Kafka's Last Trial

by Benjamin Balint

  In September 1915, Kafka noted in his diary: “The pages of the Bible don’t flutter in my presence.” Yet the formidable German-born Israeli scholar Gershom Scholem, for one, read Kafka as a master of Jewish commentary, obsessed with the Law (and its inaccessibility) in a world of accusers and accused in which the Lawgiver has gone missing and (in the Kabbalastic parlance) has “hidden His face.”

  For Kafka knew better than anyone else did how to express that boundary where nihilism and religion meet. That is why his writings, the secularized representation of the sensibility proper to Kabbalah (which he did not know), have, for many readers today, something of the radiance of canonical texts, or of some shattered perfection.

  Convinced that Kafka belongs not so much in the German tradition as “in the continuum of Jewish literature,” Scholem went so far as to accord Kafka’s writings the status of Holy Writ, wrapped (as he said to the German-Jewish publisher Salman Schocken) “in the halo of the canonical.” According to his colleague Alexander Altmann, Scholem “considered Franz Kafka to be the most authentic spokesman of our age. . . . He told his students in the 1930s that before embarking on a study of Kabbala they should first read Kafka.” Scholem announced to the Bavarian Academy of the Arts in 1974 that for him there were three canonical Jewish texts: the Hebrew Bible, the Zohar (the masterpiece of Kabbalah), and the works of Kafka. The latter, if nothing else, are as relentlessly and endlessly interpreted as the first two.

  In a 1929 essay, German-Jewish thinker Margarete Susman (1872–1966) portrays Kafka’s fiction as the last burst of Jewish theodicy before the disintegration of European Jewry, the last link in a literary tradition of quarreling with God [Hader mit Gott] that began with the biblical Book of Job. “God’s silence and its consequences are the ultimate object of Kafka’s art,” she writes. That art, she says, like the Book of Job, expresses the Jewish encounter with divine hiddenness and the incomprehensible suffering. Like Kafka’s protagonists, Job, who suffers a guilt not his own and “prefigures in his fate the sorrowful fate of the Jewish people in exile,” found himself in a trial he could not comprehend.

  Robert Alter, a leading scholar of Hebrew literature at Berkeley, has more recently drawn affinities between Kafka and the Jewish interpretive tradition:

  Had Kafka lived a century or two earlier, had he grown up in a pious milieu with his schooling entirely in the classic Jewish curriculum of sacred texts, his qualities of mind would have made him an excellent Talmudist, a first-rate exegete, and a brilliant weaver of kabbalistic homilies. . . . [He was] one of the keenest readers of the Bible since the masters of the Midrash.

  “Is modern literature Scripture?” Saul Bellow once asked. “Is criticism Talmud, theology?” For some of Kafka’s readers, yes. For them, as for the Israeli judges, Kafka’s alleged appropriation of Jewish texts and themes becomes the cipher to his entire imaginative world.

  Kafka himself would doubtless be more circumspect of such readings. “Many people prowl around Mt. Sinai,” he wrote. If Kafka’s own works have now come to resemble a Holy Scripture, perhaps they are zealously guarded by those who can no longer decipher their mysteries but who remain in awe of their power.

  What in fact did Kafka have in common with the Jews, whether defined as a nation, a race, a religion, or an ethnicity? Were his own ties to them so tenuous and idiosyncratic as to make it impossible to consider his achievement as a Jewish achievement? By what measure can we assess the National Library’s claim to take Kafka as a touchstone of “Jewish culture”?

  _____

  In November 1919, Kafka, then thirty-six years old, took a two-week break from his job at the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute to travel to Schelesen, a Bohemian resort town 20 miles north of Prague. One of only two Jews among the firm’s 260 employees, he set premiums, conducted inspections of work sites, answered countless complaints, and wrote essays on accident prevention. (The Institute’s neo-baroque building on Na Poříčí Street today houses the Hotel Century Old Town Prague.) Though he earned a reputation for diligence and acumen, Kafka chafed against the bureaucratic drudgery. “In the office,” he told Rudolf Steiner, “I fulfill my duties satisfactorily, at least outwardly, but not my inner duties, and every unfulfilled inner duty becomes a misfortune that never budges.”

  Kafka’s destination for this vacation was a boardinghouse that catered to guests with lung ailments. Max Brod joined him there for several days. (“It was so wonderful to be together with you,” Brod wrote on returning to Prague.) When Brod returned to Prague, Kafka, cloistered in his room, poured forth a merciless letter of more than a hundred handwritten pages, the longest he ever wrote. He wrote parts of it in tears. It was addressed to his father.

  Ever since they were granted the Tolerance Charter by Emperor Josef II—the “Mozart Emperor”—Prague’s acculturated Jews had considered themselves part of the German population. Issued in 1781–82, the Tolerance Charter had required Jews to take German names, shave their beards, and enroll their children in state-sponsored German-language schools. But Jews were granted full civic equality only in 1849. Kafka’s father, Hermann (Hebrew name Henoch), burly son of a kosher butcher, typified the first generation of Bohemian Jews after they were emancipated. He enjoyed the right to live in the cities and enter the trades. He had served as a platoon leader in the Austro-Hungarian army for three years (1872–75). He was a man accustomed to giving orders, a self-made and self-satisfied man who had come from the provinces to the capital, Prague, to rise in the world. He had a shop for what was then called “fancy goods” (Galanteriewaren)—parasols, canes, gloves, muffs, buttons, felt slippers, lace underwear, stockings, ribbons, buckles, and other adornments. In the eyes of his son, he was a domineering, unappeasable man. Hermann thought his impractical only son had things too easy. He both belittled his son and expected gratitude from him. Franz associated the paternal Kafka line with “strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, smugness, worldly supremacy, stamina, presence of mind, knowledge of human nature, a kind of lordliness.” At the same time, he describes himself in the letter as a fearful child who “lived under laws that had been invented only for me and which I could never comply with, I did not know why.”

  Kafka told Brod that when he presented his newly published collection of stories, A Country Doctor, to his father, Hermann had said, “Put it on my nightstand,” never to mention it again. Franz’s filial pain had long grated on Brod. (Hermann Kafka once called Brod a “meschuggenen Ritoch”—a crazy hothead.)

  In how many talks did I not try and make clear to my friend—whose deepest wound, I knew, without yet having seen the diary, was just this—how he overestimated his father, and how stupid it is to despise oneself. It was all useless; the torrent of arguments that Franz produced (when he didn’t prefer, as he frequently did, to keep quiet) could really shatter and repel me for a moment.

  Kafka’s parents, like Brod’s, were “four-day Jews”: they attended synagogue on the high holidays and on the birthday of Kaiser Franz Josef I (August 18). In the letter to his father (more like a settling of scores), Kafka describes a crisis of Jewish continuity. He writes that going through the motions during their infrequent and perfunctory visits to synagogue had left him indifferent. Those visits were “merely a social event,” which the father took as a chance to greet “the sons of the millionaire Fuchs.”

  And so I yawned and dozed through the many hours (I don’t think I was ever again so bored, except later at dancing lessons) and did my best to enjoy the few little bits of variety there were, as for instance when the Ark of the Covenant was opened, which always reminded me of the shooting galleries where a cupboard door would open in the same way whenever one hit a bull’s-eye; except that there something interesting always came out and here it was always just the same old dolls without heads. . . . I was not fundamentally disturbed in my boredom, unless it was by the bar mitzvah, but that demanded no more than some ridiculous memorizing.*

  This experience was har
dly uncommon. Brod, too, derided his Jewish education as “mere routine, boredom, something utterly exhausted and spent.” On one occasion, Kafka had discussed with Brod the relation of Jewish sons to their acculturated, bourgeois fathers. “In this case,” he wrote to Brod, “I prefer another approach over psychoanalysis, namely the realization that this father complex that some draw on for intellectual sustenance applies not to the innocent father, but to the father’s Jewishness. Most of those who started to write in German wanted to get away from Judaism, often with their fathers’ ambiguous agreement (this ambiguity was what was really embarrassing); they wanted it, but with their hind legs they were still glued to their fathers’ Judaism and with their front legs they were unable to find new ground.”

  Now, writing to his father as a prosecutor “in this terrible trial that has been pending between us,” Kafka turns accusatory on just this point.

  You still brought along, from your small ghetto-like village, a tiny bit of Judaism. It was not much and some of it got lost in the army and when you came to the city. Still those impressions and memories of your youth sufficed for a bare minimum of a Jewish life, especially for you who are of a robust endowment and did not need much by way of spiritual sustenance and were left cold by religious need if it did not merge with social status.

  “It was conceivable,” Kafka continues, “that we might have found each other in Judaism.” But the flimsy vestiges of Judaism passed on to him, Kafka writes, were “an insufficient scrap . . . a mere nothing, a joke—not even a joke . . . It all dribbled away while you were passing it on.”* In the letter, Kafka three times uses the word Nichts (nothing) to describe the nullity of his father’s religion-by-rote. “In the face of Judaism, Kafka is an exile,” Swiss literary critic Jean Starobinski writes, “albeit one who ceaselessly asks for news of the land he has left.”

  Kafka’s fiction is full of latecomers for whom the old verities have lost meaning. Traditions are on the point of losing their authority—or their decipherability—as they dissolve into incoherence. The hoped-for revelation never comes. So it was in reality. His father’s tradition—like the son’s letter—was a message deadened before it arrived.

  Franz, still living with his parents, felt unable to deliver this exorcism-by-writing, this damning oedipal indictment (almost the mirror image of Flaubert’s affectionate tribute to his father, in the posthumous Souvenirs, notes, pensees intimes). According to Brod, Franz asked his mother, Julie Löwy, to pass the letter on to Hermann. She prudently returned it to her son undelivered, never to mention it again. Kafka stashed the letter into a drawer in his desk, where it remained until Brod discovered it after Kafka’s death.

  For Kafka, the Jews were a people loyal to the law of transmission, but the Jewish message, in its paternal form, had been rendered indecipherable—and incommunicable. He could not recognize himself in its accumulated traditions. And yet his autonomy begins with that failure. Here, the interruption of Jewish patrimony shares something with the emerging sense in Kafka’s writing that modern life is accompanied by the gradual loss of traditional structures of authority, the failure to transmit the father’s word. For Kafka, modernity calls into question the very idea of succession—and our place in its order.

  Kafka described himself as “without forebears, without marriage, without descendants.” He once talked with Felice about the obstacles to raising their children in the Jewish faith. “I would have to tell the children . . . that, as a result of my origins, my education, disposition, environment, I have nothing tangible in common with their faith. . . . You might still be able to give the children at least a sorrowful answer to their question; I could not even do that.”

  Nor did Kafka spare himself the same question. “What have I in common with the Jews?” he asked himself in a diary entry of 1914. “I have hardly anything in common with myself.”

  _____

  Martin Buber’s 1909–10 lectures in Prague left Kafka unimpressed. “It would take more than Buber to get me out of my room,” he writes to Felice Bauer. “I have heard him before, I find him dreary.” But beginning in May 1910, he (like Brod) discovered an unlikely source of vitality: the performances of a Yiddish theater troupe in the Café Savoy on Ziegen Square in Prague’s former ghetto district. In contrast to the more “academic” style of the Bar Kochba group, “this company illuminated for me the true concept of Jewish folklore,” Brod wrote, “terrifying and repulsive yet at the same time magically attractive.”

  At age twenty-eight, eight years before writing the indictment of his father’s moribund Judaism, Kafka became enchanted by a third-rate Yiddish theater troupe of eight actors from Lvov (Lemberg) that performed in Café Savoy. At Brod’s invitation, he attended twenty performances over the next two years—melodramas, tearjerkers, operettas, and comedies. Among the fourteen plays he saw were Jacob Gordin’s play about the late first-century heretic Elisha ben Abuya, Avrom Goldfaden’s historical dramas Shulamith and Bar Kochba, Zygmund Faynman’s play The Vice-King, and what a review in the weekly Selbstwehr called “not entirely tasteful cabaret.”

  The café was tawdry, its doorman a part-time pimp. Yet the burlesque performances “made my cheeks tremble,” Kafka said. The actors who roamed the green-curtained narrow stage seemed at times self-sufficient and self-absorbed, drawn into their own magic circle as if unaware of their spectators, as if the curtain had never parted.

  Kafka would fill over a hundred pages in his diary—some of the most enchanting pages, in fact—with incandescent accounts of these Yiddish actors and the plays they staged. They presented something more than the spectacle of a pathos. He was impressed by their authenticity and “vigor” (urwuerchsigkeit), and by the ironic idiom itself—in which high and low, biblical and vernacular rattled against each other. Here Kafka caught a first glimpse of an unself-conscious, living Eastern European Jewish culture; a culture free of the contrived qualities of his father’s Judaism.

  This is not something the Yiddish actors intended to convey. They did not wish to use the stage to instruct or impart a message to their spectators. They were not pedagogues. And yet something in the theater’s logic of transmission clicked for Kafka.

  “The history of cultural encounters,” writes Kafka scholar Ritchie Robertson, “can probably show few transformations so abrupt as the reversal in the attitudes of successive generations of Western Jews to their Eastern counterparts.” The narrator of Saul Bellow’s story “Cousins” (1975) refers to “the nearness of ghettos to the sphere of Revelation, an easy move for the mind from rotting streets and rancid dishes, a direct ascent into transcendence. This of course was the situation of Eastern Jews. The Western ones were prancing and preening like learned Germans.”

  Two of the troupe’s actors embodied that East-West contrast for Kafka. The first object of his infatuation was a thirty-year-old actress-singer named Millie Tshissik. “Yesterday her body was more beautiful than her face . . . she reminded me vaguely of hybrid beings like mermaids, sirens, centaurs.” Her exaggerated theatrical gestures transfixed him: “the hand pressed at the depth of the shabby bodice, short jerks of the shoulders and hips when expressing scorn. . . . Her way of walking is somewhat ceremonious since she has the habit of slowly lifting, extending, and moving her long arms. Especially when she was singing the Jewish national anthem, moving her hips with her arms. . . .” When they met backstage, Kafka could not look Millie in the eye, he notes in his diary, “because that would have shown that I love her.” After one performance, Kafka presented her with flowers. “I had hoped that the bouquet would somewhat appease my love for her. It didn’t. Only literature or coitus can satisfy it.”

  A second member of the troupe caught Kafka’s eye: a Warsaw-born actor living from hand-to-mouth named Yitzhak Löwy. One night, instead of acting, Löwy gave a reading: a short story by I. L. Peretz, humorous sketches by Sholem Aleichem, and a Yiddish rendition of H. N. Bialik’s scathing poem about the Kishinev pogroms of 1903, “In the City of Slaughter” (In Shkhi
te Shtot). “After the reading,” Kafka wrote, “while still on my way home, I felt all my abilities concentrated.” Years later, the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer described meeting Löwy, by then calling himself Jacques Levi. “[Kafka] came backstage,” the aging actor told Singer, “and the moment I saw him I knew that I was in the presence of genius. I could smell it the way a cat smells a mouse.”*

  Hermann Kafka, like a self-made man embarrassed by poor relatives, held his son’s new Eastern European Jewish friends in low esteem. He considered Löwy a vagabond, a disreputable Ostjude (Eastern European Jew). When Kafka invited Löwy home, Hermann “gave himself sarcastic shakes, cut grimaces, and started talking about how just about anybody was being let into the house.”

  In the undelivered letter, Kafka reproaches his father for holding the Yiddish actor in such contempt. “Without knowing him you compared him, in some dreadful way that I have now forgotten, to vermin.” (Here Kafka uses the same word, Ungeziefer, that he used to describe his character Gregor Samsa in the opening line of “The Metamorphosis,” the novella he wrote in late 1912 and published, with Brod’s help, in October 1915: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” Löwy would be deported to Treblinka in 1942.)† “Through my agency,” Kafka adds, “Judaism became revolting to you, Jewish writings unreadable, they ‘disgusted’ you.” If the father had earlier made Judaism impossible for the son, now the son was making Judaism impossible for the father.

  The Yiddish theater taught the son that the father’s will concerning Judaism need not be the first and last word; it opened to Kafka another way of thinking Jewishness, an alternative to the paternal patrimony.