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* 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), a
Today, eagerly and happily began to read the History of the Jewsby 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 pi
It is the shorter stories, too, that sparkle most with country glimpses, with a savor of folk tale and a still-medieval i
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 ca