He also demonstrates the persistence of familiar rituals and feelings in the face of unimaginable horror. We see workers, ordered to build a new railway line for the Nazi transports, lose themselves in the satisfaction of good, hard manual work; and we see a group of people on their way to the death camps bicker among themselves about the social standing of a newly arrived prisoner.

Instead of concentrating on the experiences of a single character, as "Life With a Star" did, "Mendelssohn Is on the Roof" cuts back and forth between a dozen characters, giving the reader a kaleidoscopic portrait of life in Prague. It's a narrative strategy reminiscent of the one employed by Andrzej Szczypiorski to depict Nazi-occupied Warsaw in "The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman."

Among the characters portrayed by Weil are Schlesinger, the SS officer who fails to identify the statue of Mendelssohn; Becvar, one of the workmen involved in the Mendelssohn episode, who is sent to the front for his part in the foul-up; Dr. Rabinovich, a learned Jew, who is consulted in vain about identifying the statue, and the Nazi officials who initially order the statue's removal.

As the novel progresses, the Mendelssohn statue takes on a metaphoric quality, and images of other statues begin to proliferate as well. A statue of Moses turns up in the Jewish ghetto, reminding the Chief Elder of the Second Commandment ("Thou shalt not make graven images"). A Nazi official embraces a statue of St. George subduing the dragon as a symbol of the Reich's destiny. A patient studied by the Nazi doctors realizes that a rare disease is slowly turning him into a living statue.

No doubt such images of paralysis and petrification are meant to represent the Nazis' effect on the city of Prague, but the symbolism seems arbitrary and contrived, in sharp contrast to the effortless understatement that distinguished "Life With a Star." There is another problem as well: whereas Weil's earlier novel employed an abstract, Kafkaesque vocabulary (the Nazis are never even mentioned by name) to lend the events it described the power of fable, "Mendelssohn Is on the Roof" clumsily mixes up the real and the imagined.