Author
JIRI ROBERT PICK (Playwright) (1925 –1983) lived in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and was best known for writing plays and satirical sketches, poems and epigrams. He published nine books, including the semi-autobiographical novel THE SOCIETY FOR THE PROTECTION OF ANIMALS which was first published in Prague in 1969 and reissued in 1996. Both this novel and theplay THE UNLUCKY MAN IN THE YELLOW CAP were based on the writer’s experiences in the Terezin ghetto where he was imprisoned as a teenager. Among Pick’s plays were also several comedies which he wrote in the 1960s for the Prague Paravan Theater which he had founded and where he was the artistic director. In later years, however, with the exception of his Terezin plays, (THE UNLUCKY MAN IN THE YELLOW CAP was produced a number of times in Czechoslovakia) all of J.R.Pick’s work was banned by the Communist regime from 1969 until the fall of the Communist government in 1989.
J.R.Pick, spent two years in Terezin. When the war came to an end and he was liberated, he was 20 years old. In his writing he often saw irony and humor in the darkest of events, he loved to make people laugh.
