Life with a Star (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Jirí Weil
- First Published: 1948
- Type of Work: Novel
- Time of Work: World War II
- Setting: Prague, Czechoslovakia
- Principal Characters: Josef Roubicek, Ruzena, Tomas, Pavel, Materna, Robitschek
- Genres: Long fiction
- Subjects: Communism or communists, World War II, Individuality, Cats, Jews or Jewish life, Nazism or Nazis, Holocaust, Jewish, Czechoslovakia or Czechoslovakians
- Locales: Prague, Czechoslovakia
Jiri Weil ’s Life with a Star has been described as the first important work of Czech fiction to come out of World War II. Its reception and its author’s fate now seem all too familiar—indeed, exemplary. Weil’s first novel, Moskva-hranice (1937; from Moscow to the border), which described what he observed of the purge after Sergei Kirov’s murder and the beginning of Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror while he was working in Moscow in the International Department of the Comintern, had earned him expulsion from the Communist Party and the Czech Writers Union, as well...
[The entire page is 1874 words long]
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