Life with a Star

About the author

Jiri Weil was born in 1900 in Prague, and was one of the best-known writers in Central Europe in the 1930s and the immediate post-war years. In 1942 Weil escaped transportation to the Nazi camps by faking his own death. He remained in hiding for the rest of the Second World War and his novels Mendelssohn is on the Roof and Life with a Star are based on these experiences. Weil died in 1959.

Summary

Stitched onto the jacket, worn over the heart, according to the rules for all Jews, the star turns Josef Roubicek into an outsider in his own city. Forced to lurk on the edges of Prague, to work as a gravedigger at the cemetery, and to keep off the trams and streets after curfew, he waits for a summons from 'them'. Every day the grinding bureaucracy of evil brings new regulations, along with new lists of names to join the transports.
This remarkable novel traces one Jewish man's struggle to exist in Nazi occupied Prague. Drawing strength from the smallest of things - a lost love, a stray cat, an onion - he determines to live, and realises that surviving against the odds is his greatest act of resistance.

Foreword

'One of the finest novels of the century' - Independent

Product details

• Authors: Jiri Weil
• Assisted by: R. Klimova (Translation), Roslyn Schloss (Translation)
• Publisher: Daunt
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 04.04.2012
• EAN: 9781907970061
• ISBN: 978-1-907970-06-1
• Dimensions: 129 mm x 198 mm x 19 mm
• Series: Daunt Books
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), FICTION / Literary, Fiction in translation, Modern and contemporary fiction: general and literary