Colors (Barvy)

Abstract

About the Author: Jiří Weil (1900–1959) was a Czech writer, poet, journalist, translator and scientist. He was born into an assimilated Czech Jewish family in Praskolesy in Central Bohemia. His father owned a small factory. Weil studied comparative literature and Slavonic philology at Charles University. He became a member of the Communist Party and worked as a journalist, translator and critic of Soviet literature. In 1933 Weil went to Moscow as a translator. In 1935 he was denounced as a detractor of the Soviet Union and sent to Interhelpo, a Czech cooperative in Kyrgyzstan (see his novels From Moscow to the Border and The Wooden Spoon, both with autobiographical features). After a few months he travelled to Central Asia as a reporter. At the end of 1935, he was allowed to return to Czechoslovakia. Weil’s first novel From Moscow to the Border (1937) became one of the first true testimonies about the situation in the Soviet Union in the middle of 1930s. During the Nazi occupation of the Czech lands, Weil was persecuted for his Jewish origins. He tried to save himself by marrying Olga Frenclová, an Aryan woman, and worked in the Jewish Central Museum from 1943 to the beginning of 1945. In February of 1945, he was summoned for deportation to the Theresienstadt Ghetto. He staged his own suicide by pretending to drown himself in the Vltava river and went into hiding. His parents were transported to Auschwitz and his sister to Treblinka; none of them survived. His brother died after returning from Theresienstadt to Prague in May 1945. After the war, Weil worked again in the Jewish Museum. In 1946 he began working for the Prague publishing house ELK. His literary works concentrated on the Jewish topics and mainly on the Holocaust. He published short stories and his best known novel→ Life with a Star (1949). Nevertheless, after the Communist coup in 1948, this book was sharply criticised as formalistic and damaging, Weil was excluded from the Writer’s Union and banned. He focused on his professional activity in the Jewish Museum again, for instance, he pushed through a collective presentation of children’s drawings and poems from Theresienstadt. Weil was allowed to publish again at the end of the 1950s (the novel The Harpist, → Elegy for 77,297 Victims, both 1958) but he died of leukemia in 1959 and his last novelMendelssohn Is on the Roof was edited posthumously.