MERRY-GO-ROUND
Our hotel was a dozen or more tram stops
from Prague’s city centre. Converted
from a Soviet-era apartment block
to cater for the influx of tourists
after the Velvet Revolution,
it faced a large rectangle of open ground,
flat and bare. On the other three sides
were similar blocks, but still used for families.
In the middle was a small carousel
and, to one side, a mobile shop selling
alcohol and cigarettes – Freedom’s
enterprising dividends. The hotel
welcomed groups – like the excited party
of Israeli High School students and teachers,
with their Mossad minders, jackets bulging,
waiting in the foyer, as we arrived,
for coaches to take them to the Ghetto.
***
Hitler declared that the Ghetto be preserved –
once Prague had been pronounced wholly ‘Judenrein’ –
as if an exhibit in a museum.
In the Old Jewish Cemetery,
along the horizontal edges
of the tomb of the scholar and mystic
Rabbi Judah Levai ben Bezalel
aka Rabbi Loew small stones rest.
According to German Jewish folklore
the Rabbi could conjure, in times of trouble,
a redemptive golem out of the mud
and clay of the wide Vlatava close by.
When the city was part of the Habsburg
Empire, because of its many gilded
cupolas, it was ‘Das Goldene Stadt’.
***
Our room overlooked the open ground.
Adults were queuing at the shop, and
children turning on the roundabout. We could hear
its generator’s wheezy chug-chug,
and the tinkling of a waltz. On its roof
were clumsy images of clowns painted
in a faded yellow. The street lamps came on.
Snow began to fall as the coaches returned,
their passengers subdued.
Ashen Venema
February 1, 2025It was in a posh Prague hotel (cheap then, a trip to celebrate the birthday of a fiend) that we watched the 1969 moon landing on a small TV. A group of Americans in the room fell into each other’s arms 🙂 The food around town was excellent. I also remember doing some amazing b&w photographs, blessed by unique light, in the Jewish cemetery. I regret I lost my archive,in fact, all my laurels, in a bonfire to mark a moving-on-moment…to England.
Elise Oliver
February 3, 2025This poem resonated with me. I visited Prague and the Bohemian forest as a teenager in 1967, before the advent of threatening Russian tanks and, later, stag parties swilling in strong, cheap beer. The visit was intended to be a cultural exchange but in fact it was a cultural shock. I found it extremely difficult to reconcile the beauty of an orchestral performance of Smetana’s Vltava in Prague Castle, after visiting the Jewish Cemetery and everything it represented. As with the merry-go-round, what goes around, comes around.