Today is Franz
Kafka’s 130th birthday, and as good a reason as any to write on some of his autobiographical material.
In 1919 he wrote a letter to his father, a letter that was never delivered. It was a brutally honest, unflinching effort to analyse and rebuild their relationship.
"You
really had brought some traces of Judaism with you from the ghetto-like village
community; it was not much and it dwindled a little more in the city and during
your military service; but still, the impressions and memories of your youth
did just about suffice for some sort of Jewish life, especially since you did
not need much help of that kind, but came of robust stock and could personally
scarcely be shaken by religious scruples unless they were strongly mixed with
social scruples. Basically the faith that ruled your life consisted in your
believing in the unconditional rightness of the opinions of a certain class of
Jewish society, and hence actually, since these opinions were part and parcel
of your own nature, in believing in yourself. Even in this there was still
Judaism enough, but it was too little to be handed on to the child; it all
dribbled away while you were passing it on. In part, it was youthful memories
that could not be passed on to others; in part, it was your dreaded
personality."[1]
The letter
reflects Kafka's personal tragedy- his strained relationship with his father,
and his feeling of alienation- but it is also emblematic of his generation's
experience. Kafka himself recognised that. "The whole thing is, of course,
no isolated phenomenon. It was much the same with a large section of this
transitional generation of Jews, which had migrated from the still
comparatively devout countryside to the cities."
From the
1870s onward, Bohemian Jews witnessed an interesting phenomenon. A significant
portion of Jews from the Bohemian villages moved to Prague, set up business
ventures, prospered, and integrated themselves to a large degree into Czech and
German society. Their attitude towards their religion grew lax, to say
the least, and children of Kafka's generation grew up with a minimal, nominal
Jewish identity at best. Synagogue attendance could have been as infrequent as a few
days a year. "Four days a year you went to the synagogue, where you were,
to say the least, closer to the indifferent than to those who took it
seriously, patiently went through the prayers as a formality, sometimes amazed
me by being able to show me in the prayer book the passage that was being said
at the moment..." That was the synagogue. The situation at the Kafka
household was "even poorer." The only thing observed was the first
Passover Seder, which, "more and more developed into a farce, with fits of
hysterical laughter, admittedly under the influence of the growing children.
(Why did you have to give way to that influence? Because you had brought it
about.)"
Even when
they attended synagogue services, it seemed to the young Kafka a "purely
social event," his father going through mere motions. Kafka's father,
Franz later realised, did have a genuine attachment of sorts to Judaism, but it
was related to childhood nostalgia and a sense of social status more than any
inherent religious meanings or values.
"It
was also impossible to make a child, overacutely observant from sheer
nervousness, understand that the few flimsy gestures you performed in the name
of Judaism, and with an indifference in keeping with their flimsiness, could
have any higher meaning. For you they had meaning as little souvenirs of
earlier times, and that was why you wanted to pass them on to me, but since
they no longer had any intrinsic value even for you could do this only through persuasion
or threat; on the one hand, this could not be successful, and on the other, it
had to make you very angry with me on account of my apparent obstinacy, since
you did not recognize the weakness of your position in this."
Kafka wryly
summed up the lack of a vibrant, meaningful, and spiritual experience of
Judaism, when he said, "this was the religious material that was handed on
to me"
Is it any
wonder that Kafka then remarked, "how one could do anything better with
that material than get rid of it as fast as possible."
What
Kafka's loss of identity boils down to is that a scarcely observant father
could not browbeat or guilt his son into accepting a faith to which the former
attached so little meaning. Kafka later grew closer to his Jewish roots by the influence of a friend, Jiri Langer. Langer came from a similar background, but ran away from home to become a follower for a while of the Hasidic Rebbe of Belz. By then, however, time was running out and Kafka never entirely regained neither faith nor identity before his untimely death.
[1]Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father. http://site.douban.com/113918/widget/notes/1857805/note/183418920/
