A novel condemned to oblivion at the moment of its creation, with an uncertain and absurd title as life can be and was in Czechoslovakia of the 1940s, Mendelssohn is on the roof of the Czech-speaking Jewish writer Jiří Weil (1900-1959) reappears in French, two decades after its author's introduction in France with Vivre avec une étoiles (published in Prague in 1949, translated by Editions Denoël in 1992).