Jiøí Weil

Jiøí Weil was born in Praskolesy, Central Bohemia, near Prague. After World War I, his family moved to Prague, where he attended high school and university. In the early 1920s, enamored of the Soviet Union after his first visit, Weil joined the Communist Party, but he was expelled thirteen years later for controversy over his writing, reflected in his 1937 Moskva-hranice (Moscow to the Border). Weil survived the Holocaust in hiding and afterward remained in Prague. Although he was a prolific novelist and author of short stories, Weil’s work was rarely in line with the prevailing Soviet realism, and he remained a literary outsider.