- Karel Poláček
Karel Poláček (
22 March , 1892 –19 October 1944) was a Czechoslovak writer, humorist and journalist ofJewish descent. He was murdered by the Nazis in theAuschwitz concentration camp .Life
He was born in
Rychnov nad Kněžnou into a family of a Jewish trader. He started to attend secondary school (Czech "gymnasium") there, but due to his bad results he transferred to secondary school inPrague where he graduated in 1912. Then he started to attend the faculty of law at theCharles University .He was employed as a
clerk for a short time. During theFirst World War he was sent on a Serbian and Galician front. After the war he was employed in the Czechoslovak committee on import and export. But he lost his job after he ridiculed the office in one of his short-stories called "Kolotoč" ("The Carousel"). The story is about a family that inherits a carousel but due to a hyperbureaucratic committee on import and export they are not able to sell it abroad.Josef Čapek offered him a cooperation in 1920. Poláček contributed to a humoristic magazine "Nebojsa" (English "Dreadnought"). He started writing short-stories, feature-stories and columns using a pseudonym "Kočkodan" (English "Guenon "). Shortly after that in 1922 he was introduced to the editor's office ofLidové noviny (famous newspaper at that time) by the Čapek brothers. The newspaper published his feature-stories and very popular "soudničky" (stories - usually funny - from the court). His work was published in this newspaper until the Nazi occupation came and forbade it with rasistic laws.Then he was hired by the Jewish religious community. By the end of 1943 he was transported to the concentration camp in Terezín and then transported to Auschwitz where he died in a
gas chamber .Work
His novels represent one of the most authentic values of the Czech interwar prose. He was close with his humanistic credo to his generation fellows such as
Karel Čapek andFrantišek Langer . At the same time he reflects in his "humoristic" (but only at the first sight) novel the deep tragedy of the petty bourgeois, small-town and suburban world in which hypocrisy, mental smallness, narrow-mindness and spiritual poverty wins.Poláček was able to describe different human types - not only in their type variety but also in the art of getting under the mask of their language. At the beginning of his work stand humoristic sketches mostly from small-town environment with caricatured human figures especially from middle-class, often Jewish society.
His first novel was "Dům na předměstí" (1928) (English "A House in the Suburbs") in which he portrayed a rebirth of a "small man" into a dehumanised creature as soon as he is possessed with proprietary instincts to possess. He was widely popular for his humoristic proses such as "Muži v offsidu" (1931) ("Men in Offside"), which was made into a movie that year by director Svatopluk Innemann, starring
Hugo Haas in the role of Mr. Načeradec, or "Michelup a motocykl" (1935) ("Michelup and the Motorcycle").The work of his life became a cycle in which he portrayed a small piedmont town during years before the 1st world war. The story is concentrated around the fate of a tradesman Štědrý and his sons. It was supposed to be a pentalogy - 5th part is said to have been written but its destiny is unknown - the books were published in this order: "Okresní město" (1936) ("County Town"), "Hrdinové táhnou do boje" (1936), "Podzemní město" (1937) ("Underground Town") a "Vyprodáno" (1939) ("Sold Out").
During the Nazi occupation in 1941 Poláček's humoristic novel "Hostinec u kamenného stolu" was published under the name of painter V. Rada. It was made into a movie in 1949. After the
Second World War a novel about his childhood in Rychnov nad Kněžnou "Bylo nás pět" (1949) ("There Were Five Of Us") was published.External links
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