The Modern Novel

Biography

Jiří Weil was born in 1900 in Praskolesy, a village twenty- five miles from Prague. His father co-wned a frame factory which went bankrupt after World War I. The family moved to Prague. Weil studied Slavic philology and comparative literature at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. He did a doctorate on Gogol and then started translating Russian works into Czech.

He was a committed communist and a member of the Communist Youth League. He worked translating documents for the Soviet embassy in Prague. He travelled several times to the Soviet Union, but gradually became disillusioned and was critical, resulting in his being expelled from the Party. He was sent to a forced labour camp but eventually allowed to return to Czechoslovakia.

In Prague he worked for the Jewish Museum but was eventually arrested by the Gestapo. He pretended to be seriously ill and he hid for five months in a hospital. He then faked his suicide and managed to hide out for the rest of the war with friends. He worked as an editor and also as a researcher at the Jewish Museum. He was expelled from the Union of Czechoslovak Writers for Trotskyism.

He went on to write, several books, both fiction and non-fiction. Two of his novels have been published in English. He died in 1959 of leukaemia.

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iří Weil
Jiří Weil