Aside from the soaring beauty of Prague—the visual grace of its architecture, the often subliminally disruptive nature of its art, which I found to be so very compelling—the history of Europe, all its self-inflicted tragedies, is helping us in America’s fight for its soul.

Absurdism and subversion are endemic here. Indeed, they make up the fabric of Czech life at a signal moment in Czech cultural-political history. They merge to become a third, exquisitely sharp, subtle, element in the Czech psyche: hilarity. It threatens the release of chaos into the Bohemian bloodstream.

There is a delicacy to Kimmelman’s language, a gauzy diction that seems to barely hold together, yet allows the subject of inquiry or observation to show through, giving it respectful precedence.