Weil, Jiří. Mendelssohn Is on the Roof. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1991.
Articles of reference:
- Schubert, Peter Z. “World Literature Today.” World Literature Today, vol. 66, no. 2, 1992, pp. 369–369. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40148272.
In his youth Jiff Weil (1900-59) was intrigued by Marxism and fascinated by the Soviet Union. After a decade of work there and visits to Russia in 1920 and the 1930’s, he witnessed repression in practice and became one of the first critics of the Stalinist Regime. This ultimately got him excommunicated from writing literature and excommunicated from the Communist party and in 1942 he was summoned with other Prague Jews for transport to a concentration camp He feigned suicide and remained in hiding for the rest of the war.
Mendelssohn was published posthumously in 1960.
In the novel, the year is 1942. A candidate for the SS stands with two municipal workers on the balustrade of Prague’s Rudolfinum, from which they are supposed to remove a statue of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy on the personal orders of Heydrich. (He was offended by a statue of a Jewish composer who is actually not Jewish. The removal party is unable to identify which statue to remove. They almost by mistake therefore remove the statue of Wagner because he has the biggest nose!
Two main story lines can be discerned in the novel: the first depicts the Nazis' so-called Final Solution to the Jewish problem and portrays the lives of both murderers and victims; the second shows the Resistance, which includes people who were hiding Jews as well as those Jews who took part in it, and renders the atmosphere of the Occupation. In the course of the novel Weil shows the everyday lives of Czechs, Jews. P.368 of the article)
