In Nazi-occupied Prague, ex-bank clerk Josef Roubick discovers that the prosaic world he has always inhabited is suddenly off-limits to him because he is a Jew. When he begins to observe his new, increasingly skewed, and macabre environment with resigned detachment, his life becomes centered on survival and on the surprisingly small things he clings to in order to persevere.

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.