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Concept
Jiří Weil
Summary
Jiří Weil (; 6 August 1900, Praskolesy – 13 December 1959, Prague) was a Czech writer of Jewish origin and Holocaust survivor. His noted works include the two novels Life with a Star (Život s hvězdou), and Mendelssohn Is on the Roof (Na střeše je Mendelssohn), as well as many short stories, and other novels.
Weil was born in Praskolesy, a village about 40 kilometres from Prague, on 6 August 1900. He was the second son born to upper-middle-class Orthodox Jewish parents. Weil graduated from secondary school in 1919. As a student he had already begun writing mainly verses, but had also begun planning his three-part novel, Město, which he planned to publish under the pseudonym, Jiří Wilde. Upon graduation, Weil was accepted to Charles University in Prague where he entered the Department of Philosophy and also studied Slavic philology and comparative literature. He was a favourite student of F. X. Šalda. He completed his doctoral dissertation, "Gogol and the English Novel of the 18th Century", in 1928.
In 1921, Weil joined the Young Communists and attained a position of leadership in the group. He had a keen interest in Russian literature and Soviet culture. About that same time, his first articles were published about cultural life in the Soviet Union in the Newspaper "Rudé Právo." He also became one of the first translators of contemporary Russian literature into the Czech language and bringing works by Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Lugovskoy and Marina Tsvetaeva to Czech readers. He was the first person to translate the works of Vladimir Mayakovsky into Czech.
In 1922, Weil traveled for the first time to the Soviet Union with a youth delegation. He writes about an ill-fated meeting with the poet Sergei Esenin in his feuilleton, "Busta básníkova." Weil worked in Moscow from 1933 to 1935 as a journalist and translator of Marxist literature in the publishing department of the Comintern, the international wing of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In this capacity, he helped translate Vladimir Lenin's "The State and Revolution" into Czech.
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