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A review by jasonfurman
Mendelssohn Is on the Roof by Jiří Weil
5.0
A powerful novel that presents a wide-ranging perspective on the Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia. The novel begins with a German who is ordered to remove a statue of Felix Mendelssohn from the roof of a building the German's have turned into their own cultural center. He sends workers up to remove it but there are no plaques on the many statues so he orders them to find the one with the biggest nose. They are about to destroy it when at the last moment he realizes it is Richard Wagner. The semi-comic events unfold and depict a set of people caught up in the process who are each less motivated by evil or anti-semitism or ideology and more motivated by the penalties for not following orders. Although they eventually identify the statue of Mendelssohn and take it down, many of the initial set of characters caught up in the statue incident end punished in a variety of ways that involve being removed from Prague. The novel moves through chapters each largely focused on a different part of the process, including SS officers, heads of the Jewish Council, Reinhard Heydrich, guards, police, learned Jews, Jewish girls in hiding, a member of a quasi-resistence. At the same time, the novel moves forward in time and gets increasingly brutal and tragic as the Germans increasingly understand they have lost but only become more brutal.
Mendelssohn is on the Roof does not have some of the moral ambiguity of Primo Levi or the present the painful choices the way Eli Weisel does. The Jews, even the collaborators, all barely wrestle with their choices if at all and are presented as reasonably doing what they need to do without adding to the suffering of others. The depiction of most of the Germanys is more motivated by the fear and punishment created by the system, just like the Jews, rather than belief. Only at the very top where you have people like Heydrich are they presented as proud contributors to the horror rather than quasi-victims themselves. But I, for one, am not going to judge the perspective that Jiří Weil brings to his novel or fault it for failing to conform to the perspectives of some of the other literature by survivors.
Mendelssohn is on the Roof does not have some of the moral ambiguity of Primo Levi or the present the painful choices the way Eli Weisel does. The Jews, even the collaborators, all barely wrestle with their choices if at all and are presented as reasonably doing what they need to do without adding to the suffering of others. The depiction of most of the Germanys is more motivated by the fear and punishment created by the system, just like the Jews, rather than belief. Only at the very top where you have people like Heydrich are they presented as proud contributors to the horror rather than quasi-victims themselves. But I, for one, am not going to judge the perspective that Jiří Weil brings to his novel or fault it for failing to conform to the perspectives of some of the other literature by survivors.