It lies next to the cemetery, which dates from the 1400s to 1787, and the tens of thousands of graves, some of them quite fascinating, are in some places several layers deep. We also saw the Moorish Spanish Synagogue, but it is not yet open to the public. There is Judaica for sale in several gift shops in the area and some store signs are even in Hebrew. As usual, it was in a cellar tavern, where your drinks are marked down on a slip of paper and you pay on your way out. The town, however, laid out on a grid, did not recover most of its expelled original residents and was eerily deserted.
Block numbers are still barely visible on the corners of some of the town's buildings.
The only discordant note on Prague was a late-night conversation Julie had on the tram with a Czech man who asked her if she had read any Czech writers. Only Kafka and Kundera, she answered. Oh, Kafka wrote as a Jew, not a Czech, he answered. The cantor, Stein, had earlier given us a nice tour of the Remuh Synagogue and the cemetery next door and chatted with us after services. In several locations, we saw grafitti with the Polish word for Jew in it and a few swastikas and Maganei David.