Dagmar Hájková’s biography of Emanuel Voska traces the career of a forgotten figure of the Czechoslovak resistance movement during World War I. Very popular during the First Czechoslovak Republic, this “spying legend” then fell into oblivion during the second half of the twentieth century. The majority of the book provides a well-researched description of his wartime activities as a spy and propagandist. Through the figure of Voska, Hájková illuminates the role of various transatlantic networks in the history of Czechoslovak independence. The book provides a richly detailed account of the concrete workings of the Czechoslovak resistance abroad.

Born in Kutná Hora in 1875, Emanuel Voska immigrated to the United States at age nineteen. After his arrival, he became involved with Social Democracy and immigrants’ organizations. Hájková draws an interesting portrait of Czechs in America, analyzing their complex identity ties. The beginning of the war found Voska in Europe where he completed a first mission on behalf of Tomáš Masaryk in the Balkans. Returning to America, he played a role promoting support for Masaryk and independence among immigrant Czech organizations. He was one of the main founders of the Czech National Alliance, which attempted to unite all Czechs abroad and created a platform for the defense of Austria-Hungary's breakup. This organization also collected funds in the United States to help finance the Czech resistance, whose leaders were keen to pay for their activities through their own means and to not have to rely on the Allies for money. Voska then worked as a spy for the British, especially through one of his contacts at the Austro-Hungarian consulate in New York. He was at the time overseeing a network of messengers who regularly traveled from Europe to the United States and gathered information to be used against the Central Powers. This intelligence work was coupled with intense propaganda work in the United States, composed of conference tours and the use of the press to convey an anti-German message (both the press of immigrants’ circles and American national newspapers).

His work was obviously transformed with the United States’ entry into the war. Voska promoted the drive to get more immigrant volunteers to join the American army (after the project of transforming it into national units had been rejected). He was then sent to Russia with British writer W. Somerset Maugham in 1917 to organize Czech prisoners of war and to maintain Russia fighting in the war. As he did not speak Russian, his own understanding of the situation there was limited, and he worked on uncovering financial links between the Germans and the Bolsheviks. In the final chapter of the book, Hájková briefly charts his postwar career, his lack of involvement in the new Czechoslovak state that he had helped build, his return to the United States during World War II, and his imprisonment under the Communist regime in the fifties.

In recounting Voska's wartime activities, Hájková successfully delineates the complex relationships between the different components of the Czech resistance during World War I. She shows how Masaryk tried to limit the influence of Czechs abroad and preferred to work with exiled Czech politicians, rather than immigrant communities in the United States. The Czechoslovak National Council in Paris thus took preeminence over the Czech National Alliance. The nuanced analysis of interactions between the resistance and the Allies also demonstrates that it was not always clear who was exploiting whom between the great powers and nationalist movements they used to weaken the enemy. Hájková highlights that the Czechs were aware of the communalities of issues among nationalities on both the allied side (Indians, Irish) and the side of the Central Powers.

The book is made lively by the interesting cast of characters that Voska encounters in his peregrinations around the world. It provides a better understanding of the various components of the Czech resistance abroad: their relationships with each other and with allied governments, their sources of financial support, and the interplay between spying and propaganda efforts in a battle for information. The integration of the activities of both the immigrants and the exiles brings a new dimension to the research on this topic, emphasizing interpersonal dynamics, conflicts, and networks. The study, however, suffers from a lack of conclusion at the end of the book that would clarify the author's position on Voska's role within the Czechoslovak resistance, weighing in on the question of the legacy of Czech immigrants’ fight for independence, as well as place this book within the current historiography on the Czechoslovak resistance during the First World War. Nevertheless, this biography, based on exhaustive archival research and drawing on a wide variety of sources in five countries (private papers, interviews, memoirs, newspapers), gives a nuanced picture of Voska's wartime fortunes with an attentive eye to his evolution in different contexts.