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 . . . This darkly comic and deeply moving novel traces the transformation of ordinary lives during the Nazi occupation of Prague. Weil tells the story of the struggle to survive in a labyrinthine regime, where humour, as well as great courage, required to retain hope and humanity.
Author Biography
Jiri Weil was born in 1900 in Prague, and was one of the best-known writers in Central Europe in the 1930s and the immediate post-war years. In 1942 Weil escaped transportation to the Nazi camps by faking his own death. He remained in hiding for the rest of the Second World War and his novels Mendelssohn is on the Roof and Life with a Star are based on these experiences. Weil died in 1959.
