Франц Кафка - The Complete Stories (forword by John Updike)

* His application for employment at the Assicurazioni Generali gives his height as 1.81 meters, or over five foot eleven.

Janouch also says that Kafka, as they were passing the Old Synagogue in Prague (the very synagogue Hitler intended to preserve as a mocking memorial to a vanished people), announced that men "will try to grind the synagogue to dust by destroying the Jews themselves." His ancestors had worn the yellow patch, been forbidden to own land or practice medicine, and suffered onerous residence restrictions under the emperors. Kafka lived and died in a relatively golden interim for European Jewry; but all three of his sisters were to perish in the concentration camps. The Kafka household had been perfunctorily observant; Hermann Kafka had been proud of the degree of assimilation he had achieved, and the Judaism he had brought from his village was, his son accused him, too little; "it all dribbled away while you were passing it on." Kafka's mother, Julie Lowy, came from an orthodox family and remembered her grandfather as "a very pious and learned man, with a long white beard." As if to assert himself against his father, Franz took a decided interest in Jewishness; his diary of 1911 records:

Today, eagerly and happily began to read the History of the Jews by Graetz. Because my desire for it had far outrun the reading, it was at first stranger than I had thought, and I had to stop here and there in order by resting to allow my Jewishness to collect itself.

He taught himself considerable Hebrew and, with Dora Dymant, dreamed of moving to Israel. Yet churches loom larger than synagogues in Kafka's landscapes, and he also read Kierkegaard. His diary of 1913 notes:

Today I got Kierkegaard's Buch des Richters [Book of the Judge, a selection from his diaries]. As I suspected, his case, despite essential differences, is very similar to mine. At least he is on the same side of the world. He bears me out like a friend.

Kierkegaard's lacerating absolutism of faith would seem to lie behind the torture machine of "In the Penal Colony" and the cruel estrangements of The Trial, and to have offered Kafka a certain purchase on his spiritual pain. But in 1917 he wrote Oskar Baum, a fellow writer in Prague, "Kierkegaard is a star, although he shines over territory that is almost inaccessible to me." Kafka came to resign himself to inaccessibility; of his theology it might be said in sum that though he did not find God, he did not blame Him. The authority masked by phenomena remained unindicted. In his shorter tales an affinity may be felt with the parables of Hasidism, that pietist movement within Judaism which emphasized, over against the law of orthodoxy, mystic joy and divine immanence. Certain of the parables share Kafka's relish in the enigmatic:

A man who was afflicted with a terrible disease complained to Rabbi Israel that his suffering interfered with his learning and praying. The rabbi put his hand on his shoulder and said: "How do you know, friend, what is more pleasing to God, your studying or your suffering?"

[Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, Vol. ü]

But there is little in the Hasidic literature of Kafka's varied texture, his brightly colored foreign settings and the theatrical comedy that adorns the grimmest circumstances — the comedy, for instance, of the prisoner and his guard in the penal colony, or of the three bearded boarders in "The Metamorphosis." The Samsas, one should notice, are Christian, crossing themselves in moments of crisis and pinning their year to Christmas; Kafka, however unmistakable the ethnic source of his "liveliness" and alienation, avoided Jewish parochialism, and his allegories of pained awareness take upon themselves the entire European — that is to say, predominantly Christian — malaise.

It is the shorter stories, too, that sparkle most with country glimpses, with a savor of folk tale and a still-medieval innocence. They remind us that Kafka wrote in a Europe where islands of urban, wealth, culture, and discontent were surrounded by a countryside still, in its simplicity, apparently in possession of the secret of happiness, of harmony with the powers of earth and sky. Modernity has proceeded far enough, and spread wide enough, to make us doubt that anyone really has this secret. Part of Kafka's strangeness, and part of his enduring appeal, was to suspect that everyone except himself had the secret. He received from his father an impression of helpless singularity, of being a "slave living under laws invented only for him." A shame literally unspeakable attached itself to this impression. Fantasy, for Kafka even more than for most writers of fiction, was the way out of his skin, so he could get back in. He felt, as it were, abashed before the fact of his own existence, "amateurish" in that this had never been quite expressed before. So singular, he spoke for millions in their new unease; a century after his birth he seems the last holy writer, and the supreme fabulist of modern man's cosmic predicament.

Beverly, Massachusetts

1983

TWO INTRODUCTORY PARABLES

Before the Law

BEFORE THE LAW stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country and prays for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment. The man thinks it over and then asks if he will be allowed in later. "It is possible," says the doorkeeper, "but not at the moment." Since the gate stands open, as usual, and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the man stoops to peer through the gateway into the interior. Observing that, the doorkeeper laughs and says: "If you are so drawn to it, just try to go in despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the least of the doorkeepers. From hall to hall there is one doorkeeper after another, each more powerful than the last. The third doorkeeper is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him." These are difficulties the man from the country has not expected; the Law, he thinks, should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone, but as he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, with his big sharp nose and long, thin, black Tartar beard, he decides that it is better to wait until he gets permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at one side of the door. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be admitted, and wearies the doorkeeper by his importunity. The doorkeeper frequently has little interviews with him, asking him questions about his home and many other things, but the questions are put indifferently, as great lords put them, and always finish with the statement that he cannot be let in yet. The man, who has furnished himself with many things for his journey, sacrifices all he has, however valuable, to bribe the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper accepts everything, but always with the remark: "I am only taking it to keep you from thinking you have omitted anything." During these many years the man fixes his attention almost continuously on the doorkeeper. He forgets the other doorkeepers, and this first one seems to him the sole obstacle preventing access to the Law. He curses his bad luck, in his early years boldly and loudly; later, as he grows old, he only grumbles to himself. He becomes childish, and since in his yearlong contemplation of the doorkeeper he has come to know even the fleas in his fur collar, he begs the fleas as well to help him and to change the doorkeeper's mind. At length his eyesight begins to fail, and he does not know whether the world is really darker or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. Yet in his darkness he is now aware of a radiance that streams inextinguishably from the gateway of the Law. Now he has not very long to live. Before he dies, all his experiences in these long years gather themselves in his head to one point, a question he has not yet asked the doorkeeper. He waves him nearer, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend low toward him, for the difference in height between them has altered much to the man's disadvantage. "What do you want to know now?" asks the doorkeeper; "you are insatiable." "Everyone strives to reach the Law," says the man, "so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admittance?" The doorkeeper recognizes that the man has reached his end, and, to let his failing senses catch the words, roars in his ear: "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it."