My half-sister Bonnie messages me to say she and her son David, his wife Jessica and their two boys, Aden and Leon, are coming to discover their Czech roots for Spring Break. ‘And we can’t do it without you!’ Spring Break? That’s impossible I say – three stops in five days with jet lag! Plus it’s Easter week so it will be crowded!

So it is a few weeks later I find myself at terminal 3 in Pret meeting Bonnie, Jess and the boys – David has gone to Germany to see an old friend before boarding a flight to Prague. Jess, as I am to discover, is the queen of organisation: on arrival she has loaded the Bolt app and we get a mini-van to our Airbnb apartment right in the centre of the Old Town. Amazing location and Bonnie and I get our own rooms! David has already arrived and we dump our bags and repair for their first encounter with stodgy Czech food at the hostelry opposite.

Jess has, on my advice, pre-booked a tour of the main Czech synagogues in Josevov, the Jewish quarter. The primary objective is to find the names of the Ungar and Stransky families on the walls of the Pinkas synagogue. It brings home to the boys, in particular, the enormity of the Holocaust on the Czech Jews, as we are surrounded by the names of those who were murdered, beautifully inscribed on the walls of the synagogue. It had to be re-done after the Communist era when the synagogue was closed. Religion was banned.

En route we admire the Astronomical clock as it strikes the hour with the extraordinary mechanical figures who rotate with the chimes. We pass by the site of the Café Continental, now long gone, where our grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather Hermann Ungar would take his morning coffee.

We are hugely disappointed to find that the promised Hermann Ungar display in the Spanish Synagogue is missing from the cabinet of famous Jewish writers (Kafka of course ubiquitous) and that the display of two of our Rabbinical  ancestors (both Great High Rabbis of Prague) as reduced to one, Yekhezkel ba Hoda Bi Yhuda Landau 1713-1793); R Shmuel Halevi Landau  1756-1834 is AWOL: but we get our money’s worth as Yekhezkel is replicated in the Maisel Synagogue. He as after all one of the most famous Rabbis…as I tell anyone who questions my heritage – it is an illustrious lineage, direct descendants by eight and seven generations respectively, via Hermann’s mother Jeannette Kohn.

Lunch is a hot dog in the Old Town Square, followed by dessert in the Louvre café – Sacher torte, hot chocolate, ice cream and strudel of course. Hermann used to watch the billiard players as he sipped coffee and ate an egg in a glass, faithfully recounted in The Maimed and in his short story, The Bank Official. Here Bonnie finds a secret message on the table from Kafka. She’s very tickled.

Replete, we bimble (Bonnie and David’s favourite word acquired in Namibia) along the river bank, to the Masaryk Quay for a photo opp outside Grete Ungar’s apartment, where she sold lingerie, and where she brought up Dad and Uncle Alec following Hermann’s untimely death in 1929, aged 36. It is opposite where we scattered Dad’s ashes.

We are meant to be meeting dear friend and genealogist Julius Muller for supper, but at the last minute he has to pull out as he has flu. So instead of the rather fancy place we had booked, we sample another Czech meal in the Old Town. I’m not sure David is over impressed with svickova (national dish and Dad’s favourite, boiled beef in cream sauce); Bonnie stuck to Prague ham while the rest of us had schnitzels with cucumber salad, much nicer!

On return from another bimble round the Old Town, there is an unfolding drama. It appears US drivers require an international licence to rent a car – and no one has one. I haven’t brought any sort of driving licence. David, who is a very chilled chap, seems unperturbed – ‘it’ll be fine’- but the ladies are concerned. The plan is that David and Jess will go at 8 am to pick up the van and hope it’s ok! I’m a worrier (the Unwin gene from Hermann and Dad), so I go to bed feeling very anxious – my big day is tomorrow, the talk about Hermann at the book launch of the Czech translation of The Maimed, organised by the eponymous teashop in Boskovice. And I must be there!

I need a Plan B which I come up with late in the night – if the worst comes to the worst, we will get a Bolt – £350 for all of us. With that I go to sleep…

To be continued!