From the subtle precision of The Metamorphosis to the unfinished enigma of The Castle, the Morgan Library & Museum exhibition on Franz Kafka, illuminates his creative process and evolving relationship with Jewishness, modernity, and the imagination. Mitchell Abidor weaves this exploration into the fabric of Philip Roth’s American literary landscape, revealing how Roth’s work refracts Kafka’s profound themes of family, identity, and exile through a distinctly Jewish-American lens.
New York’s Morgan Library and Museum closes out the centennial year of Franz Kafka’s death with an exhibition, on display until April 2025, that provides more chills of excitement than almost any show I can ever remember seeing. This assembly of manuscripts, diary pages, postcards and letters, allows the visitor to examine the original form of some of the most important works of modern literature. Here, in Kafka’s hand, is the opening page of “The Metamorphosis” and the final page of The Castle, and the manuscript of “The Hunger Artist.” Examining the handwritten texts provides us with important information: The ease with which “The Metamorphosis flowed is clear from the presence of only seven words having been crossed on the first page. The manuscript of The Castle shows that it was originally written in the first person, the “ich” replaced by K.
There is a section dedicated to Kafka and Judaism and Jewishness, which includes a letter he wrote in Hebrew to his tutor, and a notebook with select words written out in German and their Hebrew translation. His Hebrew was tied to his physical condition, for among the words translated by the invalid into Hebrew are “enema” “fever.” It’s also interesting that despite his flirtation with Zionism and emigration to Palestine, his Hebrew is written with the full panoply of vowels, not the more restricted number used in Sephardic/Israeli Hebrew.
Kafka’s sword presents the exact opposite image of America, a symbolic warding off of the wretched refuse of humanity she is actually welcoming.
Kafka’s interest in America is included in a section appropriately titled “Journeys of the Imagination.” Kafka’s America could only be a fictitious one, as he never left Europe. Only his character Karl Rossmann crossed the sea to America in Amerika, a land Kafka never expressed much interest in. In his massive diaries there is precisely one mention of America, and one entry from January 19, 1911, in which he writes of how he “planned a novel in which two brothers fought each other, one of whom went to America.” He abandoned the novel, possibly an earlier version of the later incomplete book, because “it tired me immensely.” The novel presents a country with little resemblance to the country bearing that name, and contains an error that is tiny yet enormously significant. In the book Kafka writes of the Statue of Liberty: “The arm with the sword now reached aloft, and about her figure blew the free winds.” The real Miss Liberty is, of course, holding a torch, one providing light and enlightenment to the huddled masses welcomed at nearby Ellis Island. Kafka’s sword presents the exact opposite image of America, a symbolic warding off of the wretched refuse of humanity she is actually welcoming. There is an enormous irony in Kafka’s mistake. The Immigration Act of 1924 that limited immigration, aimed at keeping out Eastern and Southern Europeans, particularly Italians and Jews, was passed the very year of Kafka’s death. Any temptation to claim that Kafka foresaw this should be avoided. There’s no reason to credit him with clairvoyance, and every reason to explain his use of a sword by the fact that Kafka, in preparing the novel, used as a source Arthur Holitscher’s Amerika heute und morgen, which contained, on page eleven, a photo of the Statue of Liberty taken from a great distance, in which the torch does, indeed, look like she’s holding a sword.
If Kafka never made it to American shores, his novels came here fairly early. The Castle was first published in 1930 and The Trial in 1937. Though the original translations by Willa and Edwin Muir have been superseded, especially since Kafka entered the public domain, Kafka has been part of American literature for almost a century.
As is the case around the world, Kafkaesque is, in America, an adjective that describes the mysterious and arbitrary workings of the world of power, bureaucracy. This is the way it is used universally, even by those who have never cracked the cover of a book by Kafka. But it was Philip Roth who dealt with what was really the core of Kafka’s life and was the base upon which the superstructure of the Kafkaesque was constructed. Roth, who claimed that he only started reading Kafka seriously in his thirties, understood Kafka as a writer and, more importantly, as a man. Roth applied and adapted the real Kafka to his own very American Jewish writings. Kafka is everywhere in Roth, but not the Kafka who is shorthand for mysterious political authority. Roth’s Kafka is located at a different level and explored in a different register. Roth’s focus is on his master’s relationship to Jewishness, family, marriage, and his city. This is the Kafka whose spirit pervades Roth’s oeuvre.
The most obvious example of Kafka’s place in Roth’s writing appears in one of the few truly bad books Roth wrote: The Breast, from 1972. Riding the wave of his provocative fame after Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), in The Breast David Kepesh, Roth’s stand-in for Gregor Samsa (and himself) turns into a breast. This is Kafka, but bad Kafka, an exercise in admiration that can safely be ignored.
The rest of Roth’s Kafka-inflected work is less obviously but more profoundly Kafkaesque. Kafka’s work that was closest to Roth’s heart was the letter to his father. When Roth taught at the University of Pennsylvania, he assigned it to his classes to read and then had them write letters of their own in a similar vein. That Kafka’s letter was a formative text for Roth is attested by a note Roth wrote concerning it: “Family as the maker of character. Family as the primary, shaping influence. Unending relevance of childhood.” All of these elements, which define Roth’s novels, can be traced back to Kafka.
The powerful and uncompromising self-reflections of Kafka’s letter, his brutal dissection of those around him, but also of himself, its writer’s positioning himself as a son coming to terms with his parents, of the disappointments he causes them but that they also cause him, is what stands behind Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. In a letter to a Czech writer, Roth described Portnoy as a direct heir of Kafka’s letter, saying “it is about yet another family obsessed Jewish bachelor in his thirties [and] might have begun, ‘Dear Mother, You ask why I was obsessed with you…’” It was, he wrote another correspondent, a book where he aimed to “stand Kafka on his head.”
To be sure, Alexander Portnoy is the beloved son of a mother he finds ridiculous, while Kafka was a source of dismay to his father, who could make nothing of Franz’s manias, from the Fletcherizing of his food to his taste for the Yiddish theater. Alex lived a life in flight from his family, while Kafka remained anchored to the Old City of Prague in which he was born and raised, only finding the strength to leave for good when death approached. Both men in their different ways, were tethered to their families, to their parents; even as grown men, the judgment that mattered was that of their parents. And both, however profound their rebellions, are above all else Jews. But Jews in the sense of the oft-quoted line from Kafka’s diaries, “What do I have in common with the Jews.” This sentiment applies equally to the two authors. It is the essence of the Kafkaesque in the sense we are dealing with it here.
It was not just the letter to his father, however, that fed into Roth’s writing. Around the time of the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint Roth was asked if he had been influenced by the new wave of Jewish comics who were then appearing on the scene and who were not shy about talking about sex. His response should be taken seriously: “I would say I was more strongly influenced by a sit-down comic named Franz Kafka and a very funny bit he does called ‘The Metamorphosis.’”
If Portnoy’s Complaint is the most flagrant example of Roth applying Kafka’s spirit, it is far from the only one. Patrimony (1991), his portrait of his father, a loving, sympathetic, and clear-eyed volume. Though it describes a father who, having reached a ripe old age, was not the dominating physical presence that Herrmann Kafka was for Franz, Patrimony is almost explicitly Roth’s letter to his now departed father, also named Herman. Written after the death of Roth’s father it, like Kafka’s letter, went unread by its subject.
Prague was a city about which Roth said “I understand that a connection of sorts existed between myself and this place,” not just because it resembled those parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from which his family emigrated to the US, but because of Kafka. His first visit to Prague saw him reading Kafka’s diaries and Brod’s biography as guide books, and then visiting the addresses and places mentioned in them in an effort to get closer to this most loved of writers.
This love for Prague led him to write novels seemingly light years from Kafka, and yet their inspiration remained Roth’s favorite author. The Professor of Desire (1977) is set partially in Prague, and as Roth’s biographer Blake Bailey wrote, Roth found a way to get Kafka’s city into the novel. Bailey wrote that “Roth was determined to work Czechoslovakia into the novel […] and found a rather blunt wedge in ‘Kafka’s own erotic blockage’ as portrayed metaphorically […] in The Castle (‘a book engaged at every level with not reaching a climax’).” The Professor of Desire also includes the main character, David Kepesh’s (originally of The Breast) prurient interest in Kafka’s sexual issues. In a dream, he meets one of the whores Kafka frequented to learn if he was impotent, as Roth surmised from his reading of the diaries.
Roth made use of the prerogatives of a fiction writer to carry out the ultimate act of homage. In his 1973 essay “I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting”; or, “Looking at Kafka,” Roth with the wave of his pen saves Kafka from both the tuberculosis that killed him and the Nazis who likely would have killed him, as they did his three sisters. Roth relocates him as a late middle-aged Hebrew school teacher in Newark, New Jersey in 1942.
Roth’s intuition in assigning his resuscitated Kafka the role of a Hebrew teacher is an inspired one. Twenty years after the fictional Roth, I, too, would attend Hebrew school, which should not be confused with either a yeshiva or a Jewish day school. Hebrew school was in session in the late afternoon (typically from 4:00- 5:00), after the students had already spent a full day at public school. It was a roundly hated institution by those who attended, and Roth, placing Kafka in one of them, exposes him to the insults and derision of the unhappy students. Kafka is called Kishka, partially because of his “remote and melancholy foreignness, but largely because we vented on him our resentment at having to learn an ancient calligraphy at the very hour we should be out screaming our heads off on the ballfield.” For these young Americans, Kafka – or Kishka – stands at the nodal point of the conflict between Jewishness and Americanness.
In the hundreds, the thousands of volumes of critical work on Kafka, Roth’s brief essay is the one that gets closest to enabling us to understand Kafka, the Jew mocked by other Jews, the failed lover, the eternal bachelor.
Roth confronts the immigrant Kafka with two of the great conflicts in both Kafka’s and Roth’s lives: love and family. Kafka is invited to dinner at the Roth home, and his parents also invite Roth’s mother’s sister Rhoda in the hopes of making a match. At the dinner table Roth’s fictional father intones “I firmly believe…that the family is the cornerstone of everything.” The incomprehension that dogged the real Kafka in Prague follows him here in a lower-middle class apartment in Newark. Kafka is also witness to a relationship between parents and child totally foreign to his experience. As is almost always the case with Roth, he is the victim of too much love, of constant kvelling over his least act. As he writes: “Others are crushed by paternal criticism – I find myself oppressed by his high opinion of me.” Kafka is informed of little Philip’s expertise on the matter of the habits of fish, his father telling his guest, “’He gives me a lecture on one of those fish, it’s seventh heaven, Dr. Kafka.’ ‘I can imagine,” Kafka replies.’ We – and Roth – who are aware of Kafka’s sad history with his father know that it is only in imagination that Kafka has experienced this, as praise was the last thing he received in real life from his parents.
Kafka describes his romantic past to Rhoda. Kafka, having survived the tuberculosis that killed him, we are told that his relationship with Dora Diamant, who faithfully nursed during his final illness, went on for a seeming eternity: “Years and years it went on, and then she left him. For somebody else. She got tired of waiting.”
Roth’s fictional Kafka’s romance with Aunt Rhoda fizzles out, and the Kafka who made it out of Europe dies a forgotten man, never having published The Trial or The Castle, his diaries never read by eyes other than his own. In the hundreds, the thousands of volumes of critical work on Kafka, Roth’s brief essay is the one that gets closest to enabling us to understand Kafka, the Jew mocked by other Jews, the failed lover, the eternal bachelor.
In 1989, with the collapse of communism, previously forbidden works were now published in Czechoslovakia, among them, of course, those of Kafka. The first American book to be unbanned was one by the great lover of Prague, Philip Roth. The book was Portnoy’s Complaint.
Mitchell Abidor
