Jiri Weil: Mendelssohn is on the Roof

Mendelssohn Is on the Roof; translation Marie Winn, Daunt Books, publication date 9 June 2011
Price: £9.99
ISBN: 978-1-907970-01-6
www.dauntbooks.co.uk

Jiri Weil: Mendelssohn is on the Roof
SS officer Julius Schlesinger is ordered to remove the statue of the Jewish composer Mendelssohn from the roof of the Prague Academy of Music before an official concert. Unsure which among the decorative statues is Mendelssohn, he tells his men to remove the statue with the biggest nose. Unfortunately, this is the statue of Wagner.

Full of dark humour and bitter irony, this deeply moving novel traces the transformation of ordinary lives during the Nazi occupation of Prague. A Jewish man works in a warehouse of confiscated property, delivering the belongings of deported Jews to new owners. Two small girls hide in an apartment for weeks, catching glimpses of the world outside through cracks in the curtain. This is the story of the struggle to survive in the labyrinthine Nazi regime, and the courage required to retain hope and humanity. With a preface by Philip Roth.

Jiri Weil
Admired by Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller and Philip Roth, Jiri Weil is a remarkable yet neglected chronicler of the Holocaust. Born in 1900 in Prague, he was one of the best-known writers in Central Europe in the 1930s and the immediate post-war years. Weil had been a militant Communist in his youth, but was later expelled from the Party after having served in Moscow as a member of the Czech section of the Comintern. In 1942 Weil escaped transportation to the camps by faking his own suicide. He remained in hiding for the rest of the war and his novels Mendelssohn is on the Roof and Life with a Star are based on these experiences.

“Weil writes about savagery and pain with a brevity that in itself seems the fiercest commentary that can be made on the worst that life has to offer.”
Philip Roth

A brilliant novel...Jiri Weil was a writer who witnessed the worst of this century and testified to his experience in works of unflinching and astonishing literary vision.
New York Times

Weil had advantages that would in themselves ensure that his work stood out on the black mountain of holocaust literature. He was there.
Guardian 

                                                                                                           
Mendelssohn is on the Roof sunders the heart with a combination of savage irony an charity that is one of the glories of Czech literature...the novel builds to an undforgettable climax.
Newsday