My Kafka Problem

Abstract

was introduced to Kafka by my father. I was a teenager. It was tax season and my father was holed up in his office, his desktop strewn with forms and receipts and mysterious shoe boxes filled with paper, the way, at exam time, it would be covered with ungraded bluebooks. My father was a professor of German literature. He was born in Vienna in 1924, the same year Kafka died in Prague; they missed each other by eight days, though Kafka's burial was delayed and he was actually put in the ground on June 1 1 , the day my father was born. The Austro-Hungarian Empire had vanished by the time of my father's birth, but it still defined a shadow realm that gave many of its Jewish inhabitants something in common. My father was the last of a population born of Yiddish-speaking Galician parents who adopted German and felt a lifelong ambivalence and alienation that came to speak through writers like Kafka and philosophers like Freud for the alienation of the modern world itself. In some sense my father never stopped living in Kafka's empire. For one thing, he had a refugee's horror of bureaucracy in general and of government documents in particular. This was understandable, since when you're a refugee, a piece of paper can save your life or end it. A piece of paper got my father onto a Kindertransport in 1938. The absence of the appropriate pieces of paper doomed my grandparents to death. My father spoke with enduring affection of an elderly cousin who had vouched for him and the few others in his family who made it safely to America, and for years I thought affidavit was a Jewish word if not actually Yiddish or Hebrew, then at least denoting, like afikomen or King David, something vital to the tribe. It was a word given almost mystical meaning by my father.