Rochelle Tobias and Kafka's Country Doctor

Years before I met Rochelle Tobias, I met her through her writing. It was the summer of 2000. I had just finished my first year of teaching at the University of Toronto and was allowing myself to exhale and leaf aimlessly through journals in the reading room of Robarts Library. I stumbled across The Germanic Review and felt myself drawn to an article on Kafka; I was in the midst of writing a book about him. From the article's first phrase—"Of all the accusations made against the country doctor in Kafka's tale …"—I was hooked, not yet by the content but by the style (120). I sensed, as one does with good writing, a voice. I could hear this person, a person whom the byline said was Rochelle Tobias. And this person, I knew by the end of the first paragraph, had something elegant, self-effacing, and luminous about her. Her language was evocative, even oracular, but always lucid. It was straightforward yet pointed toward something beyond. Still not cognizant of the argument of the essay, I felt myself transported into someone else's way of speaking. And I loved it.

As I read, I realized that the genre, too, was unusual. This was a scholarly article apparently, published in an academic journal, yet there was no mention of secondary literature (I was too engrossed to flip to the endnotes), and it read like a lively essay, even a story. The author, I realized, was retelling this story that I already knew, Kafka's "A Country Doctor"—retelling it the way we retell stories, with a twist. When Kafka describes the impossible—"unearthly horses" of Homeric proportions contorting themselves and "turning" out of a tiny stall—this author insisted that Kafka was not just parodying a birth; he was meditating on what it meant to invent things. Kafka's equines embodied fantasy itself, the "turns" of phrase that are at the heart of every story (125). I now realized that this storyteller, this Rochelle Tobias, whose voice I now felt I knew, was not only good at telling and retelling tales. She was good at thinking about them too.

I got to the end of the essay in what felt like minutes but could have been hours; I was starting to experience time as Kafka's Country Doctor did. When I reached the last sentence, I understood the author's—Rochelle Tobias's—point in showing us that Kafka's story was about storytelling. She had figured out that Kafka's Country Doctor was not actually sent to save the dying boy, as the surface plot tells us, but to help him die. And not just to help him die but to help the doctor himself die. For it turns out that the story of the dying boy might have been invented by the doctor, in an attempt to delay his own death—as in One Thousand and One Nights—and also to allay the pain that all dying causes. The doctor is not the priest, Kafka tells us, and he is certainly not the Messiah, Rochelle Tobias insists. The doctor cannot save the body meant for death. But he can, if he is also a storyteller, provide that body—the boy's, the doctor's, and our own—with a way of coming to terms with dying. And he can make our living, which Kafka did not always distinguish from "the eternal torments of dying," more bearable. I realized, as I read Rochelle Tobias's essay on that quiet summer day in 2000, that her essay was doing the same for my own living and dying, and I was grateful for this person I had not yet met.

When Rochelle's and my paths finally crossed at Johns Hopkins years later, I saw her among the students and colleagues who depended on and cherished her, and I realized that she was performing this service every day for them. Rochelle, I discovered, did her own doctoring and storytelling. As a teacher, mentor, and colleague, she made—and still makes—the living of those around...