Prague Journal

Tuesday, July 26, 2005.

I went to Žižkov to see Bruce’s new building and met Jeff, the general contractor, Paul, the architect, and a few other people who are managing the project. John M has been acting as a supervisor, visiting the site daily and giving Bruce progress reports. We walked through the building, basically a brick shell, and Bruce and John described where each unit’s walls, doors, and gardens would be. After the tour, John and I went to the “The New Jewish Cemetary” at Olšanska, which is a short walk and two tram stops away from the building. The Olšanska Cemetery is a huge complex, only one section of which is the Jewish Cemetery. This is where Franz Kafka and his family are buried. Many of the names on the tombstones are of German origin. The New Jewish Cemetery is a preserved cultural monument as a whole; partly due to its character and disposition, but also thanks to a hundred-year excellent administration supported by the Hevra Kaddisha (burial society) in Prague’s Jewish community. The Hevra Kaddisha saw to it that graves were established in cemetery lots both chronologically and in accordance with the family’s wish and significance, which was important socially in the bourgeois society. The Hevra Kaddisha also saw to it that inscriptions on tombstones were truthful and testifying to the buried person’s character. Since its establishment in 1891, the cemetery has been surrounded by the wall protecting the space for some 100,000 graves. There were also structures built in the neo-Renaissance building style that prevailed in Prague in those times. The funeral parlor contains a respectable hall of prayer, and adjacent rooms needed for the ritual preparation of the burial. There is an administration building that houses the cemetery caretaker’s office and his and gravediggers’ apartments, and other structures such as a storehouse of wood used to make coffins. Since the very beginning, the cemetery has been properly divided in lots which were gradually used as graves. This cemetery will never be completely filled with graves because the devastating scourge of Nazism exterminated those who could and should have rested here one day, but there are memorial plaques on the walls to commemorate those who were killed. One memorial that draws most visitors’ attention since its installation in 1985 is that commemorating the Czechoslovak Jews who perished in concentration camps or were killed in resistance fights. This memorial is a sandstone block of concave ellipses concentrated around a hole, evoking the impression of a tortured world in whose midst the Star of David is shining. This piece of art deeply effects the conscience of all, regardless their faith or world outlook.
I then went back to the center to have lunch with Charlotte – our last lunch together this year in Prague. Regardless of when I return to Prague—and where Charlotte is living at the time—I predict that if I show up at lunchtime, she will insist on making something for us to eat and we will have a sisterly conversation. Obviously, I hope not too much time passes before we have lunch together again.
Today is Rick’s birthday, and he requested that we see a movie, so I rented the DVD of Želary, a movie set in the 1940s when the Czech lands were occupied by the Nazis. The story is about Eliška, a young woman who was unable to complete medical school because the Germans closed the universities, and who was working as a nurse in a city hospital. She was also involved in the resistance movement along with her lover, the surgeon Richard, and their friend Dr. Chldek. One night, a man from a rural mountain area is brought to the hospital with serious injuries, desperately in need of a transfusion. Eliška’s blood saves his life and a connection is formed between the two that in the course of the story becomes an extraordinarily strong relationship between the modern, cosmopolitan, and educated Eliška and the uncultivated, salt of the earth man with the soul of a child, Joza. The resistance group that the doctors are involved in is uncovered by the Gestapo, and suddenly their lives are in grave danger. While Eliška’s lover, Richard, flees the country overnight, the group quickly has to find a different safe haven for her. They ask Joza, the patient whose life she saved with her blood, to hide her in his remote mountain cabin. Eliška is forced to leave her urban life and, all at once, become a new woman: Hana, the wife of a mountain man. Her new home is the wild mountain village of Želary, where time stopped one hundred and fifty years ago. Despite the fear, misgivings, suspicion and clash of different worlds, Eliška/Hana and Joza fall in love. This is a profoundly moving and dramatic story, filled with unexpected twists of fate, that takes place in a God-forsaken part of Europe surrounded by the storm of war.

posted by JWinn @ 10:45 PM