Dear Reader, as you will have guessed by now this diary (or blog if you will) is chiefly written for my own amusement. It's not a travelogue, I don't have the talent or the patience for such a device. My best hope of describing it is a series of highlights according to my mind. A bit like gold panning... after everything has been sluiced around the nuggets of gold are what I focus on writing. With that... let's talk about Prague.
The interesting thing about Prague is that a couple of things that I had some faint knowledge about suddenly came into focus. The Unbearable Lightness of Being was a book I had heard about - I suppose it was quoted in one of the history books I had read. This is the case with Kafka and Golem. This is where they came into focus..
It all began when Helen suggested that we go on a tour of the Jewish Quarter in old Prague. I immediately signed up.
We had to meet a bloke with an orange umbrella in the old town square near the astronomical clock. So along with a Indian girl from London and Jewish surgeon from Liverpool (with his wife) we set off.
The first stop was outside a plain looking shop with a funny looking clay robot painted on it's outside. It is celebrating the Golem.
I first heard about this Golem when I was 10 or 12 - I read about it in... a Phantom comic. A very rounded Australian education..a famous rabbi in the Jewish ghetto creates a golem to server the people and protect them. He inserts a piece of paper into it's head to start it up and shut it down for the Sabbath. One day he forgets to remove the paper and it goes mad during the Sabbath and runs around destroying things. The rabbi who is in the middle of reciting a psalm in the synagogue, runs out and inserts a piece of paper to shut the golem down. He then returns and restarts the psalm he was reciting - so up till this day they recite that particular psalm twice. Technology - you just can't trust it.
The communists made a film about it and in the end of the golem gets turned into a bread oven making bread for everyone - to each according to his needs comrade...
From there we headed to a large 2 story house... where Kafka was born.
I won't even try to describe Kafka - he defies quick explanation, except to say he was a writer that died when he was 40 of TB after writing a bunch of depressing stories, which may or may not have been dreams or just elaborate jokes. Now-a-days when we caught up in a complex, bizarre and hard to understand situation and we refer to being in a Kafkaesque situation. His writing is enormously influential. I'm half attracted and half repelled.
Being lawyer in the Austro-Hungarian empire apparently was the prefect environment to write these "dreams", I don't know what he saw in his day, but his writings certainly predicted the logical conclusion of the mad schemes of Stalin and Hitler. Which is a morbid to segway to discuss the next couple of locations.
We were to visit 4 synagogues - two being being inactive and essentially a museum to the jewish ghetto. Although jewish merchants have been visiting Prague since the 10 century, from about 1200 to 1750 they were required to live in a ghetto. If they left for business they had to wear a funny yellow hat and a yellow star and christians where not supposed to visit. If that wasn't bad enough they were subjected to bouts of murderous mob violence when the so called christians decided that the bad things happening to them in life (like the plague) was because they tolerated jews in their midst. Before we get on our high horse about the ghetto - there were none in England because the kings periodically kicked all the Jews out to curry favour with the religious establishment and... when they ended up owing the jews a whole lot of money. It took the Commonwealth under Cromwell to grant them real freedom. But I digress.
The ghetto came to an end in the mid 18th century because of enlightenment ideals and so they were free to live anywhere. The ghetto was then levelled and reconstructed based on the boulevards of Paris. So apart from the old Jewish cemetery there is not much to see anymore.
Incredibly, Kafka looked backed and missed the ghetto, maybe he felt that petite bougouise life had corrupted his people.
Accepting the regular bouts of prejudice was certainly a bad strategy when the Nazi's came about and vividly illustrated by the next synagogue which is just a monument to about 88000 Jewish people slaughtered out of Czech. Their names are all written on the walls, firstly by Village and then by Last name and then First name. You walk around and basically the walls are just covered names. It's impossible to describe and I couldn't take photos. More touching was a room upstairs with drawings done by children. Drawings done while they were in camp waiting for for their final destination. A little plaque gave their name, birth and death. Some survived, but most had a death date of 1944. It's impossible to describe the pathos of seeing drawings like you would see in any school halls knowing that they had a few months left to live.
The rest of the tour seems banal in comparison. We visited an old jewish cemetery and another synagogue in the spanish moorish style and we were done.
I always end these sorts of things feeling slightly depressed. So I went and had bought some shoes. The guilt for living assuaged in a fit of materialism.
There where little chance for photos on the tour - so I'm including a monument to the World War II
The interesting thing about Prague is that a couple of things that I had some faint knowledge about suddenly came into focus. The Unbearable Lightness of Being was a book I had heard about - I suppose it was quoted in one of the history books I had read. This is the case with Kafka and Golem. This is where they came into focus..
It all began when Helen suggested that we go on a tour of the Jewish Quarter in old Prague. I immediately signed up.
We had to meet a bloke with an orange umbrella in the old town square near the astronomical clock. So along with a Indian girl from London and Jewish surgeon from Liverpool (with his wife) we set off.
The first stop was outside a plain looking shop with a funny looking clay robot painted on it's outside. It is celebrating the Golem.
I first heard about this Golem when I was 10 or 12 - I read about it in... a Phantom comic. A very rounded Australian education..a famous rabbi in the Jewish ghetto creates a golem to server the people and protect them. He inserts a piece of paper into it's head to start it up and shut it down for the Sabbath. One day he forgets to remove the paper and it goes mad during the Sabbath and runs around destroying things. The rabbi who is in the middle of reciting a psalm in the synagogue, runs out and inserts a piece of paper to shut the golem down. He then returns and restarts the psalm he was reciting - so up till this day they recite that particular psalm twice. Technology - you just can't trust it.
The communists made a film about it and in the end of the golem gets turned into a bread oven making bread for everyone - to each according to his needs comrade...
From there we headed to a large 2 story house... where Kafka was born.
I won't even try to describe Kafka - he defies quick explanation, except to say he was a writer that died when he was 40 of TB after writing a bunch of depressing stories, which may or may not have been dreams or just elaborate jokes. Now-a-days when we caught up in a complex, bizarre and hard to understand situation and we refer to being in a Kafkaesque situation. His writing is enormously influential. I'm half attracted and half repelled.
Being lawyer in the Austro-Hungarian empire apparently was the prefect environment to write these "dreams", I don't know what he saw in his day, but his writings certainly predicted the logical conclusion of the mad schemes of Stalin and Hitler. Which is a morbid to segway to discuss the next couple of locations.
We were to visit 4 synagogues - two being being inactive and essentially a museum to the jewish ghetto. Although jewish merchants have been visiting Prague since the 10 century, from about 1200 to 1750 they were required to live in a ghetto. If they left for business they had to wear a funny yellow hat and a yellow star and christians where not supposed to visit. If that wasn't bad enough they were subjected to bouts of murderous mob violence when the so called christians decided that the bad things happening to them in life (like the plague) was because they tolerated jews in their midst. Before we get on our high horse about the ghetto - there were none in England because the kings periodically kicked all the Jews out to curry favour with the religious establishment and... when they ended up owing the jews a whole lot of money. It took the Commonwealth under Cromwell to grant them real freedom. But I digress.
The ghetto came to an end in the mid 18th century because of enlightenment ideals and so they were free to live anywhere. The ghetto was then levelled and reconstructed based on the boulevards of Paris. So apart from the old Jewish cemetery there is not much to see anymore.
Incredibly, Kafka looked backed and missed the ghetto, maybe he felt that petite bougouise life had corrupted his people.
Accepting the regular bouts of prejudice was certainly a bad strategy when the Nazi's came about and vividly illustrated by the next synagogue which is just a monument to about 88000 Jewish people slaughtered out of Czech. Their names are all written on the walls, firstly by Village and then by Last name and then First name. You walk around and basically the walls are just covered names. It's impossible to describe and I couldn't take photos. More touching was a room upstairs with drawings done by children. Drawings done while they were in camp waiting for for their final destination. A little plaque gave their name, birth and death. Some survived, but most had a death date of 1944. It's impossible to describe the pathos of seeing drawings like you would see in any school halls knowing that they had a few months left to live.
The rest of the tour seems banal in comparison. We visited an old jewish cemetery and another synagogue in the spanish moorish style and we were done.
I always end these sorts of things feeling slightly depressed. So I went and had bought some shoes. The guilt for living assuaged in a fit of materialism.
There where little chance for photos on the tour - so I'm including a monument to the World War II
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