Prague Reflections

I can't deny that I had expectations on going back to Prague, the first time in a decade and a half. After all, it was where I spent perhaps the most formative semester of my college career. More importantly, of course, it was the point of origin of Kara's and my relationship. It is a place I remember fondly.

But this time, the trip was supposed to be (at least in part) all about business. I was coming to Prague with a very different set of goals than I had had the first time. Then, it was about experience, self-discovery -- all that college-y crap. This time, it was about trying to see the locus of so much that has disappeared, but which is so vividly a part of my professional life. It was about trying to grasp the physical geography of the world in which my subjects lived.

To that end, me and my intrepid research assistant Toby, set out in the middle of one of the colder Central European winters in recent memory, to wander around Prague and, weather permitting, the spa towns of Western Bohemia.

When we arrived, after a day that began at 2:30 am in Jerusalem, to an absolutely freezing Prague. Strangely, I had never been to Ruzne airport (to my readers who know Czech, please forgive the lack of diacritics -- I can't make them work on this blogging site!) -- the last time I was in Prague, I took the very poor advice of flying to Frankfurt and taking a train...which added about 12 hours to the journey. The airport today offered the first of what would be a consistent experience of the entire trip: a city that has come very far towards becoming a west European city, with all that is good and bad about that (in my opinion, mostly bad)...but still had not gone all the way. The airport was as sterile as Luden or De Gaulle (or Ben Gurion, for that matter, which it probably resembles most) the same yellow signs now synonymous with international air travel, the same duty free shops, and on and on. Yet, there was no gate for our arrival -- only a shuttle bus that brought us from the freezing tarmac to the terminal.

We were met by a driver at the baggage claim, a man that I can only describe as about the most typical Czech driver I've ever seen. Portly, full head of grey hair and trimmed but unkempt beard, wire rimmed, aviator-style eyeglasses...he could have been written by Kundera. That I liked -- for a while. It would be a few days before I would remember what came along with this picturesqueness.

We arrived in Prague...and as hackneyed as it is to say, it really was just as I remembered it. We drove down Evropska, but turned towards the castle before hitting Dejvica, taking Horakove to Badanelho, and down around the front of the castle. When I saw the 22 tram, which runs along the same route from Bila Hora, it was like a homecoming.

Then things were different. As a student, living in a dorm in Dejvica, I had never really approached the Stare Mesto and Josefov from a car. I had always taken the Metro from Dejvicka station to Mustek, and then gotten hopelessly lost walking from the boundaries of the New and Old Towns towards the river. For the first time, I realized how compact the city actually is. In what seemed like less than two minutes, we had crossed the Vlatava on Manesuv bridge, and were immediately in the middle of Josefov. Two turns, past the Altneuschul, down Parizska to Siroka to Elisky Krasnohorkse...and stopped on a magnificent street of c. 1900 Art Nouveau apartment blocks to our apartment for the week, which looked out upon four gargantuan pink atlantes. It was exactly what I had come to see.

Although we were tired, Toby and I started out immediately. We crossed the street, and found ourselves facing the Spanish Synagogue with its appallingly bizarre statue of Franz Kafka. I took it in. I have been writing about synagogues like the Spanish for months now, trying to get my head around not just the buildings but the mise-en-scene, and here was one of the finest standing examples, literally around the corner from where we would be living for the next eight days. After sitting for a few minutes in the Pasta Cafe, attached to the entrance to the Jewish Museum (which I will describe in more detail later), to call Kara -- we needed wireless to use Skype on my I-phone -- and I should add that it worked wonderfully.

We walked about two blocks and found ourselves in the Staremestske Namesti. This was a place I had not spent much time at years ago -- in fact, I avoided for the most part the tourist areas to the extent that I could. The good thing about coming during a cold snap at the beginning of December was that, at least for the first few days, we had these spaces almost to ourselves. Even the stalls set up for the Christmas fair on the square were affected -- only about 2/3 of them opened, the rest of the merchants didn't bother to show up until the weather improved.

These were the best days. The weather was terrible, and thus the tourists were very few in number.

I had not realized, and was delighted to find, how thoroughly modern Josefov had been made at the turn of the 20th century. The buildings, almost every one, were built between 1890 and 1910, all of them showed a degree of design and craftsmanship -- even the more modest ones such as were on our block -- that showed the neighborhood to have been re-designed with a very affluent clientele in mind. The old Jewish neighborhood (which tourists are still mistakenly believing they are looking at when they walk around Josefov) is really nowhere to be found -- indeed, it was probably through an act of the same sentimentality that allowed for the survival of those buildings (the Altneuschul, the cemetery, the Hevra Kadisha hall, the Maiselova and the Pinkas synagogues) that still do stand of the old neighborhood. The rest is long gone...but so much the better for my project, as it shows precisely the cultural factors at work in the neighborhood's construction (if you want me to elaborate, check out my book when it's published in about three years :-))...

OK, it is getting late...more in the next few installments!