Curt Leviant: Kafka's Son

I had a Dickensian imagination even in my twenties, before I began to write. I dreamt of becoming a rich man and driving into the ghetto on a horse-drawn coach and rescuing a beautiful girl whom someone was beating.

I look at old photos of myself now and see a handsome man. But then I thought of myself as ugly, poorly dressed, hunched over despite my height. I was thoroughly dissatisfied with myself. If you think of yourself as a lowly worm, it’s not too great an imaginative leap to imagine yourself waking up one morning as a long worm or insect. I once mentioned this to a fellow writer, who asked if this might be a direct influence on my famous story. I told him: in writing the only direct influence is plagiarism.

I was a rather good student except in mathematics. I passed only because I cried during the exams. Yes. Literally. I cried. And the boy who sat next to me, I still remember his name, Hugo, let me copy his answers. Once, in the seventh grade, our teacher told us to make up a history exam. There were twelve boys in the class and each one would have to submit a question by the next day. Of course, all the students got together that day in my house while my parents were away working and we exchanged questions. But we did it cleverly. If everyone was to get one hundred the teacher would suspect collusion. So we assigned grades. Our two class dummies, Mordecai Sahn and Samuel Dankhalter, who usually failed, were allowed to get seventy, and not a drop more. We forced them to give some wrong answers. And those who usually got C’s got B’s and so on.

With my Prague friends, Felix Weltsch and Franz Werfel, we discussed literature and, of course, Zionism. In addition to those topics, with Brod I also had religious encounters. Once Max took me, on a Saturday evening, just before the Sabbath was departing, to the home of a Hasidic rebbe. He was a refugee from Poland, now living in a suburb of Prague. The rebbe had an open house for the shaleshudess meal, which is a redundancy, for the word “meal” is contained in that Hebrew/Yiddish word.

In the dining room, the Jews, all wearing the round fur hats known as shtreiml , sat around the table singing sad songs, trying to extend the Sabbath, trying to hold on for just a bit longer to its mystic power. These Sabbath songs, these zemiros , replete with sadness — not gloom, mind you, not depression, not unhappiness or despair — just sadness at the departure of the Sabbath, which relieved the Jews of their earthly woes, and for the love of which they expressed with their lively but minor-key melodies, made an impression on me.

Impression, yes. But they didn’t snare me. I did not become a participant. It was as if I were attending a theater, as if watching one of Chekhov’s plays. Fascinated. Intrigued. But not moved to the point where I would ascend to the stage and sit with the characters. I was just an observer. The only difference was that this Hasidic shtibl , as I watched the Hasidism singing their shaleshudess zemiros , this was my theater, my stage. Nevertheless, it didn’t move me enough to join. Yet I admired the devotion of the participants.

Years later, just before the Great War, I went to another such evening when I was traveling in Munkatch in northern Hungary. In Roman Vishniac’s wonderful collection of photos from Eastern Europe there is one he secretly took from the women’s gallery without the rebbe or the Hasidim realizing it. A Hasidic friend of Vishniac’s had helped him get into the shul and hide him upstairs in the woman’s gallery. Of course they were totally against letting themselves be photographed, and especially on the Sabbath. The picture was taken on a time exposure. A flash would have been too obvious. If one looks carefully at the photograph one can see Max and me, the only men without a shtreiml , sitting at the table, the sixth and seventh men to the left of the white-bearded Munkatcher rebbe.

I once had a dream that I was traveling to the USA, which I have never visited, and put my belongings in a room with a false front so that the enemy wouldn’t get them. Then, in a hotel in Alabama, the clerk says to me, while I’m registering, How come you’re not wearing your yellow star if you’re… *

*Rest of line illegible.

Yesterday the Penal Machine took over Europe. What device can counteract it?

They went upstairs even though there was no upstairs. They were everywhere. In attics. In cellars. In wood they were termites. In air, microbes. Under water they were sharks. On land they were power, terror, the ubiquitous evil beast in ancient fables.

NOTE:These are K’s only journal entries during the war. (K.L.)

Behold, truly the eye of the Lord is on those who stand in awe of Him and await His lovingkindness to deliver them from death and sustain them in famine.

You ask about food? Do you remember the scene in Noah’s Ark where the dove brings back a twig? I have mentioned that dove before. The same dove that fed me. There was a window in the attic of the Altneushul and I opened it one morning and the dove flew in, bringing food. Reread the quote from Psalm 33 above. Yes, He sustained me in hunger and delivered me from death. And, of course, the g…

NOTE:K doesn’t finish the word or the sentence. (K.L.)

(handwriting unclear as to date)

My darling Milena once wrote that I do not have the capacity for living. She was as worldly as dear Dora was innocent. Poor Milena— though not Jewish, she too, like my sisters, was taken by the Germans and murdered by them in a concentration camp. Milena said of me that I am not of this world. Things like typewriters mystified me, she said. When she remarked that I did not have the capacity for living, she did not mean living the good life, living it up, as the American slang expression has it. She meant living, period. Not having the capacity for living meant I would never get well. That I will die soon.

In my imagination I visited her, let’s say in the mid-thirties, and revealed myself to her, proving her wrong, showing her that not only did I have a capacity for living but for defeating my nemesis, my illness. That I indeed improved. That I would not die, but live, as the Bible declares.

But, of course, although I could have, I did not act out my fantasy. The surprise, the shock, would have killed her. I couldn’t, wouldn’t, do anything like that.

You could have written to her, I hear someone suggest.

Yes.

That “Yes” contains many resonances, like an empty barrel. Yes, I could have. Yes, it was over between us. Yes, but what good would it have accomplished?

My life was my secret and I kept it well.

In his novel, where I appear briefly, Max Brod has a rather modern view on women’s legs. He says, Nowadays, girls have legs up to their necks. I never thought Brod capable of such an observation, of such an image.

Today, the two-thousand-year-old Jewish dream of return to Zion has been accomplished. Thank God, the State of Israel has been founded. The Jews have a homeland.

But do I?

When I visited Israel for the first time in 1950, I went to Jerusalem to see S. Y. Agnon, the great Hebrew writer with whom I have often been compared. Born in 1888, he was a few years younger than I. At once we had a commonality of spirit. Agnon, a man of imagination with a penchant for the metaphysical and the surreal (read his great novella, ‘Iddo and ‘Eynam) , at once believed who I claimed to be. We embraced and he welcomed me as long-lost kin and told me to call him Shmuel Yosef. I liked at once this friendly, witty, and traditional man with the black velvet yarmulke on his head.