WEIL, Jiří

Nationality: Czech. Born: Praskolesy, Bohemia, 1900. Education: Prague University. Family: Married Olga Frenclova in 1942 (marriage forcibly annulled). Career: Journalist, Moscow, 1933-35; editor, Prague, 1946-49; worked in the Prague Jewish Museum, 1950-58. Died: 1959.

Publications

Novels

Moskva-hranice [From Moscow to the Border]. 1937.

Zivot s hvězdou. 1949; as Life with a Star, 1989.

Na streše je Mendelssohn. 1960; as Mendelssohn Is on the Roof, 1991.

Drevená lzíce (sequel to Moskva-hranice ). 1980.

Short Stories

Vezen chillonskí [Prisoner of Chillon]. 1957.

Other

Makanna otec divu. 1945.

Vzpominky na Julia Fucika. 1947.

Zalozpev za 77,297 obetí [Elegy for the 77,297 Victims]. 1958.

Harfeník. 1958.

Hodina pravdy, hodina zkoušky. 1966.

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Critical Studies:

"Introduction: Jiri Weil, Two Stories about Nazis and Jews" by Philip Roth, in American Poetry Review, September/October 1974, p. 22; by Josef Skvorecky, in New Republic, 4 September 1989, 201 (10), pp. 31-35.

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Jiří Weil was actively engaged in the tumultuous cultural and political life of Europe in the 1920s, '30s, and postwar period up to his death in 1959. As a journalist he was abreast with the developments not only in his native, newly proclaimed Czechoslovakia but also in a Europe that was largely under the sway of fascist dictatorships. As a communist he observed the events in the rapidly changing Soviet Union—not always with approval—and he followed the changing trends in Soviet art and literature closely. In 1932 he edited a collection of Soviet revolutionary poetry, and, as Hitler was consolidating power in Germany, he left Czechoslovakia to spend two years in the Soviet Union (1933-35). His interest in Soviet matters led not only to journalistic articles and reportage but also to accomplished translations of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, and Maksim Gorky.

Weil was also a member of the Czech cultural avant-garde, including the Devetsil group. Having observed and experienced not only Czech anti-Semitism during the prewar years but more particularly the alarming escalation of the German anti-Jewish measures in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Weil, a Jew, went underground in 1942 until the war ended in 1945. After the war he continued his journalistic work as an editor (1946-49) and then worked in the Prague Jewish Museum (1950-58). In the forefront of European literary trends, Weil exemplifies in his postwar writings the "absurd" and demonstrates as well an affinity with his still as yet largely unrecognized compatriot Franz Kafka.

His novel Zivot s hvězdou (1949; Life with a Star ), written shortly after the liberation, tells the story of a Jewish bank clerk, Josef Roubiček, who progressively loses all his possessions, his lover, his cat, and even his identity. He is finally able to resist total effacement and, with the aid of socialist resisters, survives. The story is, however, less a description of the Jewish tragedy in 1940s Czechoslovakia than a story of alienation, of a simple human being caught, like Kafka's heroes, in an absurd world that works inexorably and machine-like against the individual. The novel Na streše je Mendelssohn (1960; Mendelssohn Is on the Roof ) deals with the order to remove the statue of Felix Mendelssohn, a Jew, from the roof of the Prague concert hall. There is confusion as to which statue, precisely, is Mendelssohn's, and the statue itself exerts an uncanny influence against those who are trying to remove it. Again, the absurdity of the world of totalitarian rule is a major theme.

Weil's writings are suffused with European existentialism, as exemplified in the works of Kafka and Albert Camus. They combine, in simple language, both the real and the surreal. No matter what he had chosen for his subject matter, Weil would have been a leading writer of his time. Experiencing and observing the German occupiers as they oppressed and finally exterminated some 78,000 of the estimated 92,000 Jews living in Bohemia and Moravia in the war years, Weil took the Holocaust as material for his novels. His real theme, however, is the alienation of the individual and the destruction of human identity in an absurd world.

—David Scrase

See the essay on Life with a Star.