Curt Leviant: Kafka's Son

I looked through biographies and found a photograph of K as a young man. I wondered if I too should sport a derby and an old-fashioned, rounded high-collar white shirt to enhance the resemblance.

A few years later I bumped into Mr. Schuman at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which was presenting the Czech National Theater’s staging of The Trial . We met in the lobby during intermission.

I introduced myself and asked if he remembered me.

“Of course. How are you? What are you doing now?”

I told him I was taking a Master’s in film at NYU and asked good-humoredly if I still looked like K.

Mr. Schuman studied my face.

“Even more than ever. Now you could really pass as his son.”

“If he had one.”

“Of course, if he had one. How could you pass as K’s son if he didn’t have children?”

I didn’t answer right away, for I was stuck on a little word. If. I could write — if I were to write, if I could write — a complete dissertation on that word. That tiny word, I thought, is the engine for all of imaginative literature. If I were a mouse called Josephine. If I were a gigantic insect. If I were an animal in the synagogue. If K had a son.

“On the other hand,” Mr. Schuman continued, “in a K-esque world anything is possible.”

“Except skipping generations. I’m too young to be K’s son.”

“All right,” he conceded. “Then grandson.”

“If… But it defies logic.”

“You’re too logical, my boy. We’re not in the gym, where parallel bars are always parallel. In space, Einstein said, parallel bars meet… Stretch your imagination.”

I laughed. I closed my eyes. I tried to stretch.

Then I said:

“I suppose you won’t find it hard to swallow the news that, despite the nearly three decades that separate my alleged daddy’s death in 1924 and my birth in 1951, K sent some of his genes to a lab which my parents then bought and had implanted in my mother’s placenta.”

“Now that’s what I call a good stretch,” Mr. Schuman said. “Now you’re ready for parallel bars that meet in space.”

So much for letters.

Let’s now turn to sounds.

Can sounds determine a person’s course for — or in — life?

Listen.

I was a good baby, a pleasant child. How do I know? My parents said I was obedient. Even the first sounds I made pointed to agreement, acquiescence.

Where other babies’ first sounds are “M…m…m…” for “Mama,” my first sound sounded like “OK.” The initial vowel was a truncated non-sound, compressed and sort of swallowed, something like an African click, followed by the robust “k.”

“Want your botty now?”

“ —k.”

“Want to go beddy-bye?”

“ —k.”

“Come help me clean up, sweetie.”

“ —k.”

When I was two, I learned the alphabet ditty, sung to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” stolen from Haydn’s Surprise Symphony No. 94, which in turn was swiped from Mozart’s “Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman,” or vice versa. When I got to “k,” I invariably let out a sound that some called a giggle, others a squeal. I loved that letter, loved that sound. Now that I think of it and try to recreate the sound I might have uttered years ago, it was probably more like a nasalized “N-kay.” Even then I was already showcasing the importance of that letter later in my life.

Years after, people said of me: “He knew even back then, that prescient little mamzer. ”

* Curiously, in Hebrew, the K sound can be two letters, kaf and coof . (There’s also a third K, but no one knows about it because, like a cat tracking on padded feet, it makes no sound; like a lost chord, the history of this third K sound hasn’t been chronicled yet.)

Even curiouser, in English there are more letters and combinations thereof for the K sound than for any other: k, c, ch, ck, cq, q, x.

“Call me Franz,”

was one of the ways I wanted to begin. To tease you. Alert you. Mystify you. Entice you. But it was just a thought. Not a serious one. A fleeting thought. Because why give things away? So this opening is just a hint of what might have been. A thought that bobbed up like a cork but was at once suppressed by my heavy authorial palm.

For that imagined opening was really a trifle. Only a lure. As false as the swaggly little faux fish near the hook. Which isn’t a fish at all but a sidekick of the hook, silent partner to the hook. Not fish important here but hook. Not décor but bite. And you are the fish and by that false beginning I wanted to lure you into these pages, into a magic world of gold dust and rainbows, orchids and light.

There are so many ways to begin a book. I could begin to tell this story with:

“Call me Amschl.”

Or:

“Call me Franz.”

Or:

“This is a true story.”

Or:

I don’t know where to begin.

OK, how about?

Prague was open, the communists gone, the spires in the city coruscating with the magic of rainbow colors they sucked in with the onset of freedom, colors hidden during the decades over which communism greyed the city, made it slower and somber, obdurate as a concrete wall.

Or this one:

One Sabbath morning early in October, I sat in the recently renovated Eldridge Street Synagogue, one of New York’s historic Lower East Side shuls…

I could keep on going forever with beginnings and never get to the middle or end, trying for a kind of literary infinity. As long as you keep commencing, you see, there are no fears for ending. For ending is what all of us fear.

So how did I get to Prague in the first place? What was the revolving wheel that cast me over there to that gorgeous city, so real to me that even now I can grasp its spires and mold the fog that drapes the city at dawn to any building silhouette I wish? Why Prague and not anywhere else? It wasn’t chance, like the little steel ball that is rolled down into the roulette wheel, suddenly thrust into the vortex of a spinning mass, and cast quickly out until chance has it land on one number or another.

Or maybe it was chance. If destiny is chance.

But to get to Prague, my Prague, that magical city, you can’t just go to Prague. There are steps you have to go through, steps you must ascend. Imagine a batter at home plate. He has to reach home — but he’s home already. But no, in order to reach home he has to go to certain places, round certain bases, and only then, if he’s lucky, can he come home home.

My Prague began in New York City (to be precise, it actually began years ago in Prague), and I didn’t reach home until I had ascended steps and rounded bases.

First step, Jiri.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It all began in one of New York’s historic Lower East Side synagogues, the Eldridge Street Shul, which, after years of work, had recently been restored to its late-nineteenth-century splendor. The New York Times ran a feature story with several photos that drew me there for Sabbath services.

One shabbes morning early in October I sat in the shul. The sun through the old stained-glass windows created a warm, rosy ambience amid the red oak pews and the wooden bimah. I was surprised to see about twenty older men scattered around the men’s section. I had assumed few Jews still lived in the area.

I didn’t pay much attention to the man one row before me, whose black yarmulke and head of grey hair were in my peripheral vision, until it came to the Torah reading. I had been too busy looking at the shul’s interior space, the lamps and old brass chandeliers, the women’s gallery upstairs, and the grand, hand-carved Holy Ark.