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Introduction: Jiri Weil's Life With a Star
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15937 |
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BOOK WORLD
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7 / 1989 |
443 Words |
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Jiri Weil's Life with a Star is considered by many to be the best Czechoslovakian novel of the early 1940s. It tells the story of Josef Roubicek, who, like other Jews living in Prague under the Nazis, wears a yellow star made of cloth over his heart. Weil contrasts this cloth star with the stars in the sky, just as he contrasts the world of death created by the Nazis with the world of life.
Roubicek, standing alone against the Nazis, discovers the stars in the sky. "'I must look at them,' I told myself. 'It's a pity I didn't think of them earlier. I won't be alone anymore when I think of them. They belong to me and have always belonged to me. Nobody can take them away from me.'"
Discovering the stars in this way may not seem significant, and Roubicek does not ponder them in relation to his fate, but it is clear he must exist on slender resources if he is to exist at all. He cannot continue to go about the streets in the daylight if he is to survive. He must develop the will to go into hiding where he will be lucky to see even one star.
The issues involved are, of course, much deeper. In order to have the strength of character needed to resist the Nazis, Roubicek must ground himself in a world of values that is infinitely far away and receding under the Nazi assault even as he seeks to grasp it. Moving along a poorly lit pathway, he must let go of aspects of his identity that once seemed to him as central and taken-for-granted as sunlight, so that he can find a Jewish society that is being destroyed. Finally, he knows what kind of life to oppose to the life with a star offered by the Nazis; he finds the real life with a star.
Initially published in Czechoslovakia between the war and the consolidation of communist power in 1949, Weil's novel is being published in America for the first time this year. THE WORLD & I has reprinted the opening nine chapters.
"Fire Under the Water," the first commentary, is by Arnost Lustig, a well-known Czechoslovakian Jewish novelist who was a friend of Weil's during the 1950s. He tells of Weil's life (Weil himself went underground to escape the Nazis) and explores Weil's novel and its relationship to work of Franz Kafka.
Finally, in "With a Star," Richard Rubenstein, an American scholar of the Holocaust, gives another reading of the novel set against the events of the Holocaust
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