Like his friend Vaclav Havel, the late Czech President and playwright, the Czech novelist Josef Skvorecky, who died Jan. 3 at 87, will be remembered as a writer with a shrewd--but much funnier--appraisal of human nature and the devilish political systems it can create. With his first novel, The Cowards, published in 1958 and quickly banned by the Czech communist government, he found his great subject, the travails of an ordinary man as he tries, however bumptiously, to hold on to his humanity amid the challenges of 20th century totalitarianism. He also found his fictional alter ego, the jazz-besotted Danny Smiricky,...
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