the beginning, Palánk looks like a promised land to him, full of fruits, tastes and smells. But soon the honest, humble man with firm moral principles finds out it is not the right place for him….

Ladislav Ballek (1941)

Writer, politician and diplomat. After many years of editorial and teaching practice he held the post of Slovak ambassador to the Czech Republic (2001 – 2008).

Ballek’s early literary work is marked by expressiveness and constructivism. In the following period it concentrates on positive themes, which he finds mainly in childhood and in his native region of southern Slovakia, as seen above all in the book Južná pošta/Southern Mail. The novel Pomocník/The Assistant is a prototype of pure epic narrative, about the dramatic lives of individuals in the Slovak-Hungarian borderlands after the Second World War. The novel Agáty/Acacia Trees is a loose sequel to this novel. Both books are among the most outstanding works of modern Slovak prose.