Pražské příběhy 5 – Krajinou židovského ghetta – Hrubý Dan (2025)

This book takes readers into the area of Prague’s former Jewish town, around the remaining synagogues and the Old Jewish Cemetery. Although the neighbourhood was fundamentally transformed during redevelopment at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, every fragment and trace of the past remains connected with the present, and past lives with those of more recent and contemporary times. Together with author Dan Hrubý, readers follow the story of the first world chess champion Wilhelm Steinitz, the famous American dancer, actor and singer Fred Astaire, and the crafty Princess von Hohenlohe, whose mother, known as Mrs Kuranda, was born in the very centre of Prague; trace the six-pointed star that travelled from Prague to the flag of Israel; visit the birthplace of the first rector of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on Old Town Square in Prague; enter the worst pub in the Fifth Quarter; explore the Prague Golem, or what it might have been, and meet people who saw their own souls; visit the studios of major Czech painters and Pařížská Street, where Limonádový Joe, Maxipes Fík and Králíci z klobouku were born only a short distance from one another; and follow the man who wanted to kill Emperor Franz Joseph I, as well as the great Central European Leopold Sacher-Masoch, who took pleasure in suffering at the feet of beautiful women, along with many other famous and little-known inhabitants of the former Jewish ghetto, Josefov, the Fifth Quarter and the adjoining streets of the Old Town. This new volume in the popular Prague Stories series contains hundreds of unique historical photographs. The book is in Czech.