More in ‘Prague’

• On Dec. 16th, for the sixth night of Hannukah, the White House will light a 19th-century menorah on loan from Prague’s Jewish Museum; Michelle Obama specifically requested it after seeing it on an official visit. [JTA]
• Benjamin Netanyahu clarified that the current West Bank settlement freeze is not permanent, but rather intended to create ...

For those who believe couplings can be bashert, it would seem that New York artist and illustrator Mark Podwal was predestined to depict Prague’s Jewish relics in his ethereal drawings and paintings. The city captivated him as a teenager growing up in Queens in the 1950s, from the moment he stumbled upon a photo of ...

Throughout the 1960s, when Kafka’s work was circulating in Czech in samizdat editions, Prague’s dissident writers would call the Prague castle, throne of the immemorial Czech kings, Das Schloß—”The Castle”—in reference to the circuitous delays, follies, and bureaucratic oppressions, of the communist period. While The Trial found its ending in officework, The Castle began in ...

Before we arrive at the Office—Franz Kafka’s, or anyone’s—we first have to make a survey of the origins of that institution. We first have to make a working genesis, a hypothetical creation myth for our cubicle. How did we get to Kafka? How was he—Franz Kafka, l’artiste bourgeois—arrived at? What was the process that resulted ...

A man knocks at the door to a flat and another man—let’s call him G.S.—opens it. Both men are dressed conservatively, in suit and tie, and, why not, in bowler hats.
G.S., because these are his rooms, says, “Good day, sir. What can I do for you?” He says this in German, or maybe in ...

The Golem of Prague’s got a tough gig these days. Who can count the number of times in the last ten years he’s had to haul his clay body out of the attic of the Altneu Synagogue? Is there a contract somewhere that requires him to make a cameo every time a writer wants to ...