House in Matoušova Street

The thrilling life story of a Jewish lawyer's family

In 1927, Eduard Schwarz, a widower, a Jewish lawyer, bought a house in Matoušova Street in Smíchov in order to acquire a decent residence for himself and his family. He was lucky he died before the Second World War started. In her novel, Tereza Boučková, who lived in the house from birth to adulthood and returned there again a few years ago, presents us with the nearly 100-year story of Schwarz's descendants and other inhabitants of the house, woven into the history of the twentieth century. The author literally searches for their fates live and it's so intense that the reader doesn't want to put the book down until they've finished it. Emotionally, with irony, but he also writes about people with sadness, that both monstrous ideologies wanted, Nazism and Communism, humiliate, robbed, to be arrested or murdered.