Prague Triptych

Structured as a winged altarpiece, Prague Triptych is written in Urzidil’s characteristic blend of fact, fiction, and memoir to create a mosaic of his native city. The centerpiece is the novella-length “Weissenstein Karl,” a Švejk-like palavering denizen of Café Arco who sits and converses with Franz Werfel, Max Brod, Franz Kafka, Ernst Pollak (and his wife-to-be Milena Jesenská) and all the other writers known as the Prague Circle. Through the eyes of his subjects, Urzidil takes us from Prague’s earliest history and lore through the Thirty Years’ War with its multiple defenestrations, to fin-de-siecle ferment and the uneasy cohabitation between Czechs, Germans, and Jews over the final decades of Habsburg rule, and ultimately to the period immediate following WWI in an independent Czechoslovakia. This journey is capped with a final, dreamlike farewell to his city as the iron curtain descends like a theater curtain to signal the end of the performance and the darkening of the stage that had been graced by those he once knew.