Jiří Weil
Jiří Weil was a notable Czech writer born in 1900 in Praskolesy, Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). He pursued his education in comparative literature and Slavic philology at the University of Prague, earning a doctoral degree in 1928. Weil initially embraced Communism, working as a translator for the Soviet trade mission and later in Moscow, but faced political persecution that led to his expulsion from the Communist Party in 1935 and subsequent exile to Soviet Central Asia. His first novel, published in 1937, was an autobiographical work set against the backdrop of Stalin's purges.
As a Jewish intellectual, Weil faced increasing danger following the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939. He evaded deportation by faking his death and going underground. After World War II, he returned to literary work but continued to face challenges under the Communist regime, leading to his expulsion from the Czechoslovak Writers' Union in 1951. Despite these hardships, he found employment at the Jewish Museum in Prague, where he contributed significantly to the history of Czech Jewry and resumed publishing. Weil passed away in 1959, and his contributions were only fully recognized years later, culminating in a posthumous award in 1991.
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Jiří Weil
Author
- Born: August 6, 1900
- Birthplace: Praskolesy, Bohemia (now Czech Republic)
- Died: 1959
- Place of death: Prague, Czechoslovakia (now in Czech Republic)
Biography
Jiří Weil was born in 1900 in Praskolesy, Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). As a child, the small manufacturing plant his father co-owned failed, necessitating the family’s move to Prague. Weil was an excellent student who studied comparative literature and Slavic philology at the University of Prague, graduating in 1928 with a doctoral degree after writing a dissertation on the Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol.
Weil, an ardent admirer of the Soviet Union and an early member of Czechoslavakia’s Communist Party, went to work as a translator for the Soviet trade mission in Prague in 1921. During the next decade, Weil traveled frequently to the Soviet Union, and in 1933 the Czechoslovak Communist Party sent him to Moscow, where he worked as a translator of Communist literary works. Despite his devotion to Communism, however, in 1935 Weil was denounced as an intellectual, excluded from the Communist Party, and exiled to Soviet Central Asia. He was allowed to return to Czechoslovakia in December, 1935, and two years later he published his first novel, Moskva—hranice (1937), an autobiographical novel set in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist purges.
Out of favor with the Communists, Weil, a Jew, became even more imperiled when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939. In March, 1942, he married a non-Jewish woman, Olga Frenclová, but he nonetheless was summoned for deportation. Instead of reporting, Weil faked suicide and went underground. At the end of World War II, Weil was reunited with his wife and went to work for a large Prague publishing house until the Communists took over Czechoslovakia in 1948. Although he continued to write and to publish, his works were considered bourgeois, and in 1951 he was expelled from the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union.
Fortunately, in 1950 Weil became an employee of the state-run Jewish Museum in Prague, initially working as an administrator until becoming head librarian in 1955. The following year, he became a senior researcher at the museum, with special permission to pursue his literary work. During this period he produced several works devoted to the history of Czech Jewry, and in 1956 he was readmitted to the writers’ union.
Weil died of leukemia in 1959. Constantly besieged by the authoritarian regimes that controlled Czechoslovakia during his lifetime, Weil was not appreciated until, decades after his death, his nation was finally free of tyranny. In 1991 he was posthumously awarded the Thomas G. Masaryk Order by the president of the Czech Republic, the playwright Vaclav Havel.