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The impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing German, the impossibility of writing differently. One might add a fourth impossibility, the impossibility of writing… Thus what has resulted was a literature impossible in all respects, a gypsy literature which had stolen the German child out of its cradle and in great haste put it through some kind of training, for someone had to dance on the tightrope. (But it wasn’t a German child, it was nothing; people merely said that somebody was dancing.)
A perfect slice of Kafka. On May 3, 1913, Kafka’s diary conceives of a butcher’s knife “quickly and with mechanical regularity chop[ping] into me from the side,” slicing thin, parma ham style, pezzi di Kafka… The quote above is like that: it has the marbled mark of Kafka running through it. It traces a typical Kafka journey, from the concrete, to the metaphorical, to the allegorical, to the notional, which last-as so often with Kafka-seems to grow obscure the more precisely it is expressed. From this same quote Begley efficiently unpacks Kafka’s “frightful inner predicament,” born of his strange historical moment. A middle-class Prague Jew (“The most Western Jewish of them all”) both enamored of and horrified by an Eastern shtetl life he never knew; a Jew in a period of virulent anti-Semitism (“I’ve been spending every afternoon outside in the streets, wallowing in anti-Semitic hate”) who remained ambivalent toward the Zionist project; a German speaker surrounded by Czech nationalists. The impossible “gypsy literature” an aspect of an impossible gypsy self, an assimilated Judaism that was fatally neither one thing or the other.
In Kafka’s world there were really two “Jewish questions.” The first was external, asked by Gentiles, and is familiar: “What is to be done with the Jews?” For which the answer was either persecution or “toleration,” that vile word. [52] (Writing to Brod from an Italian pensione, Kafka describes being barely tolerated at lunch by an Austrian colonel who has just found out he is Jewish: “Out of politeness he brought our little chat to a sort of end before he hurried out with long strides… Why must I be a thorn in their flesh?”). The second Jewish question, the one that Kafka asked himself, was existentiaclass="underline" What have I in common with Jews? Begley does not shy from citing this and many of the other quotations “used by scholars to buttress the argument that Kafka was himself a Jewish anti-Semite, a self-hating Jew”:
I admire Zionism and am nauseated by it.
At times I’d like to stuff them all, simply as Jews (me included) into, say, the drawer of the laundry chest. Next I’d wait, open the drawer a little to see if they’ve suffocated, and if not, shut the drawer again and keep doing this to the end.
Isn’t it natural to leave a place where one is so hated? The heroism of staying is nonetheless merely the heroism of cockroaches which cannot be exterminated, even from the bathroom.
To this evidence, Freudians add exhibit number one: fantasies of self-slaughter (“Between throat and chin would seem to be the most rewarding place to stab”), shadowing Kafka’s lineage (grandson of the butcher of Wossek) and those tales of Jewish ritual murder that are as old as anti-Semitism itself. [53] For Begley, though, the accusation of auto-anti-Semitism is “unfair and, in the end, beside the point.” He sees rather the conflicted drama of assimilation: “The fear was of a crack in the veneer… through which might enter the miasma of the shtetl or the medieval ghetto.” In this version, affection and repulsion are sides of the same coin:
It would have been surprising if he, who was so repelled by his own father’s vulgarity at table and in speech, had not been similarly repelled by the oddities of dress, habits, gestures and speech of the very Jews of whom he made a fetish, because of the community spirit, cohesiveness, and genuine emotional warmth he was convinced they possessed.
It’s an awkward argument that struggles to recast repulsion as “the cumulative effect on Kafka of the ubiquitous anti-Semitism” all around him, which in turn caused a kind of “profound fatigue,” compelling him to “transcend his Jewish experience and his Jewish identity” so that he might write “ about the human condition”-a conclusion that misses the point entirely, for Kafka found the brotherhood of man quite as incomprehensible as the brotherhood of Jews. For Kafka, the impossible thing was collectivity itself:
What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself, and should stand very quietly in a corner, content than I can breathe.
Kafka’s horror is not Jewishness per se, because it is not a horror only of Jewishness: it is a horror of all shared experience, all shared being, all genus. In a time and place in which national, linguistic and racial groups were defined with ever more absurd precision, how could the very idea of commonness not turn equally absurd? In his Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, fellow Austro-Hungarian Gregor von Rezzori presented the disquieting idea that the philo-Semite and the anti-Semite have something essential in common (the narrator is both): a belief in a collective Jewish nature, a Semiteness. Kafka, by contrast, had stopped believing. The choice of belonging to a people, of partaking of a shared nature, was no longer available to him. He often wished it was not so (hence his sentimental affection for shtetl life), but it was so. On this point, Begley quotes Hannah Arendt approvingly, though he does not pursue her brilliant conclusion:
… These men [assimilated German Jews] did not wish to “return” either to the ranks of the Jewish people or to Judaism, and could not desire to do so… not because they were too “assimilated” and too alienated from their Jewish heritage, but because all traditions and cultures as well as all “belonging” had become equally questionable to them. [54]
Jewishness itself had become the question. It is a mark of how disconcerting this genuinely Kafkaesque concept is that it should provoke conflict in Begley himself.
“My people,” wrote Kafka, “provided that I have one.” What does it mean, to have a people? On no subject are we more sentimental and less able to articulate what we mean. In what, for example, does the continuity of “Blackness” exist? Or “Irishness”? Or “Arabness”? Blood, culture, history, genes? Judaism, with its matrilineal line, has been historically fortunate to have at its root a beautiful answer, elegant in its circularity: Jewishness is the gift of a Jewish mother. But what is a Jewish mother? Kafka found her so unstable a thing, a mistranslation might undo her:
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 comical… “Mutter” is peculiarly German for the Jew, it unconsciously contains, together with the Christian splendor, Christian coldness also, the Jewish woman who is called “Mutter” therefore becomes not only comical but strange… I believe 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.
Kafka’s Jewishness was a kind of dream, whose authentic moment was located always in the nostalgic past. His survey of the insectile situation of young Jews in Inner Bohemia can hardly be improved upon: “With their posterior legs they were still glued to their father’s Jewishness, and with their waving anterior legs they found no new ground.”
Alienation from oneself, the conflicted assimilation of migrants, losing one place without gaining another… This feels like Kafka in the genuine clothes of an existential prophet, Kafka in his twenty-first-century aspect (if we are to assume, as with Shakespeare, that every new century will bring a Kafka close to our own concerns). For there is a sense in which Kafka’s Jewish question (“What have I in common with Jews?”) has become everybody’s question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts. [55] What is Muslimness? What is femaleness? What is Polishness? What is Englishness? These days we all find our anterior legs flailing before us. We’re all insects, all Ungeziefer, [56] now.
[52] Now more commonly used for recent immigrants to Western democracies.
[53] Begley: “Three ‘ritual murder trials,’ throwbacks to the Middle Ages, and unimaginable for Jews believing that they lived in an era of moral as well as material progress, took place within his lifetime.”
[54] From her introduction to Walter Benjamin’s
[55] Sylvia Plath hinted at this: “I think I may well be a Jew.”
[56] As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic