Despite three failed engagements, Kafka never married. Yet he was not without such confidential support; there were, in fact, three loyally solicitous persons who took on a wifely role: his sister Ottla, Max Brod, and, at the close of his life, Dora Diamant. Ottla and Kafka had, early on, an obstacle in common—Hermann Kafka and his resistance to their independence. The monstrous (in size and in force) J’accuse that the son addressed, though never delivered, to the father now stands as yet another canonical work. Ottla’s more quiet eruption came through stubborn acts of autonomy; unlike Kafka, she left behind both the family apartment and her role in the family economy. Hermann Kafka might mock his Czech employees as “my paid enemies,” but Ottla chose to marry a Czech. And when the domestic commotion became unsustainable for Kafka’s work, she gave him the use of the little neighborhood hideaway she had privately acquired. When his tuberculosis began to advance, and he declined to be admitted to yet another sanitorium (there were many such recuperative sojourns), with wifely devotion she cared for him at the longed-for farm she finally secured in the remote village of Zürau, where Kafka felt uncommonly serene. “I live with Ottla in a good little marriage,” he assured Brod.
Brod was Kafka’s confidant and champion, first reader, and also first listener: despite reticence and self-denigration, Kafka relished reading his work to friends. It was Brod who pushed Kafka to publish, pursuing skeptical editors on his behalf. “I personally consider Kafka (along with Gerhart Hauptmann and Hamsun) the greatest living writer!” he exclaimed to Martin Buber. “What I wouldn’t do to make him more active!” Brod was himself energetic on many fronts: he turned out novels, plays, polemics, political broadsides; he ran to meetings for this cause and that; he labored to bridge the divide between Germans and Czechs; he promoted Czech writers and composers; and with Kafka (though not so diligently) he studied Hebrew. The two friends traveled to Weimar to visit Goethe’s house, where each drew a sketch of the house and garden, and Kafka was all at once infatuated with the caretaker’s young daughter.
But increasingly, Kafka’s excursions away from Prague were solitary journeys to health resorts and tuberculosis sanitoriums; and inexorably in step with these, Stach’s later chapters hurtle through harrowing episodes of fever, relentless coughing, days forcibly spent in bed, and finally, when the disease spread to the larynx, the threat of suffocation. Brod, always Kafka’s anxious guardian, pressed him from the first to see the proper specialist and undertake the proper treatment. Kafka himself was oddly unperturbed: he believed that a psychosomatic element was the cause, and that, as he wrote to Ottla, “there is undoubtedly justice in this illness.” As his condition worsened, he was compelled to give up his position at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Company—which, like much of postwar Europe, was undergoing a political transformation. Habsburg officialdom was now replaced by Czech officialdom, in Munich swastikas were flying, and in Prague the decibels of anti-Semitism rang shriller. Hermann Kafka, uneasy in the company of his paid enemies, closed up his shop.
In the summer of 1923, Kafka—already seriously beginning to fail—entered into what can only be called a marriage, even if it had no official sanction and may never have been sexually consummated. It was his most daring personal commitment, and the only one untroubled by vacillation or doubts. Dora Diamant was twenty-five years old, the daughter of a rigidly observant Polish Hasidic family loyal to the dynastic rebbe of Ger. Though Zionism was frowned on as dangerously secular, Dora found her way to the writings of Theodor Herzl, broke from the constrictions of her background, and settled in Berlin. Here she worked with the children of the Jewish Home, the very institution Kafka had been so moved by in the past (and had pressed hard for Felice to support as a volunteer). Berlin was in chaos, reeling under strikes, riots, food shortages, and massive inflation. Despite every predictable discomfort and gravely diminishing funds, it was into this maelstrom that Kafka came to join Dora for one of the most tranquil intervals of his life. Half earnestly, half fancifully, they spoke of a future in Palestine, where, to make ends meet, together they would open a little restaurant. But the fevers continued to accelerate, and while Dora nursed him with singular tenderness, it became clear, especially under pressure from the family in Prague, that he was in urgent need of professional care. Another sanitorium followed, and then a hospital specializing in diseases of the larynx, always with Dora hovering protectively near. By now Kafka’s suffering had intensified: unable to speak, he communicated on slips of paper; unable to swallow food, he was facing actual starvation, even as he struggled over proofs of “The Hunger Artist.” At the last he pleaded for a lethal dose of morphine, warning—Kafka’s deliberate paradox of the final paroxysm—that to be deprived of his death would count as murder. With Tolstoyan power, Stach carries us through these sorrowful cadences; the reader is left grieving.
Ottla; Hermann Kafka; Felice; Milena; Dora. They are, ultimately, no more than arresting figures in a biography. When the book is shut, their life-shaping influences evaporate. Not so Max Brod. He became—and remains—a lasting force in Kafka’s posthumous destiny. In disobeying his friend’s firm request to destroy the existing body of his unpublished manuscripts and to prevent further dissemination of those already in print, Brod assured the survival of the work of an unparalleled literary master. Solely because of this proprietary betrayal, The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika (Brod’s title for The Man Who Disappeared) live on; had there been no Brod, there would be no Kafka as we now read him. (And had Brod not fled German-occupied Prague for Tel Aviv in 1939, there would today not be a substantial cache of still unvetted manuscripts preserved in an Israeli national archive. It is from this trove that Stach’s yet-to-be-published final volume will be drawn.) Savior though he was, Brod also manipulated whatever came into his hands. He invented titles for what was left untitled. He organized loose chapters into a sequence of his own devising. Having taken on the role of Kafka’s authentic representative, he argued for what he believed to be the authoritative interpretation of Kafka’s inmost meanings.
Stach ventures no such defining conviction. Instead, he ruminates and speculates, not as a zealously theorizing critic, but as a devoted literary sympathizer who has probed as far as is feasible into the concealments of Kafka’s psyche. Often he stops to admit that “we cannot know.” In contemplating the work, he tentatively supposes and experientially exposes. He eschews the false empyrean, and will never look to transcend the ground that both moored and unmoored his subject. In this honest and honorable biography there is no trace of the Kafkaesque; but in it you may find a crystal granule of the Kafka that was.
Nobility Eclipsed
On December 17, 2007, on the storied stage of the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York, the Hebrew language—its essence, its structure, its metaphysic—entered American discourse in so urgent a manner as to renew, if not to inflame, an ancient argument. The occasion was a public conversation between Marilynne Robinson and Robert Alter: a not uncommon match of novelist with literary scholar. In this instance, though, the scholar is an English Department anomaly: not only a master of the Anglo-American corpus, but a profoundly engaged Hebraist and Bible translator and expositor, whose newly published volume of Englished Psalms is the evening’s subject. The novelist too is exceptional among her contemporaries—a writer of religious inclination, open to history and wit, yet not dogged by piety, if piety implies an unthinking mechanics of belief. Robinson may rightly be termed a Protestant novelist, in a way we might hesitate to characterize even the consciously Protestant Updike. Certainly it is impossible to conceive of any other American writer of fiction who could be drawn, as Robinson has been drawn, to an illuminating reconsideration of Calvinism.
Protestant and Jew, writer and translator: such a juxtaposition is already an argument. The expectation of one may not be the expectation of the other. The novelist’s intuition for the sacred differs from the translator’s interrogation of the sacred. And beyond this disparity stands the inveterate perp
lexity, for English speakers, of the seventeenth-century biblical sonorities of the King James Version: can they, should they, be cast out as superannuated? The question is not so much whether the KJV can be surpassed as whether it can be escaped. From that very platform where Robinson and Alter sit amiably contending, a procession of the great modernists of the twentieth century (among them Eliot and Auden and Marianne Moore and Dylan Thomas) once sent out their indelible voices—voices inexorably reflecting the pulsings and locutions that are the KJV’s venerable legacy to poets. And not only to poets: everyone for whom English is a mother tongue is indebted to the idiom and cadences of the KJV. For Americans, they are the Bible, and the Bible, even now, remains a commanding thread in the American language.
It is that thread, or call it a bright ribbon of feeling, that animates Robinson as she confronts Alter’s rendering of Psalm 30, marveling at its “sacred quality of being,” and at the psalmist’s “I, this amazing universal human singular who integrates experience and interprets it profoundly. Any translation,” she concludes, “is always another testimony.” Here the novelist invokes exaltation in phrases that are themselves exalting, as if dazzled by a vast inner light washing out both the visual and the tactile: hence “testimony,” an ecstatic internal urge. But Alter responds with an illustration that hints at dissent. The KJV, he points out, has “I will extol thee, O Lord; for thou hast lifted me up,” while for “lifted me up” Alter chooses, instead, “drawn me up.” The Hebrew word dolah, he explains, refers to drawing water from a well; the image is of a bottomless crevasse in the earth, fearfully identified in a later verse as “the Pit.” Rather than turning inward, the translator uncovers sacral presence in the concrete meaning of the Hebrew, so that the metaphor of the well instantly seizes on weight and depth and muscle. Which approach is truer, which more authentic?
This, then, is the marrow—the unacknowledged pit—of the argument. And it becomes explicit only moments afterward, in Robinson’s beautiful recitation of Alter’s translation of Psalm 8, followed by Alter’s reading of the Hebrew original. The contrast in sound is so arresting that Robinson is asked to comment on it. She hesitates: it is clear that to American ears the Hebrew guttural is as uncongenial as it is unfamiliar. Diffidently, courteously, she responds, “I have no Hebrew.” “Well, I have,” says Alter.
And there it is, the awful cut exposed: the baleful question of birthright. The translator asserts his possession of the language of the Psalms; is this equal to a claim that he alone is their rightful heir? Perhaps yes; but also perhaps not. The novelist, meanwhile, has embraced and passionately internalized those selfsame verses, though in their English dress—then is she too not a genuine heir to their intimacies and majesties? Never mind that Alter, wryly qualifying, goes on to address the issue of vocal disparity: “And if anyone thinks,” he points out, “that he is reproducing the sound of Hebrew in English, he is seriously deluded.” A translator’s gesture of humility—the two musical systems cannot be made to meet; it cannot be done. But this comes as an aside and a distraction. What continues to hang in the air is Alter’s emphatic declaration of ownership.
Hebrew in America has a bemusing past. The Puritans, out of scriptural piety, once dreamed of establishing Hebrew as the national language. Harvard and Yale in their early years required the study of Hebrew together with Latin and Greek; Yale even now retains its Hebrew motto. Divinity school Hebrew may be diminished, but endures. And though the Hebrew Bible is embedded in the Old Testament, its native tongue is silenced. “We have no Hebrew,” admits biblically faithful America. Then can Hebrew, however unheard, be said to be an integral American birthright? Was Alter, on that uneasy evening in New York, enacting a kind of triumphalism, or was he, instead, urging a deeper affinity? Deeper, because the well of Hebrew yields more than the transports of what we have come to call the “spiritual.” Send down a bucket, and up comes a manifold history—the history of a particular people, but also the history of the language itself. An old, old tongue, the enduring vehicle of study and scholarship, public liturgy and private prayer, geographically displaced and dispersed but never abandoned, never fallen into irretrievable disuse, continually renewed, and at the last restored to the utilitarian and the commonplace. Hebrew as a contemporary language, especially for poetry, is no longer the language of the Bible; but neither is it not the language of the Bible. And despite translation’s heroic bridging, despite its every effort to narrow the idiomatic divide by disclosing the true names of things (the word itself, not merely the halo of the word), we may never see an America steeped in Hebrew melodies.
Yet once, for a little time, we did.
There was a period, in the first half of the twentieth century, when America—the land, its literature, its varied inhabitants and their histories—was sung in the Hebrew alphabet. Long epic poems on American Indians, the California Gold Rush, the predicament and religious expression of blacks in the American South, the farms and villages and churchgoers of New England, the landscape of Maine—these were the Whitmanesque explorations and celebrations of a rapturous cenacle of Hebrew poets who flourished from before the First World War until the aftermath of the Second. But both “cenacle” and “flourished” must be severely qualified. Strewn as they were among a handful of cities—New York, Cleveland, Boston, Baltimore, Chicago—they rarely met as an established group; and if they flourished, it was in driven pursuit of an elitist art sequestered in nearly hermetic obscurity. They were more a fever and a flowering than a movement: they issued neither pronouncements nor provocations. They had no unified credo. What they had was Hebrew—Hebrew for its own sake, Hebrew as a burning bush in the brain. Apart from those sociohistoric narratives on purely American themes, they also wrote in a lyrical vein, or a metaphysical, or a romantic. Though modernism was accelerating all around them, and had taken root through European influences in the burgeoning Hebrew poetry of Palestine/Israel, the American Hebraists almost uniformly turned away from the staccato innovations of the modernists. They were, with one or two exceptions, classicists who repudiated make-it-new manifestos as a type of reductive barbarism. Rather than pare the language down, or compress it through imagism and other prosodic maneuvers, they sought to plumb its inexhaustible deeps. And when their hour of conflagration ebbed, it was not only because their readers were destined to be few. Hebrew had returned to its natural home in a Hebrew-speaking polity; many of the poets followed.
Who, then, were these possessed and unheralded aristocrats, these priestly celebrants unencumbered by a congregation, these monarchs in want of a kingdom? If, in retrospect, they seem no more than a Diaspora chimera, the fault may be ours: we have no Hebrew. Even so, in a revelatory work of scholarly grandeur that is in itself a hymn to Hebrew, Alan Mintz, professor of Hebrew literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary, has revivified both the period and the poets. The capacious volume he calls Sanctuary in the Wilderness is history, biography, translation, criticism, and more—a “more” that is, after all, an evocation of regret. The regret is pervasive and tragic. Think not of some mute inglorious Milton, but of a living and achieving Milton set down in a society of illiterates unable to decipher so much as abc, and unaware of either the poet’s presence or his significance. Yet Mintz never condescends; with honorable diffidence, he repeatedly refers to this majestic study as merely introductory, an opening for others to come.
Here let me offer a far smaller opening into that long-ago reach for the sublime. From a shelf harboring a row of bilingual Yiddish and Hebrew dictionaries, I pluck out a curious little Hebrew book that has journeyed with me since childhood. It is so old that its pages are brittle and browning at the margins. The brownish-gray cover announces title and provenance: RIVON KATAN, A Little Quarterly of POETRY and THOUGHT, Volume I, Number 1. Issued by the Hebrew Poetry Society of America. Three Dollars Yearly. Spring, 5704 (1944). Editor: A. Regelson. As for the table of contents, its preoccupations and aspirations are self-evident:
Henry A. Wallace: The Ce
ntury of the Common Man
N. Touroff: Can a Nation Become Insane?
S. Hillel: Leo Tolstoy
Ben Hanagar: Walt Whitman’s Native Island
Elinor Wylie: Velasquez (Hebrew by G. Preil)
A. Regelson: The Poetry of Ibn Gabirol
A. Regelson: Saul Tchernichovsky
Ilya Ehrenberg: Plant and Child
Henry Wallace, Elinor Wylie, and Ilya Ehrenberg, all declaiming in Hebrew! And the Hebrew Poetry Society of America? It may be that A. [Abraham] Regelson, all on his own, comprised president, secretary, translation committee, and possibly the entire membership. Striving publications of this kind proliferated, many of larger note and longer duration. Most appeared exclusively in Hebrew, bearing redolent names: Haderor (“The Swallow”), Hatoren (“The Mast”), Miqlat (“Refuge”)—although Hadoar (“The Post”), despite its more mundane designation and wider circulation, was as amply literary as the others.
Like the editor of the Little Quarterly, the poets who filled these periodicals were, without exception, a part of the great flood of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Eastern European Jewish immigration. Arriving as children or adolescents or in their early twenties, they came with a traditional Hebrew grounding behind them and an American education before them; and since their foundational tongue was Yiddish, they soon were easily and fluently trilingual. But to describe them merely as trilingual is to obscure their mastery. Any one of these poets might have leaped, if he chose, into the vigorous roil of Yiddish belles lettres and its thriving American journals. Or, even more prominently, there was the possibility of aspiring to the canon of English-language poets—to stand, in that era, beside Edwin Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, and Robinson Jeffers.
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