I’m in the Czech Republic with the inhabitants of a magnificant palace

Norman Eisen was the US ambassador to the Czech Republic during the Obama administration. This book is about the palace which is now the home to American ambassadors in Prague but which was originally built by a family of Jewish bankers in the 1920s. The Last Palace is his story of the people who have lived in the palace and left their mark during the last century. I have this book in hardback and it was bought new from a discounted supplier of books on the Internet. I bought it when I was buying some other books because I was attracted by the idea of the book and also because I know very little history of the country.

The book is told in the stories of four residents of the palace. It begins with the family of Jewish bankers who built the palace and invested a huge amount of their wealth in it and its furnishings but who were forced to flee when the Nazis overran the city. The second resident is the Nazi officer who inhabited the palace during the war. The third is the American officer who helped to relieve Prague from the Nazis and who bought the palace for the USA to try and preserve it. The final inhabitant is the American ambassador at the time of the independence of the Czech state from Soviet control.

The author also tells us about his experience as an ambassador, living in the palace, and how he was the first openly Jewish person to live and practise his faith there since WW2. The final thread of the book is a history of the author’s mother who was a Czech citizen, was incarcerated in a concentration camp and had to flee eventually to Israel and onwards to America.

The story of these individuals and the palace reflect the history of modern day Prague and the Czech people because all of the inhabitants were influential or significant in one way or another. The book, therefore, talks about the eventful years since the building was erected and the history of the country but because it is told through the lives of people whom the reader comes to know it makes the history very real and accessible.

This is a clever way to tell the story of a country and it’s an absorbing book. I enjoyed it a lot. I would have liked more photographs and it would have been nice to learn a little bit more about some of the people we meet in passing during the story but these are small quibbles. This is an enlightening book about the recent history of one country albeit told through the filter of American priorities.

This book has been placed on my shelves for a future reread. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in twentieth century European history.