by Franz Kafka
A second example: Yesterday evening I simultaneously held out both my hands to my two sisters-in-law on Mariengasse with a degree of adroitness as if they were two right hands and I a double person.
21 October. A counter-example: When my boss confers with me about office matters (today the filing-cabinet), I cannot look him in the eye for long without there coming into my eyes against my will a slight bitterness which forces either my look or his away. His look yields more briefly but more often to every impulse to look away, since he is not aware of the reason, but his glance immediately returns as he considers it all only a momentary fatigue of his eyes. I defend myself against it more vigorously, therefore hasten the zigzagging of my glance, look by preference along his nose and across to the shadows of his cheeks, often only keep my face towards him by the aid of the teeth and tongue in my tight-shut mouth – when I must, I lower my eyes, to be sure, but never farther than to his tie, but get the most direct look immediately after he turns his eyes away, when I follow him closely and without consideration.
The Jewish actors. Mrs Tschissik has protuberances on her cheeks near her mouth. Caused in part by hollow cheeks as a result of the pains of hunger, childbed, journeys, and acting, in part by the relaxed unusual muscles she had to develop for the actor’s movements of her large, what originally must have been a heavy mouth. Most of the time, as Sulamith, she wore her hair loose, which covered her cheeks so that her face sometimes looked like the face of a girl out of the past. She has a large, bony, moderately robust body and is tightly laced. Her walk easily takes on a solemnity since she has the habit of raising, stretching and slowly moving her long arms. Especially when she sang the Jewish national anthem, gently rocked her large hips and moved her arms, bent parallel to her hips, up and down with hands cupped as though she were playing with a slowly flying ball.
22 October. Yesterday with the Jews. Kol Nidre by Scharkansky, pretty bad play with a good, witty letter-writing scene, a prayer by the lovers standing up beside each other with hands clasped, the converted Grand Inquisitor pressing himself against the curtain of the Ark of the Covenant, he mounts the stairs and remains standing there, his head bowed, his lips against the curtain, holds the prayer book before his chattering teeth. For the first time on this fourth evening my distinct inability to get a clear impression. Our large company and the visits at my sisters’ table were also responsible for it. Nevertheless, I needn’t have been so weak. With my love for Mrs Ts., who only thanks to Max sat beside me, I behaved wretchedly. I’ll recover again, however, even now I feel better.
Mrs Tschissik (I enjoy writing the name so much) likes to bow her head at the table even while eating roast goose, you believe you can get in under her eyelids with your glance if you first carefully look along her cheeks and then, making yourself small, slip in, in doing which you don’t even first have to raise the lids, for they are raised and even let a bluish gleam through which lures you on to the attempt. Out of her truthful acting flourishes of her fist now and then emerge, turns of her arm that drape invisible trains about her body; she places her outspread fingers on her breast because the artless shriek does not suffice. Her acting is not varied: the frightened look at her antagonist, the seeking for a way out on the small stage, the soft voice that, without being raised, mounts heroically in even, short ascents aided only by a greater inner resonance, the joy that spreads through her face across her high forehead into her hair; the self-sufficiency and independence of all other means when she sings solos, the holding herself erect when she resists that compels’ the spectator to devote his attention to her whole body – but not much more. But there is the truth of the whole and as a result the conviction that the least of her effects cannot be taken from her, that she is independent of the play and of us.
The sympathy we have for these actors who are so good, who earn nothing and who do not get nearly enough gratitude and fame is really only sympathy for the sad fate of many noble strivings, above all of our own. Therefore, too, it is so immoderately strong, because on the surface it is attached to strangers and in reality belongs to us. Nevertheless, in spite of everything, it is so closely bound up with the actors that I cannot disengage it even now. Because I recognize this and in spite of it this sympathy attaches itself even more closely to them.
The striking smoothness of Mrs Tschissik’s cheeks alongside her muscular mouth. Her somewhat shapeless little girl.
Walking with Löwy and my sister for three hours.
23 October. The actors by their presence always convince me to my horror that most of what I’ve written about them until now is false. It is false because I write about them with steadfast love (even now, while I write it down, this too becomes false) but varying ability, and this varying ability does not hit off the real actors loudly and correctly but loses itself dully in this love that will never be satisfied with the ability and therefore thinks it is protecting the actors by preventing this ability from exercising itself.
Quarrel between Tschissik and Löwy. Ts.: Edelstatt is the greatest Jewish writer. He is sublime. Rosenfeld is of course also a great writer, but not the foremost. Löwy: Ts. is a socialist and because Edelstatt writes socialist poems, because he is editor of a Jewish socialist newspaper in London, therefore Ts. considers him the greatest. But who is Edelstatt, his party knows him, no one else, but the world knows Rosenfeld. – Ts.: It is not a question of recognition. Everything of Edelstatt’s is sublime. – L.: Of course, I’m well acquainted with him too. The Selbstmörder, for example, is very good. – Ts.: What’s the use of arguing. We won’t agree. I’ll repeat my opinion until tomorrow and you the same. – L.: I until the day after tomorrow.
Goldfaden, married, spendthrift, even if terribly badly off. About a hundred pieces. Stolen liturgical melodies made popular. The whole people sings them. The tailor at his work (is imitated), the maid, etc.
With so little room for dressing you are bound, as Ts. says, to get into quarrels. You come off the stage excited, everyone considers himself the greatest actor, then if someone, for example, steps on someone else’s foot, which cannot be avoided, not only a quarrel but a good battle is ready to break out. But in Warsaw there were seventy-five small, individual dressing-rooms, each one with light.
At six o’clock I met the actors in their coffee-house seated around two tables, divided into the two hostile groups. A book by Peretz was on the table of the Ts. group. Löwy had just shut it and stood up to leave with me.
Until the age of twenty Löwy was a bocher who studied and spent the money of his well-to-do father. There was a society of young people of the same age who met in a locked tavern precisely on Saturday and, dressed in their caftans, smoked and otherwise sinned against the Sabbath commandments.
‘The great Adler’ from New York, the most famous Yiddish actor, who is a millionaire, for whom Gordin wrote Der Wilde Mensch and whom Löwy in Karlsbad had asked not to come to the performance because he didn’t have the courage to act in his presence on their poorly equipped stage. – Real sets, not this miserable stage on which you cannot move. How shall we play the wild man! You need a sofa for it. In the Crystal Palace in Leipzig it was magnificent. Windows you could open, the sun shone in, you needed a throne in the play, good, there was a throne, I walked towards it through the crowd and was really a king. It is much easier to act there. Here everything confuses you.
24 October. Mother works all day, is merry and sad as the fancy strikes her, without taking advantage of her own condition in the slightest, her voice is clear, too loud for ordinary speech but does you good when you are sad and suddenly hear it after some time. For a long time now I have been complaining that I am always ill, but never have any definite illness that would compel me to go to bed. This wish certainly goes back chiefly to the fact that I know how comforting Mother can be when, for example, she comes from the lighted living-room into the twilight of the sick-room, or in the evening, when the day begins to change monotonously into night, returns from business and with her co
ncerns and hurried instructions once more causes the day, already so late, to begin again and rouses the invalid to help her in this. I should wish that for myself once more, because then I should be weak, therefore convinced by everything my mother did, and could enjoy childish pleasure with age’s keener capacity for gratification. Yesterday it occurred to me that I did not always love my mother as she deserved and as I could, only because the German language prevented it. The Jewish mother is no ‘Mutter’, to call her ‘Mutter’ makes her a little comic (not to herself, because we are in Germany), we give a Jewish woman the name of a German mother, but forget the contradiction that sinks into the emotions so much the more heavily, ‘Mutter’ is peculiarly German for the Jew, it unconsciously contains, together with the Christian splendour Christian coldness also, the Jewish woman who is called ‘Mutter’ therefore becomes not only comic but strange. Mama would be a better name if only one didn’t imagine ‘Mutter’ behind it. I believe that it is only the memories of the ghetto that still preserve the Jewish family, for the word ‘Vater’ too is far from meaning the Jewish father.
Today I stood before Counsellor L., who asked about my illness unexpectedly, uninvited, childishly, lyingly, ridiculously and to the point where I lost patience. We hadn’t spoken so intimately for a long time, or perhaps never at all – I felt my face, which had never before been so closely observed by him, reveal parts to him in spurious frankness that he hardly understood but that nevertheless surprised him. I was unrecognizable to myself. I know him quite well.
26 October. Thursday. All afternoon yesterday Löwy read from Gott, Mensch, Teufel by Gordin and then from his own Paris diaries. The day before yesterday I saw the performance of Der Wilde Mensch by Gordin. Gordin is better than Lateiner, Scharkansky, Feimann, etc., because he has more detail, more order, and more logical sequence in this order, he therefore somehow lacks the immediate Jewishness that is always being improvised in other plays, the clamour of this Jewishness rings more dully and therefore in less detail. Of course, concessions are made to the audience and sometimes you believe you must stretch in order to see the play over the heads of the Jewish theatre audience of New York (the character of the wild man, the whole story of Mrs Selde), but worse is the fact that palpable concessions are made also to some vaguely felt art; for example, in Der Wilde Mensch the plot rambles as a result of hesitancy, the wild man delivers speeches humanly unintelligible but dramatically so clumsy that one would prefer to close one’s eyes, the same is true of the older girl in Gott, Mensch, Teufel. Parts of the plot of Der Wilde Mensch are very spirited. A young widow marries an old man with four children and immediately brings her lover, Vladimir Vorobeitchik, along into the marriage. The two proceed to ruin the whole family, Shmul Leiblich (Pipes) must hand over all his money and becomes sick, the oldest son, Simon (Klug), a student, leaves the house, Alexander becomes a gambler and drunkard, Lise (Tschissik) becomes a prostitute, and Lemech (Löwy), the idiot, is driven to idiotic insanity by hate of Mrs Selde, because she takes the place of his mother, and by love, because she is the first young woman to whom he feels close. At this point the plot reaches a climax with the murder of Selde by Lemech. All the others remain incomplete and helpless in the spectator’s memory. The conception of this woman and her lover, a conception that asks no one’s opinion, gave me a vague, different self-confidence.
The discreet impression made by the playbill. One learns not only the names but a little more, yet only so much as the audience has to know, even a very cool audience with the best intentions, about a family exposed to their judgement. Shmul Leiblich is a ‘rich merchant’, however, it is not said that he is old and infirm, that he is a ridiculous ladies’ man, a bad father, and an irreverent widower who remarries on the anniversary of his wife’s death. And yet all these characterizations would be more accurate than that on the playbill, for at the end of the play he is no longer rich, because the Selde woman has thoroughly robbed him, he is also hardly a merchant any longer, since he has neglected his business. Simon is ‘a student’ on the playbill, therefore something very vague, something we know many sons of our most distant acquaintances are. Alexander, this characterless young man, is just ‘Alexander’; of Lise, the home-loving girl, we know also only that she is ‘Lise’. Lemech is unfortunately ‘an idiot’, for that is something that cannot be hushed up. Vladimir Vorobeitchik is only ‘Selde’s lover’, but not the corrupter of a family, not a drunkard, gambler, wastrel, idler, parasite. In the characterization, ‘Selde’s lover’, much of course is betrayed, but considering his behaviour it is the least that can be said. In addition to this the scene of action is Russia, the scarcely assembled characters are scattered over a tremendous area, or assembled in a small, unrevealed place in this area, in short, the play has become impossible, the spectator will get to see nothing.
– Nevertheless, the play begins, the obviously great powers of the author begin to work, things come to light which one would not expect of the characters on the playbill but which fall to their lot with the greatest inevitability if one can only persuade oneself to believe in all the whipping, snatching away, beating, slapping on the shoulder, fainting, throat-cutting, limping, dancing in Russian topboots, dancing with raised skirts, rolling on the sofa, which are after all things that it does no good to contradict. Yet not even the climax of the spectator’s excitement, remembered afterward, is necessary in order to recognize that the discreet impression made by the playbill is a false impression which can originate only in some tired outsider, since for one who judges honestly no decent relationship can be seen between the playbill and the play after its performance.
From the dash on, written in despair, because today they are playing cards with unusual uproar, I must sit at the common table, O. laughs with all her mouth, gets up, sits down, reaches across the table, speaks to me, and I, to complete the misfortune, write so badly and must think of Löwy’s Paris recollections, well written with an uninterrupted feeling, which come out of an independent fire while I, at least now (mostly, I am certain, because I have so little time), am almost entirely under Max’s influence, which sometimes, to cap it all, even spoils my enjoyment of his work as well. Because it consoles me I write down an autobiographical remark of Shaw’s, although it actually is the opposite of consoling: As a boy he was apprentice in the office of an estate agent’s in Dublin. He soon gave up this position, went to London, and became a writer. In the first nine years, from 1876 to 1885, he earned 140 kronen in all. ‘But although I was a strong young man and my family found itself in poor circumstances, I did not throw myself into the struggle for a livelihood; I threw my mother in and let her support me. I was no support for my old father; on the contrary, I hung on to his coat-tails.’ In the end this is little consolation for me. The free years he spent in London are already past for me, the possible happiness becomes ever more impossible, I lead a horrible synthetic life and am cowardly and miserable enough to follow Shaw only to the extent of having read the passage to my parents. How this possible life flashes before my eyes in colours of steel, with spanning rods of steel and airy darkness between!
27 October. Löwy’s stories and diaries: How Notre Dame frightens him, how the tiger in the Jardin des Plantes affects him as an image of one who despairs and hopes, appeasing his despair and hope with food, how his pious father in misapprehension questions him as to whether he can now go for walks on Saturday, whether he now has time to read modern books, whether he now may eat on the fast days, while as a matter of fact he must work on Saturdays, has no time for anything, and fasts more than any religion prescribed. When he walks through the streets chewing his black beard it looks from a distance as though he were eating chocolate. The work in the cap factory and his friend the socialist who considers everyone a bourgeois who does not work exactly the way he does – such as Löwy with his fine hands – who is bored on Sundays, who despises reading as something luxurious, cannot read himself and ironically asks Löwy to read him a letter that he had received.
> The Jewish ritual bath that every Jewish community in Russia has, which I picture to myself as a cabin with a basin of exactly determined outline, with arrangements appointed and supervised by the rabbi, which must only wash the earthly dirt from the soul, whose external condition is therefore a matter of indifference, that is, a symbol, therefore can be, and is, filthy and stinking, but still fulfils its purpose. The woman comes here to purify herself of her period, the Torah scribe to purify himself of all sinful thoughts before writing the last verse of a book of the Torah.
Custom, immediately after awakening, to dip the fingers three times in water, as the evil spirits have settled during the night on the second and third joints of the fingers. Rationalist explanation: To prevent the fingers directly touching the face, since, uncontrolled during sleep and dreams, they could after all have touched every possible part of the body, the armpits, the behind, the genitals.
The dressing-room behind their stage is so narrow that if by chance you are standing in front of the mirror behind the portière on the set and someone else wants to pass by, he must raise the curtain and willynilly show himself for a moment to the audience.
Superstition: The evil spirits gain entry into a person who drinks out of an imperfect glass.
How bruised the actors appeared to me after the performance, how I feared to touch them with a word. How instead I quickly left after a hasty handshake, as though I were angry and dissatisfied, because the truth of my impression was so impossible to express. Everyone seemed false to me except Max, who quietly made some meaningless remark. And the person who asked about some irrelevant detail was false, the person who gave a facetious reply to a remark by an actor, the ironic one and the one who began to explain his varied impressions, all the rabble that had been crowded into the back of the auditorium where it belonged and now, late at night, got up and once more became aware of its importance. (Very far from correct.)
