Do books have souls? Some books do, some don't. How long does the soul of a book last? That depends. Some books are stillborn, others are immortal. Jiri Weil's Life with a Star belongs to this latter category. These are the truly first-class books.
When I was asked to write a few pages on Life with a Star and its author, the eminent Czech Jewish writer Jiri Weil, his name brought back images. A warm, spirited face. A knowing, tender smile. Graying black hair. Simple black glasses. I knew this man in Prague at the end of the fifties, at a difficult time when the communist revolution was devouring its own children, or, as the Czech saying goes, the swine were eating the sows.
In those times, Weil had the courage to befriend young writers, and his was rare courage indeed. Even to speak to other people took courage. He was a friend to all the possibilities of art and did not abandon his position under pressure from the communists. He was in love with literature. Whatever other forces influenced his life, he was shaped by literature and was happy with a single goal: to be able, for a brief period, to determine the body and soul of Czech literature. And this he did. As writers were his brothers, young writers were his hope. He was a key figure in the struggle to keep art alive in communist Czechoslovakia.
Yet Weil was a sad man, despite having one of those beautiful smiles that so often serve sad people as a deceptive façade. His life was sad, and what he had witnessed was far sadder. He saw the collapse of the prewar order in Europe, and of a common morality. First the crash of the market, leaving millions unemployed in Europe and America. Then the collapse of communist hopes for social justice under Stalin, with senseless murder replacing promising slogans of a shining future. He saw World War II and its aftermath, with its fifty-five million dead and many-times-more wounded and crippled for life, a destruction that was unprecedented in human history and that ultimately led to the near-collapse of the very idea of man. The haunting question "What is Man?" was posed to him at a moment when no one could answer it honestly.
The life of Jiri Weil would make a gripping horror story just as easily as it would make a first-class political novel or adventure story. When the Nazis invaded Prague, Weil, who had a Jewish mother, barely managed to avoid being shipped to the fortress in northern Bohemia called Theresienstadt, and from there to the East, to the realm of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Treblinka, and the other notorious German extermination camps.
As Weil wrote, Germany was convinced that man's best friend was death. That death was the all-embracing expression of life. The only reward, the only punishment. After death, the Nazis' second god was fear. Like a brother and a sister, death and fear worked for the Nazis against anyone who opposed them, even if only internally. Weil experienced a time of unspeakable terror, when thousands upon thousands were killed daily at the shooting range on the outskirts of Prague.
He refused to participate in the transport of Jews to the East and was arrested by the Nazis, held briefly, and then inexplicably let go. Perhaps the Nazis had some hidden purpose for his life and released him, but it is hard to imagine what it might have been. He learned his lesson and became an invisible man,
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