FOR EXPATRIATE AMERICANS, PRAGUE IS A CITY OF HOPE--THE LAST, BEST CHANCE TO FIND ADVENTURE, MAKE A DIFFERENCE, AND REKINDLE POLITICAL FAITH.
By 1989, there was scarcely a trace of romantic sensibility left in California painter Bruce Burris. That might seem odd, since artists are supposed to come equipped with a quixotic streak wider than the wheelbase on a '73 Caddy. But during the Greed Decade of the '80s, Burris had expended his supply of idealism on counseling runaway teens and helping the homeless in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. Down there on Larkin Street, any dewy-eyed notions about life, purpose, and the commonweal tended to wane pretty quickly. Burris a romantic? Fat chance.
Blame what happened next on Ted Turner.
In November of 1989, the 33-year old Burris was hard at work at a Vermont art colony run by some friends. Outside it was doing what it usually does in New England at that rime of year. "There was five feet of snow on the ground:' Burris recalls. "So we watched CNN a lot."
The hit show that season was The Fall of Communism. All over Eastern Europe, fearless leaders had toppled--in Budapest, Berlin, Warsaw. As the snow collected beneath the eaves, so did the demands for democratic reform in Czechoslovakia's capital, Prague.
The snowbound artists watched mesmerized while Czechs carried out the Velvet Revolution, their country's largely peaceful two-week uprising. Led by playwright Václav Havel, it was a groundswell that ended 40 years of tyranny. 'What he was seeing moved Burris deeply. Right there on TV, a society's creators-poets, novelists, actors, and artists--were shoving their country toward democracy. They were victorious; the Czech Federal Assembly elected Havel president. The streets of Prague brimmed with hope and joy. Burris felt his heart lift as it hadn't done in years.
So last January he and his wife, 32year-old Robynn Pease, abandoned California's golden hills for a sooty Prague neighborhood of crumbling concrete and rising aspirations.
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BRUCE BURRIS AND ROBYNN PEASE
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He paints. She teaches. They have no car and live on $160 a month.
They're so happy that they may stay for three years.
Some 20,000 Americans-Burris and Pease among them--have followed their hearts to Czechoslovakia during the past few years, believing that like San Francisco in 1967 or Paris in 1924, Prague is the place to be now. Though these new expatriates squirm at allusions to "the Left Bank of the '90s" ("It'll look like Paris when they paint it," says one wag), this is undeniably a city of hope and excitement.
The Americans--and the Italians, British, and Germans, for that matter--have come for a variety of reasons. In the beginning they were attracted by the leadership of Václav Havel. The chain-smoking playwright-politician has been a moral force, as well as one of the first baby-boomerstyle rulers anywhere. Frank Zappa and Mick Jagger have turned up at state dinners as frequently as Britain's John Major or Russia's Boris Yeltsin.
In addition, Prague offers expatriates the chance to make an impact, to accomplish something as individuals. People like Burris and Pease find that they can make a big difference by doing relatively modest things--teaching English, developing a business plan, sponsoring an art exhibition that would be ignored in the West.
"This city represents something the United States desperately needs," says Pease. "Morality, commitment, political belief-even a sense of sacrifice." One example: When the school that employs her could no longer afford to pay her salary, the children's parents passed the hat to raise enough money so Pease could go on teaching her English classes.
Anything seems possible here. Below the gold-tipped steeples and art nouveau facades still coated in coal dust and socialist neglect, Prague's cafes and pubs buzz with international gossip.
"I think Czechoslovakia is the kinder, gentler place that George Bush was exhorting America to become," muses Alan Levy, editor in chief of one of the city's two English-language newspapers, The Prague Post. As a journalist in 1968, he witnessed the flowering and brutal repression of the Prague Spring. The Communists expelled him in 1971; he returned in 1990. Now 60 and a kind of elder statesman of the American community, he notes that it's not just college kids who have come here, but accomplished boomers like Pease and Burris as well.
For all the rewards of living passionately, when will the expatriates come home? The Burris-Peases plan to leave. "I can see that being an exile won't work in the long run:' Burris says. "We have to go back and continue with our lives."
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ENERGY: BRUCE BURRIS_____________