[5] One of her early screenplays, written under her maiden name and titled Snadný život (An Easy Life), was filmed by Miloš Makovec and Jiří Brdečka.
According to her own words, the Czechoslovak president Antonín Novotný in a speech against "unreliable writers" even listed her name as a "subversive person".
[5] Frederick Jelinek emigrated from Czechoslovakia to the United States in 1949, however, in 1957 he visited Vienna as a participant of a professional conference.
Her son William Jelinek later claimed: "As an inaugural gift to Kennedy, the Czechs released nine dissidents and one of them was my mother".
Jelinek also wrote the libretto for the opera Kafka's Women by Czech composer Jiří Kadeřábek, first staged at the Cell Theater in New York City in 2013.
[9] For the screenplay for the film Zapomenuté světlo (Forgotten Light), she found an inspiration in a short story by the Czech Catholic priest and writer Jakub Deml.