Jiří Weil (1900–1959)

Jiří Weil was born to a Jewish family in Praskolesy, Bohemia (present-day Czech Republic). In his childhood, the family moved to Prague, where he went to high school. He began writing poetry and fiction as a teenager. He studied Slavic philology and comparative literature at Charles University in Prague, graduating in 1928 with a doctoral dissertation on Gogol and the 18th century English novel. During his student days, Weil had joined the Young Communists. He took a keen interest in Russian literature and Soviet culture. In the 1920s, he translated extensively from Russian literature into the Czech language, bringing works by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Mayakovsky and others to Czech readers.
In 1933, he went to Moscow to work as a translator for a Soviet publishing house. Two years later, he was suddenly expelled from the Communist Party and exiled to Central Asia for so-called re-education. The circumstances of these events have never been fully explained, but they marked a turning point in his life.

On his return to Prague, Weil published his novel Moscow to the Border (1937), an account of the Stalinist purges and trials. He tried to leave Czechoslovakia to join relatives in the UK prior to Nazi Germany's invasion, but was unable to do so.

During the Nazi occupation, he was assigned to work at the Jewish Museum in Prague. In November 1942, he was summoned for deportation to the concentration camp at Terezín (Theresienstadt), but faked his own suicide and survived the rest of World War II in hiding. Despite the tremendous hardships, Weil continued to write, producing short stories and a historical novel, Makanna, Father of Wonders (1946). His now-classic book Life with a Star (1949) was one of the first Czech novels to deal with the Holocaust and is probably his best-known work. After the war, he worked as an editor, as his writing was disapproved by the Communists who took power in the country. He also resumed work at the Jewish Museum, where he was instrumental in the creation of an exhibition of children's drawings from Terezín, I Never Saw Another Butterfly, and a monument for Jews murdered by Nazis in the Pinkas Synagogue, for which he wrote the prose poem Lament for 77,297 Victims.

In the mid-1950s, Weil was re-admitted to the Writers' Union and allowed to publish. His novel Mendelssohn Is on the Roof appeared posthumously in 1959. Only a handful of his works have been translated into English.