"Well, I'm off to the Land of the Round Doorknobs,'' Alan Levy always said as a way of parting before one of his occasional trips back to the United States. It was partly a benediction to himself and also a way to say, "OK, I'm going back to that place where I used to live but don't consider home. I can't wait to get back."

I've never met another foreigner who gave more of his soul over to Prague than Alan. Bitterly sad at being kicked out of the country after the 1968 invasion, he lived in seeming exile in Vienna until he could return in 1990, and then rarely strayed, like a homesick sailor who felt he had a lot of catching up to do because of all those years at sea.

I met him shortly after he had been tapped to become editor-in-chief and was hiring for the first staff of The Prague Post in the late summer of 1991. I was impressed that he asked me for a résumé and whether I had actually written anything before — it was a sign they were serious about producing a quality newspaper. I had read his book Rowboat to Prague (now reprinted as So Many Heroes), about the Warsaw Pact invasion, and had seen it around town. The signals looked good.

And so we went to work. It was often an immensely difficult challenge building a newspaper from scratch in a city that lacked proper printers, phone lines, darkroom facilities — much less any kind of conception of what a free press really was supposed to be. Because of his book and his experiences as a reporter for The New York Times during Prague Spring, he gave our fledgling publication a gravitas that otherwise would have been impossible to attain.

Alan left his mark on the paper and the city from the first press conference we had to announce our debut to a decidedly skeptical audience.

"We are living in the Left Bank of the 1990s," he said, reading from a prepared text. "For some of us, Prague is Second Chance City; for others, a new frontier where anything goes, everything goes, and, often enough, nothing works. Yesterday is long gone, today is nebulous, and who knows about tomorrow, but, somewhere within each of us, we all know that we are living in a historic place at a historic time."

In the distance, I swear I could hear the sound of passports being stamped, backpacks being filled and trust funds being raided to pay for a hop across the pond in search of cheap beer, an artist's carefree life and an escape from McJobs and an increasingly banal way of life.

Alan invited them, and, man, did they come. By the planeload. The future Hemingways, Picassos and Gertrude Steins quickly filled our waiting rooms and spilled out into the stairways. Sometimes they contributed; often they were just a distraction. The legend grew, and soon CBS, NBC, MTV, the BBC and every small American hometown newspaper had descended upon us in search of the "Left Bank of the 1990s." Our one fax machine groaned as it spat out résumé after résumé from youth dreaming of "making the scene." Ah, Die Zeitgeist!

Alan rose to the moment, becoming something of the stage manager in a version of Our Town rewritten for Prague, as well as equal parts den mother and rabbi to the paper and the denizens of America's youth who were now shacking up in the city. Shambolic, rumpled, always slightly stuttering, he was the owner of a perpetually disorganized desk — even by the normally messy standards of our business — that was a no-go zone for cleaners and anyone who feared disturbing the objets trouves that nested in the small work area.

In the spirit of the classic reporter, he was also an admitted "cheap guy" who could regale people with stories of free meals noshed, parties crashed and famous people encountered while on the job. He loved playing teacher and mentor to the armies of unskilled, untutored "reporters" we hired in the early days, and was giving of his time, either in a café (you pick up the check, please) or at his home, where his hundreds of books about Czechoslovakia were the envy of any serious student of the history and culture.

Alan could be maddening, pedantic and unwilling to budge over almost every element of the copy, especially when it came to editing his own column. He also put his heart and soul into the paper and remained at his desk as long as the other key editors, most of whom were young enough to be his own children or grandchildren. The paper was his life from day one, and he helped keep the atmosphere light, even when it became demented.

It was a quiet Sunday afternoon around The Prague Post when one poor American lass, insanely hungover after several consecutive nights out on the town and of already unstable mental footing, became unhinged and screamed, "I THINK I HAVE FOUND JESUS. AND I LOVE IT!" Sitting alone in a nearby room where he was proofreading copy, Alan retorted, almost as loudly, "AND I JUST FOUND A STRAY COMMA. AND I LOVE IT!"

He seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of Czech friends drawn from every nook and cranny of the pre-1968 period. From time to time they would appear, often elegantly dressed and seemingly beamed in from another era, to greet him or to sit for a profile.

"Eeeeezzzz Meeester Levy here?" they would croak, blinking in surprise at the odd collection of characters we had managed to persuade to show up in the newsroom on a daily basis. Alan would emerge from behind his blizzard of papers in the corner and spirit them away. A few weeks later, a "Prague Profile" would appear about the person, who turned out actually to be perhaps a long-forgotten poet, painter, aristocrat, chef, dancer, clown, Holocaust survivor or member of the 1945 uprising.

"These are the interesting ones to me," Alan told me once. "Forget about politicians like Václav Klaus. They're small. These are the people who we need to focus on, the ones who really fashioned personal history here."

The mania surrounding the "Left Bank of the '90s" eventually ebbed as the city became more expensive and the novelty faded. The paper has endured, and, until his final illness, Alan remained a welcoming presence, happy to exhort those around him to abandon their ideas of going back home. He later coined the term "RexPats" to describe the foreigners who came to Prague, left, and then returned again because they couldn't get enough.

"Welcome back," he told a friend of mine who had checked in for another stint in town. "You belong here."

I last saw Alan in the spring of 1995 after I had moved to New York City. He was in town to give a reading at the Czech Cultural Center on Madison Avenue. The next day, we lunched at a diner. We exchanged books — by some quirk we both had published the same month — and chatted about the paper. At that time I had no plans to return to the Czech Republic and was relishing life in the "Land of the Round Doorknobs." He regarded me warily, like some sort of unreliable gold prospector who had decamped when there was still a fortune to be made. "Well, New York is interesting — I worked here, after all," he said. "But I will die in Prague."

We parted ways somewhere on the East Side of Manhattan. "If I had known you were going to pick up the check, I would have ordered more," he said, smiling. Vintage Alan. He waved, walked off, and I never saw him again.

I said at his memorial that Alan did what writers always hope to do: coin a phrase that becomes a part of the language. He not only brought the phrase "Left Bank of the '90s" into the vernacular, thus inspiring many young people to put off real life in favor of some time in Prague, he also celebrated it till the day he died.

I think about him a lot when I am walking through the meandering streets here. "Don't forget how beautiful this city is," he said. "Remember the buildings. It's easy to get buried in everyday life. Always look up!" The other night as I was heading home I remembered his advice. I looked up and was standing in front of the Powder Tower. Thanks, Alan!