I was born and raised in Prague - without a doubt one of the best cities anywhere - when it was darkly Communist. Everything was terrible about it (for adults, that is, never for me until I reached 15 years of age). But for us locals, there was one huge advantage. Want to stroll across Charles Bridge at noon, munching on a sandwich, admiring the old masonry and the magnificent statutes - no problem.
A visit to the Castle to walk through the majestic Gothic cathedral of St. Vitus - no problem. The magnificent archive of Czech literature (“Repository of Czech National Belles-Lettres”) - no problem. Walk down from the Castle via Nerudova Street - easy peasy. Not today. The only time you can cross Charles Bridge now, without elbowing your way through tens of thousands of locusts…pardon me, I mean “tourists” is at 3am. Even then, you’ll run into film crews taking advantage of the two or three hours the bridge isn’t choked by consecutive tsunamis of humanity. No Prague resident of sound mind is complaining. My friends, all in their late 60’s are delighted that Prague is no longer a ghost town and are gladly paying the price of tourist invasion, when they remember the city in the 50’s and 70’s. It’s different story with me. I didn’t have to suffer two decades of soul crushing Communist bureaucracy, arbitrary arrests, unfounded detentions and show trial. All I remember is beauty unsullied by pushing crowds. The walk down Nerudova Street in the spring, all by myself, aged 15, almost the only pedestrian at 3pm, inhaling the heady aroma of lilac, and wild, magnificent bloom of the trees on the nearby Petrin Hill…those are my memories. So, naturally, the crowds, the graffiti, the constant noise miffs me, though I understand the natives
The Charles bridge crucifix (above) is captivating story: INRI stands for “Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum” - Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews) That is not unusual. But what about the Hebrew letters? In transliteration they read: “Kadosh - adonai tzvaot - adosh” The words mean “Holy - Lord of hosts - holy”. A better translation would be “Lord of Multitudes” or even “Lord of Armies” but “hosts’ is the usually accepted translation. But never mind all that: why on earth would a crucifix bear a biblical verse from the Book of Isiah only applied to God? Sadly, it’s a symbol of Prague post-medieval anti-Semitism. There’s a fascinating story about the events that precipitated the lettering: read it here:
http://www.unexpectedtraveller.com/hebrew-inscription/
In October 1968, I landed in Israel. It was around midnight and a scorching desert wind, called the “chamsin” was blowing. The contrast of modern, messy, topsy-turvy, deafeningly loud city of Tel Aviv, built on sand and boasting magnificent beaches on the Mediterranean with the serene, baroque and gothic city I had just left was profound. I was shell-shocked. It took two years and an Israeli girlfriend to wrap my mind around the earthshaking change I had undergone. I learned Hebrew from my Israeli friends and English from my American and British friends, of whom I had many. I did a stint in the IDF (a lowly pencil pusher in the air force), suffered a nervous breakdown (subject for a different Substack), and completed my Bachelor’s in English. To the eternal chagrin and horror of my parents, I didn’t pass the Hebrew University medical school entrance exam. Somewhere in the deep recessed of their minds, they never forgave me. A son of intellectual Holocaust survivors is practically BORN a doctor. True to form, my best friends back in Prague both became physicians. I worked at the Ben Gurion Airport Duty Free store and saved enough money to leave Israel and my parents’ displeasure. I flew to Munich, then took a train to Switzerland and from there flew to London (after parting with a French Canadian girlfriend called Elaine in whose arms I spent the whole Munich - Zurich night train journey)
Life in London was fabulous. I became a mod to top all mods. All my money was spent on clothes. I scoured second-hand shops and bought many woolen suits. I always wore a tie like a proper Englishman, though no one else in my school did (I was at the Guildhall School of music first, then completed my Master’s in Linguistics at the university of Essex, 60 miles north-east of London) I got to know London better than any taxi driver. I often had no money for the “tube” or the bus and so I walked everywhere. On my many free days, I’d hang out on Trafalgar Square, visiting the National Gallery, walking through the Admiralty Arch and of course, feeding pigeons.
Stay tuned, I will continue the story of the stereotypical wandering Jew a.k.a. George Grosman (george.jazzcat on IG)