Reading Myself and Others

by Philip Roth

  And those nine months spent with Dora have still other “Kafkaesque” elements: a fierce winter in quarters inadequately heated; the inflation that makes a pittance of his own meager pension, and sends into the streets of Berlin the hungry and needy whose suffering, says Dora, turns Kafka “ash-gray”; and his tubercular lungs, flesh transformed and punished. Dora cares for the diseased writer as devotedly and tenderly as Gregor Samsa’s sister does for her brother, the bug. Gregor’s sister plays the violin so beautifully that Gregor “felt as if the way were opening before him to the unknown nourishment he craved”; he dreams, in his condition, of sending his gifted sister to the Conservatory! Dora’s music is Hebrew, which she reads aloud to Kafka, and with such skill that, according to Brod, “Franz recognized her dramatic talent; on his advice and under his direction she later educated herself in the art…”

  Only Kafka is hardly vermin to Dora Dymant, or to himself. Away from Prague and his father’s home, Kafka, at forty, seems at last to have been delivered from the self-loathing, the self-doubt, and those guilt-ridden impulses to dependence and self-effacement that had nearly driven him mad throughout his twenties and thirties; all at once he seems to have shed the pervasive sense of hopeless despair that informs the great punitive fantasies of The Trial, “In the Penal Colony,” and “The Metamorphosis.” Years earlier, in Prague, he had directed Max Brod to destroy all his papers, including three unpublished novels, upon his death; now, in Berlin, when Brod introduces him to a German publisher interested in his work, Kafka consents to the publication of a volume of four stories, and consents, says Brod, “without much need of long arguments to persuade him.” With Dora to help, he diligently resumes the study of Hebrew; despite his illness and the harsh winter, he travels to the Berlin Academy for Jewish Studies to attend a series of lectures on the Talmud—a very different Kafka from the estranged melancholic who once wrote in his diary, “What have I in common with the Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.” And to further mark the change, there is ease and happiness with a woman: with this young and adoring companion, he is playful, he is pedagogical, and, one would guess, in light of his illness (and his happiness), he is chaste. If not a husband (such as he had striven to be to the conventional Fräulein Bauer), if not a lover (as he struggled hopelessly to be with Milena), he would seem to have become something no less miraculous in his scheme of things: a father, a kind of father to this sisterly, mothering daughter. As Franz Kafka awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a father, a writer, and a Jew.

  “I have completed the construction of my burrow,” begins the long, exquisite, and tedious story that he wrote that winter in Berlin, “and it seems to be successful.… Just the place where, according to my calculations, the Castle Keep should be, the soil was very loose and sandy and had literally to be hammered and pounded into a firm state to serve as a wall for the beautifully vaulted chamber. But for such tasks the only tool I possess is my forehead. So I had to run with my forehead thousands and thousands of times, for whole days and nights, against the ground, and I was glad when the blood came, for that was proof that the walls were beginning to harden; in that way, as everybody must admit, I richly paid for my Castle Keep.”

  “The Burrow” is the story of an animal with a keen sense of peril whose life is organized around the principle of defense, and whose deepest longings are for security and serenity; with teeth and claws—and forehead—the burrower constructs an elaborate and ingeniously intricate system of underground chambers and corridors that are designed to afford it some peace of mind; however, while this burrow does succeed in reducing the sense of danger from without, its maintenance and protection are equally fraught with anxiety: “these anxieties are different from ordinary ones, prouder, richer in content, often long repressed, but in their destructive effects they are perhaps much the same as the anxieties that existence in the outer world gives rise to.” The story (whose ending is lost) terminates with the burrower fixated upon distant subterranean noises that cause it “to assume the existence of a great beast,” itself burrowing in the direction of the Castle Keep.

  Another grim tale of entrapment, and of obsession so absolute that no distinction is possible between character and predicament. Yet this fiction imagined in the last “happy” months of his life is touched by a spirit of personal reconciliation and sardonic self-acceptance, by a tolerance of one’s own brand of madness, that is not apparent in “The Metamorphosis.” The piercing masochistic irony of the earlier animal story—as of “The Judgment” and The Trial—has given way here to a critique of the self and its preoccupations that, though bordering on mockery, no longer seeks to resolve itself in images of the uttermost humiliation and defeat … Yet there is more here than a metaphor for the insanely defended ego, whose striving for invulnerability produces a defensive system that must in its turn become the object of perpetual concern—there is also a very unromantic and hardheaded fable about how and why art is made, a portrait of the artist in all his ingenuity, anxiety, isolation, dissatisfaction, relentlessness, obsessiveness, secretiveness, paranoia, and self-addiction, a portrait of the magical thinker at the end of his tether, Kafka’s Prospero … It is an endlessly suggestive story, this story of life in a hole. For, finally, remember the proximity of Dora Dymant during the months that Kafka was at work on “The Burrow” in the two underheated rooms that were their illicit home. Certainly a dreamer like Kafka need never have entered the young girl’s body for her tender presence to kindle in him a fantasy of a hidden orifice that promises “satisfied desire,” “achieved ambition,” and “profound slumber,” but that, once penetrated and in one’s possession, arouses the most terrifying and heartbreaking fears of retribution and loss. “For the rest I try to unriddle the beast’s plans. Is it on its wanderings, or is it working on its own burrow? If it is on its wanderings then perhaps an understanding with it might be possible. If it should really break through to the burrow I shall give it some of my stores and it will go on its way again. It will go on its way again, a fine story! Lying in my heap of earth I can naturally dream of all sorts of things, even of an understanding with the beast, though I know well enough that no such thing can happen, and that at the instant when we see each other, more, at the moment when we merely guess at each other’s presence, we shall blindly bare our claws and teeth…”

  He died of tuberculosis of the lungs and larynx on June 3, 1924, a month before his forty-first birthday. Dora, inconsolable, whispers for days afterward, “My love, my love, my good one…”

  2

  1942. I am nine; my Hebrew-school teacher, Dr. Kafka, is fifty-nine. To the little boys who must attend his “four-to-five” class each afternoon, he is known—in part because of his remote and melancholy foreignness, but largely because we vent on him our resentment at having to learn an ancient calligraphy at the very hour we should be out screaming our heads off on the ball field—he is known as Dr. Kishka. Named, I confess, by me. His sour breath, spiced with intestinal juices by five in the afternoon, makes the Yiddish word for “insides” particularly telling, I think. Cruel, yes, but in truth I would have cut out my tongue had I ever imagined the name would become legend. A coddled child, I do not yet think of myself as persuasive, or, quite yet, as a literary force in the world. My jokes don’t hurt, how could they, I’m so adorable. And if you don’t believe me, just ask my family and the teachers in my school. Already at nine, one foot in college, the other in the Catskills. Little borscht-belt comic that I am outside the classroom, I amuse my friends Schlossman and Ratner on the dark walk home from Hebrew school with an imitation of Kishka, his precise and finicky professorial manner, his German accent, his cough, his gloom. “Doctor Kishka!” cries Schlossman, and hurls himself savagely against the newsstand that belongs to the candy-store owner whom Schlossman drives just a little crazier each night. “Doctor Franz—Doctor Franz—Doctor Franz—Kishka!
” screams Ratner, and my chubby little friend who lives upstairs from me on nothing but chocolate milk and Mallomars does not stop laughing until, as is his wont (his mother has asked me “to keep an eye on him” for just this reason), he wets his pants. Schlossman takes the occasion of Ratner’s humiliation to pull the little boy’s paper out of his notebook and wave it in the air—it is the assignment Dr. Kafka has just returned to us, graded; we were told to make up an alphabet of our own, out of straight lines and curved lines and dots. “That is all an alphabet is,” he had explained. “That is all Hebrew is. That is all English is. Straight lines and curved lines and dots.” Ratner’s alphabet, for which he received a C, looks like twenty-six skulls strung in a row. I received my A for a curlicued alphabet, inspired largely (as Dr. Kafka seems to have surmised, given his comment at the top of the page) by the number eight. Schlossman received an F for forgetting even to do it—and a lot he seems to care. He is content—he is overjoyed—with things as they are. Just waving a piece of paper in the air and screaming, “Kishka! Kishka!” makes him deliriously happy. We should all be so lucky.

  At home, alone in the glow of my goose-necked “desk” lamp (plugged after dinner into an outlet in the kitchen, my study), the vision of our refugee teacher, sticklike in a fraying three-piece blue suit, is no longer very funny—particularly after the entire beginners’ Hebrew class, of which I am the most studious member, takes the name Kishka to its heart. My guilt awakens redemptive fantasies of heroism, I have them often about the “Jews in Europe.” I must save him. If not me, who? The demonic Schlossman? The babyish Ratner? And if not now, when? For I have learned in the ensuing weeks that Dr. Kafka lives in a room in the house of an elderly Jewish lady on the shabby lower stretch of Avon Avenue, where the trolley still runs and the poorest of Newark’s Negroes shuffle meekly up and down the street, for all they seem to know, still back in Mississippi. A room. And there! My family’s apartment is no palace, but it is ours at least, so long as we pay the $38.50 a month in rent; and though our neighbors are not rich, they refuse to be poor and they refuse to be meek. Tears of shame and sorrow in my eyes, I rush into the living room to tell my parents what I have heard (though not that I heard it during a quick game of “aces up” played a minute before class against the synagogue’s rear wall—worse, played directly beneath a stained-glass window embossed with the names of the dead): “My Hebrew teacher lives in a room.”

  My parents go much further than I could imagine anybody going in the real world. Invite him to dinner, my mother says. Here? Of course here—Friday night; I’m sure he can stand a home-cooked meal, she says, and a little pleasant company. Meanwhile, my father gets on the phone to call my Aunt Rhoda, who lives with my grandmother and tends her and her potted plants in the apartment house at the corner of our street. For nearly two decades my father has been introducing my mother’s “baby” sister, now forty, to the Jewish bachelors and widowers of north Jersey. No luck so far. Aunt Rhoda, an “interior decorator” in the dry-goods department of the Big Bear, a mammoth merchandise and produce market in industrial Elizabeth, wears falsies (this information by way of my older brother) and sheer frilly blouses, and family lore has it that she spends hours in the bathroom every day applying powder and sweeping her stiffish hair up into a dramatic pile on her head; but despite all this dash and display, she is, in my father’s words, “still afraid of the facts of life.” He, however, is undaunted, and administers therapy regularly and gratis: “Let ’em squeeze ya, Rhoda—it feels good!” I am his flesh and blood, I can reconcile myself to such scandalous talk in our kitchen—but what will Dr. Kafka think? Oh, but it’s too late to do anything now. The massive machinery of matchmaking has been set in motion by my undiscourageable father, and the smooth engines of my proud homemaking mother’s hospitality are already purring away. To throw my body into the works in an attempt to bring it all to a halt—well, I might as well try to bring down the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company by leaving our receiver off the hook. Only Dr. Kafka can save me now. But to my muttered invitation, he replies, with a formal bow that turns me scarlet—who has ever seen a person do such a thing outside of a movie house?—he replies that he would be honored to be my family’s dinner guest. “My aunt,” I rush to tell him, “will be there too.” It appears that I have just said something mildly humorous; odd to see Dr. Kafka smile. Sighing, he says, “I will be delighted to meet her.” Meet her? He’s supposed to marry her. How do I warn him? And how do I warn Aunt Rhoda (a very great admirer of me and my marks) about his sour breath, his roomer’s pallor, his Old World ways, so at odds with her up-to-dateness? My face feels as if it will ignite of its own—and spark the fire that will engulf the synagogue, Torah and all—when I see Dr. Kafka scrawl our address in his notebook, and beneath it, some words in German. “Good night, Dr. Kafka!” “Good night, and thank you, thank you.” I turn to run, I go, but not fast enough: out on the street I hear Schlossman—that fiend!—announcing to my classmates, who are punching one another under the lamplight down from the synagogue steps (where a card game is also in progress, organized by the bar mitzvah boys): “Roth invited Kishka to his house! To eat!”

  Does my father do a job on Kafka! Does he make a sales pitch for familial bliss! What it means to a man to have two fine boys and a wonderful wife! Can Dr. Kafka imagine what it’s like? The thrill? The satisfaction? The pride? He tells our visitor of the network of relatives on his mother’s side that are joined in a “family association” of over two hundred people located in seven states, including the state of Washington! Yes, relatives even in the Far West: here are their photographs, Dr. Kafka; this is a beautiful book we published entirely on our own for five dollars a copy, pictures of every member of the family, including infants, and a family history by “Uncle” Lichtblau, the eighty-five-year-old patriarch of the clan. This is our family newsletter, which is published twice a year and distributed nationwide to all the relatives. This, in the frame, is the menu from the banquet of the family association, held last year in a ballroom of the “Y” in Newark, in honor of my father’s mother on her seventy-fifth birthday. My mother, Dr. Kafka learns, has served six consecutive years as the secretary-treasurer of the family association. My father has served a two-year term as president, as have each of his three brothers. We now have fourteen boys in the family in uniform. Philip writes a letter on V-mail stationery to five of his cousins in the army every single month. “Religiously,” my mother puts in, smoothing my hair. “I firmly believe,” says my father, “that the family is the cornerstone of everything.”

  Dr. Kafka, who has listened with close attention to my father’s spiel, handling the various documents that have been passed to him with great delicacy and poring over them with a kind of rapt absorption that reminds me of myself over the watermarks of my stamps, now for the first time expresses himself on the subject of family; softly he says, “I agree,” and inspects again the pages of our family book. “Alone,” says my father, in conclusion, “alone, Dr. Kafka, is a stone.” Dr. Kafka, setting the book gently down upon my mother’s gleaming coffee table, allows with a nod that that is so. My mother’s fingers are now turning in the curls behind my ears; not that I even know it at the time, or that she does. Being stroked is my life; stroking me, my father, and my brother is hers.

  My brother goes off to a Boy Scout meeting, but only after my father has him stand in his neckerchief before Dr. Kafka and describe to him the skills he has mastered to earn each of his badges. I am invited to bring my stamp album into the living room and show Dr. Kafka my set of triangular stamps from Zanzibar. “Zanzibar!” says my father rapturously, as though I, not even ten, have already been there and back. My father accompanies Dr. Kafka and me into the “sun parlor,” where my tropical fish swim in the aerated, heated, and hygienic paradise I have made for them with my weekly allowance and my Hanukkah gelt. I am encouraged to tell Dr. Kafka what I know about the temperament of the angelfish, the function of the catfish, and the family life of the black mollie
. I know quite a bit. “All on his own he does that,” my father says to Kafka. “He gives me a lecture on one of those fish, it’s seventh heaven, Dr. Kafka.” “I can imagine,” Kafka replies.

  Back in the living room my Aunt Rhoda suddenly launches into a rather recondite monologue on “Scotch plaids,” intended, it would appear, for the edification of my mother alone. At least she looks fixedly at my mother while she delivers it. I have not yet seen her look directly at Dr. Kafka; she did not even turn his way at dinner when he asked how many employees there were at the Big Bear. “How would I know?” she had replied, and then continued right on conversing with my mother, about a butcher who would take care of her “under the counter” if she could find him nylons for his wife. It never occurs to me that she will not look at Dr. Kafka because she is shy—nobody that dolled up could, in my estimation, be shy. I can only think that she is outraged. It’s his breath. It’s his accent. It’s his age.