Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

You always had a fine genius (never mind your literary one) for working me up. And you knew it was bad for my heart condition. Now, what does it matter. . but, as God’s my witness, you aggravate me. . you make me. .

Well.

All I know is that I am to blame for ever. You’ve seen to that. It’s written, and not alone by you. There are plenty of people writing books about Kafka, Franz Kafka. I’m even blamed for the name I handed down, our family name. Kavka is Czech for jackdaw, so that’s maybe the reason for your animal obsession. Dafke ! Insect, ape, dog, mouse, stag, what didn’t you imagine yourself. They say the beetle story is a great masterpiece, thanks to me — I’m the one who treated you like an inferior species, gave you the inspiration. . You wake up as a bug, you give a lecture as an ape. Do any of these wonderful scholars think what this meant to me, having a son who didn’t have enough self-respect to feel himself a man?

You have such a craze for animals, but may I remind you, when you were staying with Ottla at Zürau you wouldn’t even undress in front of a cat she’d brought in to get rid of the mice. .

Yet you imagined a dragon coming into your room. It said (an educated dragon, noch ): ‘Drawn hitherto by your longing. . I offer myself to you.’ Your longing, Franz: ugh, for monsters, for perversion. You describe a person (yourself, of course) in some crazy fantasy of living with a horse. Just listen to you, ‘. . for a year I lived together with a horse in such ways as, say, a man would live with a girl whom he respects, but by whom he is rejected.’ You even gave the horse a girl’s name, Eleanor. I ask you, is that the kind of story made up by a normal young man? Is it decent that people should read such things, long after you are gone? But it’s published, everything is published.

And worst of all, what about the animal in the synagogue. Some sort of rat, weasel, a marten you call it. You tell how it ran all over during prayers, running along the lattice of the women’s section and even climbing down to the curtain in front of the Ark of the Covenant. A schande , an animal running about during divine service. Even if it’s only a story — only you would imagine it. No respect.

You go on for several pages (in that secret letter) about my use of vulgar Yiddish expressions, about my ‘insignificant scrap of Judaism’, which was ‘purely social’ and so meant we couldn’t ‘find each other in Judaism’ if in nothing else. This, from you! When you were a youngster and I had to drag you to the Yom Kippur services once a year you were sitting there making up stories about unclean animals approaching the Ark, the most holy object of the Jewish faith. Once you were grown up, you went exactly once to the Altneu synagogue. The people who write books about you say it must have been to please me. I’d be surprised. When you suddenly discovered you were a Jew, after all, of course your Judaism was highly intellectual, nothing in common with the Jewish customs I was taught to observe in my father’s shtetl , pushing the barrow at the age of seven. Your Judaism was learnt at the Yiddish Theatre. That’s a nice crowd! Those dirty-living travelling players you took up with at the Savoy Café. Your friend the actor Jizchak Löwy. No relation to your mother’s family, thank God. I wouldn’t let such a man even meet her. You had the disrespect to bring him into your parents’ home, and I saw it was my duty to speak to him in such a way that he wouldn’t ever dare to come back again. (Hah! I used to look down from the window and watch him, hanging around in the cold, outside the building, waiting for you.) And the Tschissik woman, that nafke , one of his actresses — I’ve found out you thought you were in love with her, a married woman (if you can call the way those people live a marriage). Apart from Fräulein Bauer you never fancied anything but a low type of woman. I say it again as I did then: if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. You lost your temper (yes, you, this time), you flew into a rage at your father when he told you that. And when I reminded you of my heart condition, you put yourself in the right again, as usual, you said (I remember like it was yesterday) ‘I make great efforts to restrain myself.’ But now I’ve read your diaries, the dead don’t need to creep into your bedroom and read them behind your back (which you accused your mother and me of doing), I’ve read what you wrote afterwards, that you sensed in me, your father, ‘as always at such moments of extremity, the existence of a wisdom which I can no more than scent’. So you knew , while you were defying me, you knew I was right!

The fact is that you were anti-Semitic, Franz. You were never interested in what was happening to your own people. The hooligans’ attacks on Jews in the streets, on houses and shops, that took place while you were growing up — I don’t see a word about them in your diaries, your notebooks. You were only imagining Jews. Imagining them tortured in places like your Penal Colony, maybe. I don’t want to think about what that means.

Right, towards the end you studied Hebrew, you and your sister Ottla had some wild dream about going to Palestine. You, hardly able to breathe by then, digging potatoes on a kibbutz! The latest book about you says you were in revolt against the ‘shopkeeper mentality’ of your father’s class of Jew; but it was the shopkeeper father, the buttons and buckles, braid, ribbons, ornamental combs, press studs, hooks and eyes, bootlaces, photo frames, shoe horns, novelties and notions that earned the bread for you to dream by. You were anti-Semitic, Franz; if such a thing is possible as for a Jew to cut himself in half. (For you, I suppose, anything is possible.) You told Ottla that to marry that goy Josef Davis was better than marrying ten Jews. When your great friend Brod wrote a book called The Jewesses you wrote there were too many of them in it. You saw them like lizards. (Animals again, low animals.) ‘However happy we are to watch a single lizard on a footpath in Italy, we would be horrified to see hundreds of them crawling over each other in a pickle jar.’ From where did you get such ideas? Not from your home, that I know.

And look how Jewish you are, in spite of the way you despised us — Jews, your Jewish family! You answer questions with questions. I’ve discovered that’s your style, your famous literary style: your Jewishness. Did you or did you not write the following story, playlet, wha’d’you-call-it, your friend Brod kept every scribble and you knew he wouldn’t burn even a scrap. ‘Once at a spiritualist seance a new spirit announced its presence, and the following conversation with it took place. The spirit: Excuse me. The spokesman: Who are you? The spirit: Excuse me. The spokesman: What do you want? The spirit: To go away. The spokesman: But you’ve only just come. The spirit: It’s a mistake. The spokesman: No, it isn’t a mistake. You’ve come and you’ll stay. The spirit: I’ve just begun to feel ill. The spokesman: Badly? The spirit: Badly? The spokesman: Physically? The spirit: Physically? The spokesman: You answer with questions. That will not do. We have ways of punishing you, so I advise you to answer, for then we shall soon dismiss you. The spirit: Soon? The spokesman: Soon. The spirit: In one minute? The spokesman: Don’t go on in this miserable way. .’

Questions without answers. Riddles. You wrote ‘It is always only in contradiction that I can live. But this doubtless applies to everyone; for living, one dies, dying, one lives.’ Speak for yourself! So who did you think you were when that whim took you — their prophet, Jesus Christ? What did you want ? The goyishe heavenly hereafter? What did you mean when a lost man, far from his native country, says to someone he meets ‘I am in your hands’ and the other says, ‘No. You are free and that is why you are lost’? What’s the sense in writing about a woman ‘I lie in wait for her in order not to meet her’? There’s only one of your riddles I think I understand, and then only because for forty-two years, God help me, I had to deal with you myself. ‘A cage went in search of a bird.’ That’s you. The cage, not the bird. I don’t know why. Maybe it will come to me. As I say, if a person wants to, he can know everything, here.