''Mendelssohn Is on the Roof'' is a novel by Jiří Weil written in 1959 and first translated into English by Marie Winn in 1991. The book took 15 years to write. It is an exploration of the many forms of corruption in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and embeds historical events, such as the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in
Prague
Prague ( ; cs, Praha ; german: Prag, ; la, Praga) is the capital and largest city in the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 million people. The city has a temperate ...
in 1942, among fictional stories concerning the Holocaust, Nazi careerism and the rise of Nazism.
It is set in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia during
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
. The book starts with a story about some municipal workmen who are tasked to remove a statue of the Jewish composer
Felix Mendelssohn
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (3 February 18094 November 1847), born and widely known as Felix Mendelssohn, was a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of the early Romantic period. Mendelssohn's compositions include sy ...
from the roof of the Prague Academy of Music. The book continues with a collection of interlinked stories about Jewish life in Czechoslovakia during the war, including a tale similar to Anne Frank's. The stories of most of the characters end unhappily, with the exception of Richard Reisinger (effectively the protagonist) whose fate we do not explicitly or implicitly learn.
The English translation of the novel was originally published in 1992 by
HarperCollins
HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News Cor ...
in the U.K. and
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a British publishing, publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year.Daunt Books with a foreword by
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth (March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018) was an American novelist and short story writer.
Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophicall ...
which was originally written for and accompanies the translation of Weil's novel '' Life with a Star''.