Šimon Wels (1853-1922), the son of a peddler from a Czech-Jewish family from Osek near Rokycany, followed in his father's footsteps by trading. In his memoirs of the years 1853-1897, in which he also recorded the history of his parents from 1803 onwards, he gives valuable testimony to many details of the life of the village Jewish community in western Bohemia in the second half of the 19th century. His son Rudolf Wels later became an outstanding architect; he perished in Auschwitz in 1944, as did his wife Ida and their son Martin. Numerous lexical and spelling peculiarities contribute to the charm of this unusually sensitively written literary text. The manuscript, discovered in the 1980s in England, was prepared for publication by Zbyněk Hejda. The new book edition presents its revised version.
Czech edition