LIFE WITH A STAR (Zivot z hvězdou)

Novel by Jiří Weil, 1949

Jiří Weil's novel Life with a Star (1949; Zivot z hvězdou ) reflects the three major influences on his work: his experiences as a Jew in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, as Adolf Hitler designated that part of Czechoslovakia that the Germans occupied on 15 March 1939; his knowledge and experience of European totalitarianism in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s; and his espousal of the Kafkaesque qualities of human alienation in an incomprehensible world, a world devoid of meaning. In short, although the word was not yet current, he attempted to come to grips with what Albert Camus called l'absurde. It is no coincidence that Weil's hero, Josef Roubiček, shares the same first name as Kafka's Josef K.

Written in the first person, the novel relates how Roubiček, a lowly Jewish bank clerk, loses everything: his job, his material possessions (which he in part destroys so that "they" won't get them), his lover Růzěna, who is executed, and, finally, his identity and every shred of humanity. Throughout the tale Roubiček describes the various people he runs across as they react (or do not react) to the decrees and measures applied to the Jews: the identification of them as Jews, the expropriation and exploitation they suffer, the ever more frequent deportations, and the final extermination, which, however, is presumed rather than described. The oppressors are never identified but simply called "they." Neither are there, strictly speaking, any other true characters—the persons throughout appear more as figures that barely function in the world of the oppressors, figures tangential to Roubiček, who through them reveals the absurd nature of the world he exists in as it increases inexorably in its incomprehensibility. This world finally effaces all that live with a star. Roubiček's narration, with its frequent imagined conversations with his absent lover Růzěna, its depiction of his encounters with his fellow sufferers, with its conversations conducted with the stray cat, Thomas, that he adopts and tries, unsuccessfully, to protect (it is, after all, illegal for him to possess a pet), succeeds brilliantly in depicting the alien machine that progressively crushes the human beings sought out and identified for destruction.

Very near to his own destruction—deportation is imminent—Roubiček, who has been surreptitiously visiting Materna, a socialist in the resistance, finally decides, with Materna's help, not to accede to the demands of the oppressors. He will drop out of sight, hide, and thereby survive. Perhaps his intention is, through this action, to thwart "them" in their attempt to destroy him.

Although "they" would clearly seem to be the Germans, and although Life with a Star would seem to be based on Weil's own experiences as a Jew in the Protectorate, the novel is really about modern alienation, about living a pseudolife imposed on one from the outside. Humans are caught in a machine-like and unfeeling system, constantly degraded and finally destroyed. Only at the brink of the abyss does Roubiček, who has always been fed with cake and tea by the socialists around Materna, finally break free and rejoin the true humanity that the socialist resistance represents.

Although the Czech experience of the Holocaust is essential to the novel, Life with a Star is primarily a novel of the absurd, in which estrangement unto death in a meaningless and inimical world is the real theme. Like the Dutch writer Marga Minco , he subscribes to the school of existentialism as it took hold in postwar Europe. Despite the secondary importance of the Holocaust in Weil's work, however, he remains the best portrayer of the Holocaust in Czechoslovakia. The book is always accessible, sober in its descriptions, clear in its structure and syntax, and effective in its depiction of the incomprehensible nature of the crushing Nazi oppression.

—David Scrase