Prague Summer

...One of them found the local emergency bank phone number for canceling credit cards, and even phoned my relatives to explain that I would be a little late...

...There is a Kafka theater, a Kafka book shop and a Kafka cafe...

...For example, some say my old Czech friends who worked as translators and proofreaders in the state-run news organizations were active collaborators because they dealt with Soviet propaganda...

...recruiting stickers on bus and subway windows urge...

...Other fundamental questions have lately been rising to the surface as well...

...The issue of restoring what was taken by the Nazis and then "nationalized" after the War by the Communists finally appears to be on its way to resolution...

...None of the ex-Communist countries have yet found a fair approach to the matter...

...A TRAVELER'S NOTEBOOK Prague Summer BY ELIAHU SALPETER PRAGUE HAVING MY pocket picked in the subway here a few weeks ago, just after a nostalgic tour of my old student haunts, was an unpleasant and embarrassing experience...

...Next to Mozart (who has almost been transformed into a local boy), Franz Kafka and the old Jewish Quarter are the biggest tourist attractions...

...Prague is full of tourists these days and has become a favorite target of pickpockets from neighboring Eastern European countries...

...Supporters of Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus—chairman of the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) and a staunch advocate of market economics—contend that those stoking these controversies have their eyes on the 1996 parliamentary elections...

...From the standpoint of real estate, Prague's Jewish community may be the richest in Europe...

...Help Us Change the Image—Join the Police...

...But if they are to be compensated, what about the doctors who never became hospital directors or the technicians who never became floor managers because they were not politically "reliable...

...Even sharper arguments have erupted over the impending prosecution of about 20 former top government and security figures on charges of high treason stemming from their role in crushing the 1968 "Prague Spring...

...Of the 200-odd pre-War Czech synagogues, half were destroyed by the Nazis and 50 were tom down or irretrievably put to other uses by the Communists...

...Theoretically, that would open the way to the return of their property?and could become a point of contention in next year's elections, since Czech nationalists vigorously oppose any such policy...

...Should the past be laid to rest, and professional abilities made the test of economic leadership...

...Nobody knows the exact number of ELIAHU SALPETER, a regular NL contributor, is a correspondent for Ha'aretz...

...During the 40 years of Communist rule Jews often tried to hide their identity from neighbors and the authorities...

...INDEED, POLITICAL (read pre-election) attention is largely focused now on a more immediate piece of unfinished business: how to settle accounts in the case of those who actively collaborated with the Communist regime and, equally important, those who suffered for not actively collaborating...

...On the Left, they note, the Social Democrats—who have scored dramatic gains in opinion polls and are now running neck and neck with the ODS?are employing the same tactic, while reminding voters that there is a more socially caring alternative to current policies...

...The first was a declaration that I knew the language and waived my right to an interpreter...

...The opposition on the Right, they complain, is unfairly attempting to portray the government as having become soft on Communists...

...The old Jewish Quarter in the city's center occupies some of the most expensive property in the country...

...Still others argue that the reason for their being restricted to the lower echelons—the avoidance of Party membership—was a subtle form of resistance, so they deserve compensation for enduring decades of discrimination...

...Czech law does not recognize dual nationality, and few Sudetens are likely to give up their German citizenship to repossess what they left behind...

...What stands out, though, is the appeal of the Jewish cemetery, one of the oldest on the Continent...

...many children learned they were Jewish only after the Velvet Revolution...

...Last year President Vaclav Havel denounced the foot-dragging on the question as a "disgrace to the Czech nation...

...Moreover, there is speculation that the lists were made available to Arab terrorist organizations...

...It was their demand to "return" to the Third Reich that led to the infamous Munich Pact and ultimately helped precipitate World War II...

...The main obstacle to restitution had been the fear that this would strengthen the claims of 3 million Sudeten German expel lees, most of whom were ardent Na-zis...

...The situation here, moreover, is complicated by the fact that Communist rule in Czechoslovakia was generally less cruel than in the rest of Eastern Europe, often making it difficult to distinguish the degree of an individual's involvement...

...Recently, in a prominently featured newspaper interview, Jewish community leader Jiri Danicek said 65 per cent of the 202 items on an agreed-upon list—held mostly by local municipal authorities—have already been handed back...

...In fact, Czech authorities reportedly have uncovered two travel agencies—one Romanian, the other Bulgarian—that offer special Friday-to-Monday packages for organized groups devoted to the dubious art...

...The interested visitor comes away with one clear impression: Mainstream politicians of almost every stripe agree thatanti-Communist rhetoric continues to play well in the Czech Republic...

...Before my complaint was recorded—in duplicate—I was given two documents to read and sign...

...A relative handful of the 50 or so that remain intact are functioning...

...In addition the community owns buildings and land (mainly cemeteries) in other areas, plus extensive properties whose private owners or heirs did not survive the Holocaust...

...Markers indicate the houses where Kafka was born, grew up and wrote this or that masterpiece...

...Others call them merely passive collaborators, since they held innocuous positions...

...Then there is the reality that, as in virtually all other ex-Soviet bloc countries, former Communist bureaucrats have succeeded in retaining, or worming their way back into, the top managerial posts in business and industry...

...But it afforded a first-hand glimpse of an especially meaningful aspect of the changes the Czech Republic has undergone in the two years since my last visit...

...The second, two pages single-spaced, listed all the rights and obligations of the police and of plaintiffs and witnesses making statements...

...This city holds special interest for Jewish tourists, but the same sites they flock to draw hordes of other Europeans, Americans and Asians...

...Their claims constitute one of the major pieces of postwar "unfinished business...

...Today liberals like Havel, viewing the expulsion from a distance of 50 years, see it as collective punishment and are inclined to let the Sudetens regain Czech citizenship...

...Recently discovered lists in secret police files, however, suggest that the concealment efforts were in vain...

...Kafka T-shirts of all colors are sold at every tourist corner...

...One concerns a law adopted in the wake of the Velvet Revolution banning former Party functionaries and secret police members from government and academic posts for five years...

...And when I reported the theft at a nearby police station the young officers on duty certainly were very polite and helpful...

...Criticized by many Czech liberals because of the difficulty of distinguishing between collaborators and victims, it is due to expire shortly and a rancorous debate has begun over the govern-ment's plans to extend it for two more years...

...Under the Potsdam Agreements they were transferred to Germany, where they now form a powerful lobby in Chancellor Helmut Kohl's party...

...In practice, this means an Orthodox synagogue, although the word "religious" has been dropped from the name of the "Federation of Jewish Communities" to encourage the participation of nonreligious Jews in its activities...

...The capital and the countryside are beautiful as ever, apartments rent at reasonable rates, restaurants and supermarkets are plentiful and inexpensive by Western standards, and moderately priced cultural events are abundant...

...Nevertheless, it is one of the incongruities of post-Holocaust Jewish life here (and elsewhere in Eastern Europe) that a Jewish community center can only be officially established and registered in conjunction with an operating synagogue...

...Still, except for a few fancy hotels catering to rich Westerners and nouveau riche Russians, the republic remains an ideal destination for the pocketbook conscious tourist...

...Jews in the Czech Republic at present...

...According to unofficial estimates, some 3,000 live in Prague and roughly 2,000 are sprinkled throughout nine other communities...

...Throngs of visitors shuffle along the now one-way roped off pathways between the closely spaced, tiredly leaning tombstones that are perhaps the most moving Jewish sight this side of the sanitized concentration camps of Germany and Poland...

...No less impressive was the courteous attention to legalities that is part of the government effort to exorcise the specter of Communist-era intimidation...

...Furthermore, given that Party membership played a big role in the size of the apartment one got and the educational opportunities of one's children, shouldn't these and similar factors be entered into the calculations of privation...

...Practically, it would probably have little effect...