His novel Tank Battalion, drawing on Skvorecky's two years' national service after the war, was about to be published when the Soviet tanks invaded in 1968 to crush the Prague Spring. He and his wife, an actress and writer, decided to go to Canada, where the University of Toronto offered him a teaching position in the English department. His wife, however, at that stage spoke little English and had no work. Their solution was to go into publishing. Zdena Salivarova used all her savings to print Tank Battalion, the Czech edition of which had been pulped by the communist authorities. She then wrote to all the Czech exiles they knew, offering them the book and inviting them to suggest other potential buyers. The response was overwhelming: 1,000 names and nearly twice as many orders.