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.
By David Selzer
