Prague Forays: Egon Erwin Kisch

Egon Erwin Kisch, a celebrated member of the Prague Circle, first earned local fame while writing a newspaper column entitled Prager Streifzüge, or Prague Forays, published weekly from 1910 to 1911. In these literal and figurative forays, Bryant argues, Kisch puzzled through notions of urban belonging in a city ruled by Czech elites and shot through with political antisemitism. Kisch’s literary experimentations, furthermore, suggested ways of thinking about strangers and difference, place and community, in the fin-de-siècle city more broadly.

The event is organized by the Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews with support of the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association, the Consulate General of the Czech Republic in New York and the Leo Baeck Institute.

Suggested donation $10.

About Professor Chad Bryant

Chad Bryant is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an adjunct professor in the Curriculum in Global Studies. He is the author of the recently published Prague: Belonging and the Modern City (Harvard University Press, 2021). The book has been positively reviewed in the Economist and Times Literary Supplement and is co-winner of the Radomír Luža Prize. A Czech translation, published by Argo, is forthcoming.

Professor Bryant is also the author of Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism (Harvard University Press, 2007), winner of the Hans Rosenberg Book Prize. He co-edited, with Arthur Burns and Paul Readman, Walking Histories, 1800-1914 (Palgrave, 2016) and, with Paul Readman and Cynthia Radding, Borderlands in World History, 1700-1914 (Palgrave, 2014). Bryant, Kateřina Čapková, and Diana Dumitru are completing a study of Communist party dynamics and the Slánský show trial in Czechoslovakia that will be published by Oxford University Press. This project has been funded by an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship.