Elegy for 77,297 Victims (Žalozpěv za 77 297 obětí)

Author: Jiří Weil

First Published: 1958

Translations: German (Elegie für 77 297 Opfer, 1999; the new translation Klagegesang für 77 297 Opfer, in: Jiří Weil: Leben mit dem Stern, 2000); Russian (Psalom pamjati 77 297 žertv, in: Pochorony kolokolov, 2001, pp. 71–92).

Theatre Adaptation: Divadlo Miriam, Praha (2002).

About the Author: Jiří Weil (1900–1959) was a Czech writer, poet, journalist, translator and scientist. He was born into an assimilated Czech Jewish family in Praskolesy in Central . His father owned a small factory. Weil studied comparative litera- ture and Slavonic philology at Charles University. He became a member of the Com- munist Party and worked as a journalist, translator and critic of Soviet literature. In 1933, Weil went to Moscow as a translator. In 1935, he was denounced as a detractor of the Soviet Union and sent to Interhelpo, a Czech cooperative in Kyrgystan (see his no- vels From Moscow to the Border and The Wooden Spoon, both with autobiographical features). After a few months, he travelled to Central Asia as a reporter. At the end of 1935, he was allowed to return to Czechoslovakia. Weil’s first novel From Moscow to the Border (1937) became one of the first true testimonies about the situation in the So- viet Union in the middle of 1930s. During the Nazi occupation of the Czech lands, Weil was persecuted for his Jewish origins. He tried to save himself by marrying Olga Fren- clová, an Aryan woman, and worked in the Jewish Central Museum from 1943 to the beginning of 1945. In February of 1945, he was summoned for deportation to the . He staged his own suicide by pretending to drown himself in the Vltava river and went into hiding. His parents were transported to Auschwitz and his sister to Treblinka; none of them survived. His brother died after returning from Theresienstadt to in May 1945. After the war, Weil worked again in the Jewish Museum. In 1946 he began working for the Prague publishing house ELK. His literary works concentrated on Jewish topics and mainly on . He published short stories → Colors and his best known novel → Life with a Star. Nevertheless, after the Communist coup in 1948, this book was sharply criticised as formalistic and dama- ging, Weil was excluded from the Writer’s Union and banned. He focused on his pro- fessional activity in the Jewish Museum again, for instance, he pushed through a col- lective presentation of children’s drawings and poems from Theresienstadt. Weil was allowed to publish again at the end of the 1950s (the novel The Harpist, Elegy for 77,297 Victims, both 1958) but he died of leukemia in 1959 and his last novel Mendels- sohn Is on the Roof was edited posthumously.

Open Access. © 2021 Hana Hříbková, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110671056-033 158 Entries

Further Important Publications: Barvy (1946, → Colors; short stories); Život s hvězdou (1949, → Life with a Star; novel); Dětské kresby na zastávce k smrti. Terezín 1942–1944 (edited by Hana Volavkovková, introduction J. W; 1959, Children’s Drawings on the Way to Death. Terezín 1942–1944; children paintings); Na střeše je Mendelssohn (1960, Mendelssohn Is on the Roof; novel).

Content and Interpretation From the existing documents kept in the Prague Jewish Museum Archives it becomes obvious, that the work was preceded by a detailed study of the available documenta- tion from the persecution period, as well as of other dirges, which Weil translated in the 1950s into Czech. The number 77,297 refers to the death toll of Czech whose names are written on the walls of the Pinkas in Prague. Elegy is a montage of three interlink- ing narrative levels marked with different fonts. It reports on the persecution of the Czech Jews; from the arrival of the Nazi army to the mass murders in the extermination camps. The work oscillates on the genre boundary between poetry and prose, while straddling the interface between nonfiction (facts soberly documenting historical events documents) and literature. The first layer of Elegy has a frame composition, where the introductory and con- cluding passages are similar describing the ashes of millions of Jewish victims decom- posing into fertile ground. The narrative is linked not only by chronology, but also by the omniscient narrator, who presents general information on the individual stages of the Holocaust in the Czech lands in poetic form. During the final sentences the narra- tor falls silent and the liquidation of the Jewish population in the extermination camps is portrayed purely as a prose poem. The principles of contrast and parallels as well as allegory, metaphors and symbols are often used in this layer. The second layer in Elegy describes factual episodes of persecutions, concrete fig- ures, dates and terms are presented, while the sober form of the text comes close to that of a newspaper report. The final scene in Auschwitz comes to serve as a link with the framework of the first narrative level – symbolising the strength and courage of the Czech Jews tied to their homeland, who at the hour of death find human heroism and banish fear with a song from their native land. The style of the description of indi- vidual characters in this second layer is similar to that in Weil’s other works. Although Elegy describes the fate of all Czech Jews, it presents the Shoah through the eyes of an assimilated Jew, for whom it is a disaster, when he cannot buy raisins to bake a Christ- mas stollen, or that the inscription on the Jewish star is written “in a foreign lan- guage”. The third narrative level is made up of sensitively selected quotes from Kralice Bible, the first translation of Bible from its original languages into Czech created in the 16th century, mostly from Psalms and closely related with texts from the second layer. The connections between all three narrative levels result in a blending of texts that were written thousands of years apart. Hence the text of Elegy is resurrected in new contexts that are relatable to present-day events. Elegy for 77,297 Victims (Žalozpěv za 77 297 obětí) 159

Main Topics and Problems Thematically, Elegy covers Weil’s entire work on the topic of the Holocaust. Individual motifs from Elegy are presented in detail in → Life with a Star, Mendelssohn Is on the Roof, the unfinished novel Here the Lambeth-Walk Is Dancing and also in his short stories → Colors. The dominant motif of the landscape in the setting is a clear symbol of the Jewish people, which like the landscape itself, is gradually recovering from the ordeal it has suffered. At the same time, however, the motif of ashes (Ficowski’s → A Reading of Ashes) swirling in the wind and the omnipresent shadows point to the weight of the past, which the survivors will always carry with them. At the end of this reflective fra- mework the author addresses the reader and by alluding to the Czech national an- them, points to the imprescriptibility of the crimes committed. Elegy was published in Czech in 1958 in a special graphic format with three art prints by graphic designer Zdenek Seydl. For the second and last time it was edited in 1999 as a part of a more extensive volume of Weil’s works. Nevertheless, this edition, as well as the translations of Elegy, don’t preserve the originally intended format. This different layout prevents the reader from reading the text not only vertically (as a con- nection of three different layers) but also horizontally, as a sequel each of the narra- tive layers. When vertical reading reveals the deeper connections between first and second layers in front of the reader: e. g. Czech Jews, who were murdered and only dust remains of them, will not be forgotten. The numbers turn into names again and a memorial will be created to memorialise them for the whole world. The motif of revolt and painful dying of the characters in Elegy is connected by a parallel with the motif of the hopeless fight of the Czech land, which resists by natural elements – unusual snow in spring and mud (the wheels of enemies get stuck in it). The Czech land is waiting vainly to be defended. It is occupied, trampled and hoped “on deliverance dies”. Elegy has appealed to creative artists to consider its subsequent artistic represen- tation. Several dramatic and literary-musical adaptations have been created. One of the best-known of these was a performance by the Miriam Theatre, first presented in 2002 to mark the 60th anniversary of the first transports of Czech Jews to the There- sienstadt Ghetto. No less impressive were the radio adaptations by Czech Radio in the 1990s.

Further References Heftrich, U. (2000). Der Unstern als Leitstern: Jiří Weils Werk über den Holocaust. In: J. Weil, Leben mit dem Stern. München: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, pp. 383–385. Holý, J. (2017). Die Namen auf den Mauern der Pinkas-Synagoge in Prag. In: K. Hanshew, S. Koller, Ch. Prunitsch, eds., Texte prägen. Festschrift für Walter Koschmal. Wiesba- den: Harrassowitz, pp. 415–432. Hříbková, H. (2012). Jiří Weil as a Scientist: Genesis of the Book Children’s Drawings and Poems: Terezín 1942–1944 and Film Butterflies Don’t Live Here. In: J. Holý, ed., The Representation of the Shoah in Literature, Theatre 160 Entries

and Film in Central Europe: 1950s and 1960s. Praha: Akropolis, pp. 51–63. Kaibach, B. (2007). Poetologická dimenze Weilova Žalozpěvu za 77 297 obětí. In: J. Holý, ed., Holo- kaust – Šoa – Zagłada v české, slovenské a polské literatuře. Praha: Karolinum, pp. 169–189. Málek, P. (2011). Holocaust a kulturní paměť: obrazy – figury – jazyk. In: J. Holý et al., Šoa v české literatuře a v kulturní paměti. Praha: Akropolis, pp. 87–95. To- man, J. (2004). Jiří Weil. In: E. Sicher, ed., Holocaust Novelists. Detroit et al.: The Gale Group, pp. 354–358. Volavková, H. (1966). Příběh Židovského muzea v Praze. Praha: Odeon.

Other Resources Archiv ČRo (Czech Radio Archives), Prague; Národní archiv (National Archives), Pra- gue; Literární archiv Památníku národního písemnictví (Museum of Czech Literature), Prague

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