Life with a star /

A man who escapes assignment to a concentration camp during the Holocaust clings to hope despite the persecution he witnesses, and finally goes underground with a resistance fighter's help. ``Powerful, yet small in scope, this is as much an indictment of materialism--and greed--as it is a chilling portrait of Nazi-occupied Prague,'' PW said. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

In Nazi-occupied Prague, Jews live as outcasts, awaiting the dreaded summons to the concentration camps. Identified with the Star of David, they cannot use a streetcar or buy meat; their property and their jobs have been taken away. A timid, sickly bank clerk named Roubicek records how these humiliating measures and the proximity of death affect him and those around him. As he observes others meekly submitting to the deportation orders, he gradually resolves to rebel and goes into hiding with the help of a sympathetic Czech. Narrated in simple, matter-of-fact style, this affecting novel--based on the author's own experiences and first published in 1949--is a powerful testimony to the Holocaust.-- Marie Bednar, Pennsylvania State Univ. Libs., University Park (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A postwar Czech novel of great influence in Central Europe (published here thanks to the invaluable reclamation efforts of Philip Roth), Weil's book concerns the underground-man half-existence of one Josef Roubicek, a Prague Jew who lies lower and lower until he seemingly escapes the noosed net of the raging Holocaust. First in a deserted room with only a cat and memories of his lover Ruzena as company, then working in a cemetery crew after being judged physically unfit for harder forced labor, then with an almost hallucinatory anonymity (thanks to being mistaken for another man with a similarly spelled name), Roubicek slinks through his days wearing his yellow star ("" 'It's not at all nice and there's something special about it. It doesn't shine at night, only in the daytime. No helmsman could steer a ship by it, because he'd lose his way. And it must be worn precisely over the heart' "") as he remains alive to the voices of his fellow prey. The book has a Beckett-like, bottom-line sensibility while miraculously remaining a social novel--a record of the conversations and recriminations and grotesque hopes of the hopeless. Not an easy read, but special in its portrayal of a society of the walking dead. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.