Set during the Nazi occupation of Prague, Life with a Star records the day-to-day life of Josef Roubicek, an ex-bank clerk, who discovers that the prosaic world he has always inhabited is suddenly off-limits to him because he is a Jew. "One of the most powerful works to emerge from the Holocaust; it is a fierce and necessary work of art".--The New York Times.

JIRI WEIL (1900-1959) was a major Czech writer in the 1930s but is most widely known today of his two postwar works Life with a Star and Mendelssohn is on the Roof. In 1942 he was summoned for transport to a concentration camp with the rest of Prague Jewry but managed to escape and hide for the duration of the war. He died in Prague in 1959.