Posted on July 16, 2008 by Steve Pollak
Based on some of the things he said about Jews, certain scholars have called Franz Kafka a Jewish anti-Semite.
He said he admired Zionism but was "nauseated" by it. He said he'd like to stuff all Jews (himself included) into a drawer until they suffocated. And he famously asked, "What have I in common with Jews?"
Now, let's keep in mind one thing: given the prevalent anti-Semitism in Prague during Kafka's lifetime, it may be understandable if at certain times he harbored a resentment towards the quote-unquote condition that kept him from the inner sanctum of Czech society.
And so it is that a new Kafka biography, Louis Begley's The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay, argues that the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial was not a Jewish anti-Semite but, instead, was unduly influenced by the pervasive anti-Jewish atmosphere all around him in Prague.
In the July 17 issue of The New York Review of Books, author Zadie Smith says Begley saw in Kafka "the conflicted drama of assimilation." Here is a telling excerpt from Begley's book:
It would have been surprising if he [Kafka], 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.
Smith goes on to say Begley misses the ultimate effect of this struggle on Kafka's thinking. He did not "recast repulsion" into a desire to shed his Jewish identity and write about the "human condition," Smith argues. She claims that that would be the wrong conclusion because Kafka abhorred all manner of brotherhood and shared experience.
I'd suggest you read the entire article but here is Smith's conclusion:
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. 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, now.
I can't claim any special knowledge of Kafka but from what I can discern he was a man of extreme passions who struggled greatly in many areas of life. That's not an excuse for saying terrible things about Jews. But we should also remember that he had Jewish friends, attended Yiddish theater productions and expressed a desire to travel to Palestine, even going so far as to suggest starting a new life there. How do you reconcile those facts with his other statements about Judaism?
I'm not sure you can unless you accept Begley's idea of Kafka's "conflicted drama of assimilation." And if you do that, then, as Smith notes, we're all insects at some point or another.
The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay is published by Atlas & Company (208 pages).
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