{"id":1873,"date":"2010-08-22T21:06:31","date_gmt":"2010-08-23T04:06:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp\/2010\/08\/jiri_weil_jesse_edward_the_hoo\/"},"modified":"2010-08-22T21:06:31","modified_gmt":"2010-08-23T04:06:31","slug":"jiri_weil_jesse_edward_the_hoo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/2010\/08\/jiri_weil_jesse_edward_the_hoo.html","title":{"rendered":"Jiri Weil, Jesse Edward & The Hooters: I’m Alive"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like the unnamed narrator of his first novel, Life With A Star<\/i><\/a>, the Jewish writer Jiri Weil<\/a> had a chance to escape from Prague just before the German invasion in 1939, but he couldn’t bear to leave. <\/p>\n

Life With A Star<\/i>:<\/p>\n

I was born here, I knew almost every street, I had my own cafe, my movie house, my newsstand and tobacco shop.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Weil faked a suicide so his name would be struck from the Nazis’ list; he survived the war in hiding. His characters didn’t fare as well. <\/p>\n

At one time we all dreamed of miracles and now we didn’t like it when they occurred. We would have preferred to live calmly and simply, instead of on the edge of our seats…. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Digging our graves, we counted every minute separating us from death. As long as we held the handles of our shovels, as long as our fingers held a handle, as long as our fingers were freezing and the skin on our hands was raw, we were alive…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We would never have admitted that our lives were worthless, because they were our lives, our unique and unrepeatable lives. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I thought of these sentences looking at Jesse Edwards<\/a>‘ photos of bleak marginalia. Our unique and unrepeatable lives<\/i>….<\/p>\n

\"jesseedwardschair.jpg\"\"jesseedwardsbottle.jpg\"And I thought of the video tribute to The Hooters<\/a>, below. We are still living in the hangover of those European murders, but as Weil who witnessed them was able to report, the important thing to the victims was not their deaths but their lives.<\/p>\n

Weil’s final effort, Mendelssohn Is On The Roof,<\/i><\/a> was published posthumously in Czech in 1960. It’s not as good, entirely because the second half is devoted to praising the Soviet Union. The writer who survived the Nazis spent his remaining years under Soviet dominion. He sacrificed the second half of his last novel to enable the brilliant first half to see the light of day.<\/p>\n

Here’s Philip Roth, summarizing the plot:<\/object><\/p>\n

An S.S. man has orders to remove the statue of the Jewish composer Mendelssohn from among the statues of musicians that ornament the roof of the Prague Academy of Music. Since he does not know which one is Mendelssohn, he decides to take down the one with the biggest nose. This turns out to be the statue of Wagner. The novel proceeds from there.<\/object>
<\/object><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/object><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like the unnamed narrator of his first novel, Life With A Star, the Jewish writer Jiri Weil had a chance to escape from Prague just before the German invasion in 1939, but he couldn’t bear to leave. Life With A Star: I was born here, I knew almost every street, I had my own cafe, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1873","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1873\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}