Carol’s Reviews > A Time of Gifts > Status Update

From his demeanor and the excellence of his English I think a stranger in a railway carriage would have taken him for an Englishman but of a half-patrician, half-scholarly kind which even then seemed threatened with extinction. I knew that his life had been full of movement and adventures, quite apart from his two marriages….

There was an enormous desk covered with photographs, a box of cigars… and… a number of silver cigarette cases…each of them embossed with a different gold monogram. (This … was an invariable item in Central European country houses, particularly in Hungary. They were presents exchanged on special occasions, and always between men: for standing godfather, being best man at a wedding, second in a duel, and so on.)

[P]unctiliously exact in the historical plays, Shakespeare didn’t care a fig for the topography of the comedies. Unless it were some Italian town - Italy being the universal lucky dip for Renaissance playwrights - the spiritual setting was always the same. Woods and parkland on the Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire borders, that is….

Our wanderings had ended under a clock tower in the old Ghetto, where the hands moved anti-clockwise and indicated the time in Hebrew alphabetic numbers. The russet-coloured synagogue, with its steep and curiously dentated gables, was one of the oldest in Europe; yet it was built on the site of a still older fane which was burnt down in a riot in which [3000] Jews were massacred, on Easter Sunday, 1389.

The Jews, who had been settled in Prague since the tenth century, fell victims in the eighteenth to a… figure called Hayan. He was a Sephardic Jew from Sarajevo, a Kabalist, and a votary of the false Messiah Sabbatai Zevi; he convinced the trusting Ashkenazim. With Elijah’s guidance, he proclaimed in private seances that he would summon God, raise the dead, and create new worlds.

“Jaroslav Hasek was a poet, an anti-clerical eccentric and a vagabond full of random learning and his adventures paralleled the picaresque wanderings of his creation. In and out of jail, once locked up as insane and once for bigamy, he was an incessant drinker and his excesses killed him in the end. He had a passion for hoaxes….[His] fake suicide, when he jumped off the Charles Bridge… set all Prague by the ears.”

At the middle of one side and higher than the rest, stands St. Johannes Nepomuk. He was martyred a few yards away in 1393 — he is said to have refused, under torture, to betray a confessional secret of Queen Sophia. When the henchmen of Wenceslas IV carried him here and hurled him into the Vlatva, his drowned body, which was later … entombed in the Cathedral, floated downstream under a ring of stars.

Question: Who is the most unexpected private soldier to be fighting as a volunteer in Maximilian’s army?
Answer: Descartes.

“The invisible watershed shares its snowfalls with the Polish slopes and the …Carpathian barrier, forested hiding-place of boars and wolves and bears, climbs and sweeps for hundreds of miles beyond the reach of even memory’s eye. It towers above southern Poland and the Ukraine and …Rumania in a thousand-mile-long boomerang-shaped curve until it retreats west again, subsides and finally drops into the lower Danube…”