Coming Home

After a walking tour of Old Town, including the Municipal Palace and the Cubist House of the Black Madonna, we dressed and celebrated Thanksgiving at Villa Richter, at the far side of Prague Castle. This meal was up there as one of the best I've ever eaten. The chef de cuisine is Petr Hajny, he is very young, doesn't speak any English, but has a future. Watch for his name! The restaurant is in a remodeled vineyard that was part of the St. Wenceslas Vineyard and has only recently been reopened. Grapes have been grown here since 1375, and like many properties in the Czech Republic, this one was confiscated after the Second World War because it was owned by German nationals, then used for government offices by the Communists. The Czech government began restoration in the 1990s.

The views are magnificent, the restaurant is quiet and divided into several rooms which assured privacy, and the food was delicate, complex, aesthetically pleasing, and perfectly plated. I started with a fresh crab salad served with corn mousse that was light and flavorful as well as complex in the textures of the strings of crab against the smoothness of the mousse. Others had the veal cheeks with a stock reduction that was velvety and intense. For the main dish I had turbot with a celery cream on top that was light yet richly infused with the taste of celery. My husband had pork belly with another completely different stock reduction, other folks had duck and monk fish.

The restaurant has various cousins on the property that are open during the high season, but this elegant and expensive place should be reserved for high holidays like Thanksgiving and romantic anniversaries.

After a week in Prague I knew I didn't really know the city well. It was only as we were leaving that we drove through the Soviet-era styled apartment complexes where poor and working people live. Although that section of town is clean, it clearly is poor, without any of the aesthetics of Old Town or New Town. There aren't any stores nearby either, making living there more difficult without immediate access to grocery stores and the wares of daily life.

Prague has a public transportation system--Metro, Trams, and buses--that operates on a near honor system. One purchases a ticket and without going through a turn stile, one enters the Metro, Tram, or bus without ever having to show it. There are machines to run the ticket through on the way into the Metro and on the Trams and buses, but there is no one to assure that no one is getting a free ride. Imagine that working in New York!

It is not easy to get to know a Czech person. The only real contact we had was with Ivana, our knowledgeable guide who took us to Terezin, the Jewish Quarter, and on our last day's walking tour. She attended university during Communism and spoke with some hesitation about her life as it has changed so radically over the last twenty years. I met an Israeli man who has lived in Prague for seven years and loved it better before it became so cosmopolitan, so sophisticated. He liked it better when it was a hidden gem.

Of course, the last two days were consumed with images of the seiges in Mumbai where unknown gunmen attacked two hotels, the train station, a Chabad, a hospital, and several other locations. We understood how safe we felt in Prague. There is little visible security, some armed police patroling, but no army presence anywhere near the city or the airport.

Nine hours in the air and now I'm home, doing laundry, delivering clothing to the dry cleaners, going through the piles of mail, and longing for the next adventure.

The Jewish Quarter

Only 1500 Czech Jews survived long enough to receive reparations from the Czech and German governments after the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Originally there had been 180,000 Jews living here before the country was chopped up and fed to Germany with the hope that this would be the last conquest not the first of many.

157,000 Jews were transported through Terezin, not all Czech, most died. Now the Czech Republic has fewer than 5000 Jewish people living here, mostly in Prague. It is a Catholic country with a church on every corner. It is a Catholic country with a history of hostility towards the Jews who have been a part of this nation since the 10th century. The oldest remaining synagogue in Europe is here in Prague, dating from the 13th century.

The Jewish Quarter is now the most fashionable section of Prague with all of the boutique shops and fancy restaurants located on its border. Once a ghetto, once the only place where Jews could live, under Joseph II finally the wealthier Jews were allowed to leave, and the area filled up with the very poorest: the Orthodox Jews and the poor Christians. The Quarter was destroyed because of fire and disease and rebuilt, and now, after the Nazis were defeated, after the Communists were defeated, the Quarter is fashionable and a tourist destination. There is the Jewish cemetery, and various synagogues, some still in use, others converted to museums.

Oddly the Czechs convinced the German occupiers to allow them to collect the artifacts from the over 150 Jewish communities around Czechoslovakia and horde them in Prague. The original intention of the Nazis was to store the artifacts for an exhibit they would soon launch to illustrate the annihilated species. Thankfully it didn't work and the remains, including old Torahs, silver plates and cups, sofars, and books, are now collected and maintained by the Jewish Museum.

It was the Pinkas Synagogue that touched me. The interiors are covered with the names of the 80,000 Czech Jews who perished in the Holocaust. Simple black lettering, family names not repeated. I found my last name. My husband found his, too. Our friends are not Jewish and they watched our eyes fill up with tears, as we realized that aunts and uncles, cousins we never knew, died this horrible death of exile, confinement, dehumanization, and starvation.

I wandered through the city afterwards wondering how a city's history is so intrinsically connected to its anti-Semitism, how a city's legacy has such a rich vein of shame driven through it. And then I looked up and saw this decoration on a building, only constructed at the beginning of the twentieth century, but obviously recently restored. If you can't see it clearly, it shows a Star of David, a Jewish man's face in profile with a hooked nose, a woman's profile. But next to the Star of David is a pile of money! I saw this and wondered how it must feel to live here, being Jewish, and wondering what remains alive of this history in the blood of my neighbors.

Another Magnificent Meal

I had no expectations that the food in Prague would be so delicious. I don't eat meat, and figured I would be despondent for fish or vegetables, forced to choose among the lesser items on menus dominated by beef and pork. But every meal, from breakfast at the Intercontinental where we are staying to cafe snacks to extraordinary dinners, has been fresh, tasty, and presented with panache.

After reunioning with our daughter whom we haven't seen for three months since she left New York for Prague, we went to Kampa Park, considered the best restaurant in Prague, located just below the Charles Bridge. We decided to eat in the riverside terrace, in the glass room at river's edge although it was both too cold (it's blustery cold outside) and too hot (the gas heaters above the table). But this vantage point gave us views of the twelve giant swan, the bridge, and the Old Town on the other side of the Charles River.

We were excited to see salads on the menu although not so excited to see the prices! This restaurant is as expensive as many in New York City, so our expectations rose quickly. And we weren't disappointed.

I started with a beet root salad with goat cheese cream, shallot dressing and basil pesto hidden underneath a pile of arugula. Impeccably prepared, each leaf of arugula was delicate and young. The favorite appetizer for the table was the grilled octopus although the pumpkin soup with walnut ravioli and black trumpets was light and refreshing for an autumnal favorite.

The seared monk fish was rolled and placed on a plate with a cream cause that was so light I forgot that I might be takng a few years off my life by eating something so rich. It wasn't just cream, it was infused with lobster flavors and foamed. Foam is a detail on most menu items. Other folks had a plate with four types of duck, from foie gras to duck breast to traditional duck and duck confit. Or the halibut, roasted and delectable.

My dessert of chocolate, two types, with a bitter orange and chocolate gelato was perfection.

We walked back across the Charles Bridge, dating back from the 1600s, which is under reconstruction. The famous statute of Christ with Hebrew letters above it has a story connected to it. Here is how Steven Plaut describes the strange and horrific irony. This country, like most of Central Europe, has a complex and anti-Semitic history with the Jewish people who lived here. The Jews here were immediately rounded up when the great appeasement gave the Nazis control over the country in 1938. However, even without the Nazis, there is a hideous history here.

The glistening golden letters around the statue of Christ have always been a matter of controversy for Prague's Jews. The statue with the letters raised around it is a central feature on the Charles Bridge, the bridge that spans the Vltava River, joining the two halves of Prague. It was built in Prague's golden age by King Charles I, the Czech king who went on to become Charles IV of the Holy Roman Empire. The bridge is one of the artistic wonders of Prague, full of crowds admiring the statues of saints and kings bedecking the sides of the structure, long since converted into a pedestrian avenue. But the statue of Jesus has long been the center of contention.

In 1696, the Prague authorities accused a local Jewish leader, one Elias Backoffen, of blasphemy. As his punishment he was ordered to raise the funds for purchasing of gold-plated Hebrew letters, placed around the head of the statue, spelling out "Holy, Holy, Holy, the Lord of Hosts," the Kedusha from the Hebrew prayer and originating in the vision from the Book of Isaiah. The inscription was a symbolic humiliation and degradation of Prague Jews, forcing them to pay for a set of golden letters referring to God and hung around the neck of the statue of Christ.

Prague by Night and Day

Today we went to Prague Castle and walked through St. Vitus's Cathedral: going from chapel to chapel inside this Gothic structure, listening to how people died: torture, thrown into vats of boiling oil, tongues pulled out, infanticide, patricide. Once again the pain of being human inspired the magnificent beauty and uniqueness in each of the many chapels. We entered just as noon mass was ending and got to hear the pipe organ fill the entire church, which is enormous.

But it was the Lobkowicz Palace that brought me into vacation mode. We sat through a concert of viola, piano, and flute: Mozart (the Turkische March was particularly strident and fun), Beethoven (we were humming Romance for hours afterwards), Vivaldi (Allegro from The Four Seasons), Dvorak in a sitting room so that as I listened to each note, I floated back into time, a member of the court invited to an afternoon's entertainment. The Lobkowicz family was always connected to music. The patriarchs were patrons to both Beethoven as well as Mozart, and there are original manuscripts of Beethoven's Fifth and Eighth Symphonies as well as the manuscript for Handel's Messiah, with their own notes for concerts played in the palace. The family first lost everything to the Nazis, then to the Communists, but their possessions and portraits as well as a collection of musical instruments have been reclaimed and back in the family palace.

Walking out of the Palace, we suddenly found ourselves in front of Franz Kafka's house on Golden Lane, a tiny house, where I purchased a copy of Metamorphosis and we all posed in front of the door.

Prague is cosmopolitan yet not rushed. Shops don't open until eleven or noon. Life is slower and it's infectious. All of us are relaxed, only checking email twice a day. Breads, fruits, cheeses are all fresh and flavorful. However, we still haven't met any Czechs. We are traveling, two families, and because we have our nearly adult children with us, we are not ready yet to open our conversations up to others. But we have only been here for two days: today was our first intentional walking, to Prague Castle, which would take weeks to go through. It's the Louvre of Prague and still the home to the President of the Czech Republic.

However, I don't feel ashamed to be an American here anymore. Not with Obama giving his Saturday addresses, appointing an economic team that will restart confidence in the marketplace, banks, and employment. Not with the vitality of our children here with us, two still in college, one her second year out in the work world.

Traditions in Central Europe

Several observations about the Czech Republic: the keyboard on the computer is different, because of the accent marks needed to write in Czech. This language was almost wiped out during the Austrian then German occupation. Currently only about 4 million people on the planet speak this language. It's very difficult to speak, even more difficult to understand.

Last night we made a reservation at a restaurant, V Zatisi, that we believed was just passed the astrological clock square and down Karlova on Lillova. The maps appeared to be navigable. However, once we got passed the clock, during a cold, blustery pre-snow storm, the map and reality no longer matched. No one quite knew what we were asking them. We had no idea what they were saying back to us.

Somehow we got there. We even got there at the right time for our reservation. And once there, the food was exceptional, a real surprise. I won for the best appetizer: pumpkin and pear soup with cinnamon cream foam. There was an asparagus salad, and a seared tuna or a tiger shrimp that was infused with citrus and served in a sharp cream sauce. For entrees, there were a lot of portions of "Bambi" served at our table, but I had the sea bass with two sauces, and once again, mine was the freshest and tastiest.

We walked home in a snow storm which continues today, although suddenly the sun has come out. So far we haven't met any Czechs. We will be going to an art area today after stopping by some churches (there are churches on every block), and perhaps in a pub, we can engage people in conversation.

CNN is so much more grown up here in Europe. I would watch it in America if it was this good at home. There is no discussion about whether John Roberts looks better in a tie or without. Instead there was an entire half hour devoted to the Middle East this morning, another to Africa. The United States of America is not the center of the world here and it is a relief.

Prague in the Czech Republic

There is something about the first moment when I see a new city; we arrived at 4:30 in the morning on a Saturday. It was dark, it was snowing as we drove through abandoned streets, not a single car, not a single person, into Old Town where our hotel is located.

These buildings each has a novel inside it, just from the facade without even walking into a hallway.

We had breakfast, Iwent to sleep for two hours, and then I was drawn out of bed and onto the streets.

Prague is a city that was never bombed, so it is medival in architecture. Even the Soviets respected the aesthetic of the city. Each building is unique with statuary, murals on some, metal work, a wooden door. In just an hour, I shot over 65 images. In an hour, I was freezing, because it is cold, chilling to the bone, windy, but so beautiful, so full of a history that remains unknown to me.

I came back to the hotel for another sweater and went out again, walked across the Charles Bridge to the Lesser City, wandered with our friends up and down streets, just taking in the age of everything.

So Hillary is going to be Secretary of State. I wonder how Bill will be kept in check.

So it feels OK to be an American here again. People are excited despite the economic disaster that is spreading all around. The whole world is hoping that this mortal man will succeed.