Rediscovering Czech Novelist Jiri Weil
Weil, Jiri
Rediscovering Czech Novelist Jiri Weil Life with a Star by Jiri Weil; translated by Ruzena Kovarikova with Roslyn Schloss Farrar, Straus 4 Giroux, 1989. 208 pp.. S22.95 Reviewed by Linda...
...The protagonist is terribly precocious...
...I don't know another like it...
...he also served as director of the Jewish State Museum in Prague...
...Jews were forbidden to own pets...
...Weil's literary style is laconic, like Hemingway's—stripped, sparse, essential, yet poetic...
...They'll arrest you, and they'll look in their files and see that we are your relatives and they'll kill us too, all because the gentleman allows a cat to sleep with him...
...In contrast to what they did, Josef does very little...
...Desperately, these people thrash about for any way to explain or control their fate...
...it depicts an inner struggle with morale and morality once the historical domain has been depleted of meaning...
...But there is no departure from the real...
...In fact, the novel avoids plot...
...I saw stars...
...Symbols must replace explanations...
...An orphan bereft of family and friends, possessions and employment, Josef works in the cemetery...
...Instead of things, we had vegetables...
...Life with a Star seems surrealistic...
...Life with a Star, on which Weil worked for 15 years, was published posthumously in 1960 (in Czech...
...In the preface to Life with a Star, Roth compares Weil to Isaac Babel in his "ability to write about savagery and pain with a brevity that in itself seems the fiercest commentary that can be made on the worst that life has to offer...
...But silence may well be the appropriate medium for depicting a time when language failed humanity...
...Even when the Nazis put flowers on German graves, this decoration is depicted as a way of celebrating (or bribing) death...
...no fixed stars can light the earth, but neither are the stars missing from the firmament...
...This reductionist, emblematic toying with death—a kitsch of death, as it were—illustrates a side of the Nazi mania that is often overlooked and that Weil addresses...
...Nobody can take them away from me.'" Thus Weil delicately reunites the Jewish symbol with its metaphysical source, elevating the image from its association with tyranny...
...You have to have ration cards for sugar or you can't get a star...
...indeed, he details an utterly dehumanized world where ideals have been obliterated along with those who held them...
...They belong to me and have always belonged to me...
...Beyond a means to an end, murder for the Nazis was a passion connected with a materialistic preference for the inorganic over the organic...
...Josef is still alive at the end of the story, but the book ends before the war does...
...Weil died of cancer in 1959 at the age of 59...
...Roth—who won the National Book Award the year that Weil died—encouraged his own publisher to bring out Weil's novel, explaining that, "The book is, without a doubt, one of the outstanding novels I've read about the fate of a Jew under the Nazis...
...T must look only at them,' I told myself...
...This absurd rationale is less outrageous than the truth: These pathetic, suffering souls have done absolutely nothing to incur annihilation...
...Thanatos, Freud's term for the attraction to death that vies with eros, was the dominant value in Nazi ideology as it was in Futurist art, which also glorified machines over nature...
...In 1942 he was scheduled for transport to a concentration camp with the rest of Prague Jewry, but he eluded the Nazis by pretending to kill himself and hid for the duration of the war in the home of Franz Kafka's niece...
...Weil's world is not one of heroism or devotion...
...I won't be alone anymore when I think of them...
...he has lost everything, including the power of expression...
...Alone and impoverished, he has been abandoned like the Jews among the nations...
...Most of the novel is internal reflection with minimal dialogue...
...Originally a militant communist and a member of the Comintern, Weil was later a victim of Stalinist antisemitism that drove him out of politics...
...the absurdity is palpably documented in minute detail...
...For example, when Josef is losing his grip on reality, the handle of his shovel comes loose or he slips on icy ground...
...They were shining brightly in the autumn night...
...While Josef and the other Jews are growing vegetables in the cemetery, the Germans are absorbed with insignia, epaulets and flags...
...Recently, I visited Sachsenhausen while traveling in Germany with the United States Holocaust Memorial Council...
...The very next chapter begins with these words...
...in Prague people did feed birds but not starving Jews...
...Likewise, I saw pottery made at Terezin with a skull and crossbones indicating its place of manufacture...
...Weil wrote five novels and numerous short stories...
...It's a pity I didn't think of them earlier...
...On the director's desk in the medical experimentation section was a gruesome lamp made from a human skull with light bulbs set in the eye sockets...
...Even Josef s only aunt and uncle turn on him, irrationally blaming him for their predicament...
...Naval Academy and author of the novel The Blessing and the Curse (Jewish Publication Society, 1988) and The Gothic Imagination (Associated University Presses, 2nd printing 1986...
...They had badges in the shape of skulls because they honored death, worshiped it, loved it...
...I turned away from the black chasm and looked into the sky...
...Without emotional gloss or nostalgia, Weil chronicles a gaping loss through the lens of an isolated individual...
...In a world devoid of humanity, Josef speaks only to the memory of his lost love, Ruzena, and to a contraband stray cat...
...We weren't interested in their cars because they taught us to stop loving things," Josef concludes...
...His flat, precise descriptions lend absurdity to the horrors of mass extermination in the same city where, two decades earlier, Kafka had prophetically imagined the nightmare of turning into a giant insect that is then summarily killed...
...Linda Bayer is a professor of literature at the U.S...
...As if referring to the injunction Yemach Shemam—"to erase their names" as in the biblical commandment "thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek" (Deuteronomy 24:19)—the narrator avoids direct reference to the Germans, resorting only to "they...
...Weil describes the survival of a Jewish bank clerk, Josef Roubicek, and his cat, Tomas, during the Nazi occupation of Prague...
...They were cold, indifferent, but they shone over the whole city, including this district, crouched under blows...
...Similarly, the star of David—debased into a yellow emblem designed to insure persecution—is juxtaposed with the enduring though remote planets that calm and orient Josef in the midst of earthly chaos...
...Life With a Star is an existential treatise...
...Weil does not sweeten despair with hope...
...his personal condition echoes the collective Jewish plight...
...S22.95 Reviewed by Linda Bayer In the 1930s and immediately following the war, Jiri Israel Weil was among the most renowned Jewish writers in Eastern Europe...
...Novelist Philip Roth is the person most responsible for recovering one of Czechoslovakia's best writers and making his work available to world Jewry after Soviet suppression nearly obliterated it...
...Weil had a strong influence on other Czech writers who admired him, such as Milan Kundera...
...The irrationality experienced by the narrator prompts minimal interpretation by the author...
...I was told that similar appliances were found in other concentration camps...
Vol. 15 • August 1990 • No. 4
