Life with a Star

Weil, Jirí

Kovarikova, Ruzena

Schloss, Roslyn (translators)

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

Mendelssohn is on the Roof

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Harpercollins

Mendelssohn Is On the Roof

Harpercollins Publisher

Following the Nazi occupation of Prague, Josef Roubick, an ordinary ex-bank clerk, finds his whole world rendered extraordinary. Overnight he changes from being a simple Czech citizen to being a hunted Jew. "Life With a Star" relates Josef's life under the Holocaust.

Penguin??Books

Traces the lives of ordinary people in Nazi-occupied Prague. In this ironic pageant of crossing and recrossing lives, death wins all the battles but ultimately loses the war, defeated by the fragile flowering of courage and defiance.

Mendelssohn Is on the Roof: A Novel

Literary

Following the Nazi occupation of Prague, Josef Roubick, an ordinary ex-bank clerk, finds his whole world rendered extraordinary. Overnight he changes from being a simple Czech citizen to being a hunted Jew. "Life With a Star" relates Josef's life under the Holocaust.

Life With a Star (Jewish Lives)

Penguin Classics

Life With a Star

Penguin Books, Ltd.

Weil based this novel on his experiences hiding from the Nazis in Czechoslovakia in order to avoid the concentration camps. In recommending the book to FSG for translation into English, Philip Roth wrote: "I think that the book is, without a doubt, one of the outstanding novels I've read about the fate of a Jew and the Jews under the Nazis. I don't really know of one quite like it."

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

On the roof of Prague's concert hall, Julius Schlesinger, aspiring SS officer, is charged with the removal of the statue of the Jew Mendelssohn--but which one is he? Remembering his course on "racial science," Schlesinger instructs his men to pull down the statue with the biggest nose. Only as the statue topples does he recognize the face of Richard Wagner. This is just the beginning in Weil's novel, which traces the transformation of ordinary liveds in Nazi-occupied Prague.

Genre Fiction

In Nazi-occupied Prague, ex-bank clerk Josef Roubick discovers that the prosaic world he has always inhabited is suddenly off-limits to him because he is a Jew. When he begins to observe his new, increasingly skewed, and macabre environment with resigned detachment, his life becomes centered on survival and on the surprisingly small things he clings to in order to persevere.

Life with a Star (Jewish Lives)

Northwestern University Press

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