Time's Magpie - Myla Goldberg [29]
The New Jewish Cemetery lies beyond Olšany’s eastern edge and is considerably smaller than its neighbor. Its name is a relative term. The New Jewish Cemetery is the granddaughter of the Old Jewish Cemetery, a tiny patch of ground in Old Town that contains twelve thousand gravestones. Marking burials from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the crumbling stones are lodged one atop the other like dulled teeth within a fossilized jaw. The stones represent only a small fraction of the cemetery’s population, which is estimated at a hundred thousand: the bodies are buried one on top of another as deep as twelve layers in obeyance of a Prague law that for centuries forbade Jews from being buried anywhere else.
A hand-painted sign inside the New Jewish Cemetery’s front entrance directs visitors along the cemetery’s southern wall to Kafka’s grave, where he is buried with his mother and father. Because Kafka’s demise preceded his parents’, his name tops the gravestone, an angular granite obelisk beside which grows a thin pine sapling. Leaning against the stone is a black marble plaque inscribed to the memory of Kafka’s three sisters, who died in concentration camps. Dried yellow roses are strewn among the stones that cover the grave. Yellowed notes are tucked among these stones, and these attest to the unique power of a gravesite. People do not leave notes tucked into the floorboards of houses; only at a grave does writing a message to a dead man not seem like a pointless and empty act. And yet, the customary thrill that attends proximity to someone of Kafka’s stature is tempered by the cemetery’s unrelenting solitude. The attention paid to Kafka’s grave—the flowers, the notes, and the skinny pine sapling—only draw further attention to the profound neglect of the hundreds of gravestones surrounding it. Kafka’s grave is a lonely place, a place that does not invite lingering.
The history carved into the granite of the New Jewish Cemetery’s headstones differs from Olšany’s. The majority of the Jewish Cemetery’s graves date from the cemetery’s establishment in the 1890s to the 1930s. In fact, there exists a century-wide gap between the Old Jewish Cemetery’s newest graves, dating from the late 1700s, and the New Jewish Cemetery’s oldest ones. A separate Jewish cemetery containing the missing century’s graves was once located a few blocks from the New Cemetery, but this other burial ground was turned into a park in the 1970s, after there weren’t enough Jews around to complain about its destruction.The truth of this stark fact is borne out through observation. Although the New Jewish Cemetery contains a few scattered graves belonging to Jews who returned to Prague after surviving the insanity of the Second World War, it is difficult to find a gravestone more recent than the 1930s.
The New Jewish Cemetery’s opening hours are shorter than Olšany’s. The paths between the graves are completely overrun with ivy, such that they are no longer paths but leafy furrows that make walking difficult. Overgrowth submerges shoes at every step. The stillness inside the New Jewish Cemetery is profound. The ivy that covers the pathways has also covered some of the gravestones and climbed the trees. There are no old ladies here, no freshly tended graves. No flower shops stand near its front entrance.
It is a popular misconception that cemeteries are for the dead. Cemeteries serve the living. They provide places to remember and to mourn, to attest to life’s larger continuation in the face of smaller ends. A tended cemetery is itself a living creature of earth and candles and flowers. But when there are no living to remember the stories and faces and names of a cemetery’s dead, a cemetery dies. In the New Jewish Cemetery family headstones that are largely blank await additions that will never come.
Park Redux
THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF HOLEŠOVICE began as a nineteenth-century