The Jewish Essence of Franz Kafka

28 SHOFAR Winter 1995 Vol. 13, No.2 THE JEWISH ESSENCE OF FRANZ KAFKA by Harriet L. Parmet Harriet L. Parmet, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures, has taught Hebrew at Lehigh University since 1976. She specializes in modern Israeli literature in translation, particularly the work of women writers. She co-authored a study of feminist religious views on reproductive technologies and a major article on Haviva Reik, a heroine of the Holocaust. Co-founder of Lehigh University's Jewish Studies program and founder of the Jewish Colloquia series, Parmet was responsible for Lehigh'sJudaic library acquisitions. She has published in Midstream, Feminist Teacher, Journal for Feminist Studies in Religion, JeWish Spectator, NEMIA (Modern Language Studies), Studies in American Jewish Literature, Shofar, Visions International, and Delos (forthcoming ). Parmet has coordinated an archaeological dig a Tel Akko, Israel for the Lehigh valley Association of Independent Colleges. She has served on the Executive Board of the Hillel Society and the Academic Board of Associates (Berman Center at Lehigh) and has received fellowships for research in Israel. Had Franz Kafka not been born and reared a Jew, he would not have been Kafka, any more then James Joyce reared among the Zulus could have written A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Although the point seems rather obviOUS, its significance has often been missed, distorted, or ignored. Kafka has been hailed as a crypto-Christian and simultaneously unveiled as a pseudo-Marxist: the absence of explicitly Jewish references in the available texts has justified the dismissal by literary critics of Kafka's religion as only an incidental biographical detail. In this regard one must understand the prevailing atmosphere ofJewish learning and writing until The Jewisb Essence of Franz Kafka 29 the social and political turmoil of the collapsing Austrian Empire ended its traditional character. The medieval myth of the golem ('clay' in Hebrew), layered with the cultural impulses superimposed upon it, pervades the world of Franz Kafka. To grow up as a Jew in Kafka's Prague was a matter not of choice but of destiny. What Kafka made of that destiny at different points in his life, the manner in which collective fate shaped his individual vision, constitutes the larger story beyond the scope of this paper; moreover, his attitude toward Judaism-and far more is involved here than religion as such-underwent significant changes over the years. Yet who he was cannot possibly be understood without realizing that his beingJewish-not faith, to begin with, not observance, but the fact of beingJewish in turn-ofthe -century Prague-was as vital a component of his identity as his dark hair and deeply brooding eyes. Hermann and Julie Kafka, Franz's parents, belonged to the first generation of assimilated Jews. Though no longer observant in any meaningful sense, they retained a tenuous and largely sentimental attachment to the. tradition in which they were raised, at the same time striving to become Austrian citizens of the Mosaic faith, that would assure their full acceptance as equals in the social strata to which. they aspired.1 Into this defensively ambivalent attitude toward Judaism, the child Franz's self-awareness as a Jew could scarcely have made for a happy discovery. Among the writings ofKafka, the primary document detailing his relation to the family is the Letter to His Fatber/ written November 1919, five years before his death, which was never delivered. In this Letter Kafka analyzes the Jewish aspect of his development with a critical detachment that, despite its polemical tone, conveys a vivid sense of the home situation: As a child I reproached myself in accord with you, for not going to the synagogue often enough, for not attending services often enough, for not fasting, and so on. It was you whom I thought I had wronged, rather than myself, and I felt crushed by the ever-present burden of guilt (76). Kafka continues reproaching the father for the farcical nature of Judaism that was his brand of religious experience: the four times a year 'Ernest Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason: A 'Life of Kafka (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1984), pp. 54, 55. 2Franz Kafka, Letter to...