Long ago, in the year 1980, a friend gave me a Christmas present of The Trial and insisted I read it. I would love it, he said. Love it! Yet years passed before I could bring myself to touch not only The Trial but anything by Kafka. I had somehow eluded exposure to his work in both high school and college and knew little of him other than the occasional Woody Allen joke, yet still had managed to develop an inexplicable trepidation of entering his world. What was it exactly that kept me away? I normally had no fear of dark material, in fact often embraced it. Why did I think this author in particular would pull me into a pit of despair I could never escape? I don't know, but that gift (which I still have) gathered layers of dust on my bookshelf.
A decade later, I encountered an extraordinary exhibition of paintings at MOCA by the art teacher Tim Rollins and his South Bronx middle-school collective K.O.S. (Kids of Survival). Canvases constructed from pages of Kafka's Amerika were covered with an intricate network of fantastical gold shapes. Rollins had instructed his students to read Amerika, sketch their own versions of the horns blown by a troupe of angels in the book's final chapter, then intertwine and paint these horns in gold on the book-page canvases. The result: Webs of wonder and mystery into which one could sink and remain, willingly, forever.
Well, now I had to read Kafka. I immediately obtained a copy of Amerika and took the plunge.
What I discovered in the novel was not a pit of despair but an odyssey full of humor and endless invention. Yes, it got dark, but without ever losing its comic touch. I read the rest of his work in quick succession and realized my friend had been right—I did "love it"—yet Amerika was easily my favorite.
Why was that? An early, unfinished work, it is by no means Kafka's most profound. He wrote the bulk of it in a quick three-month burst of inspiration at the end of 1912 (at the age of 29), between The Judgment and The Metamorphosis, then didn't touch it until adding one more chapter in 1914—at the start of World War I—after which he dropped it altogether, shifting his attention to The Trial and shorter works. While initially so delighted with what he was crafting that he regularly read excerpts aloud to friends (and published the first chapter as a standalone story), he ultimately became so dissatisfied with it that he demanded his friend Max Brod destroy the entire manuscript after his death. (Of course, Brod didn't...and tellingly, neither had Kafka.) Initially intended as a variation on David Copperfield—a boy's eventful journey into adulthood, but this time in an exotic land—he found his own imagination taking him instead to a place of no return. But still, that place alternated its darkness with light, defeat with recovery, and despair with (oddly for Kafka) tendrils of hope. And so, despite its downward trajectory, this tale of a forsaken German immigrant became the tale of us all—groping our way through a world that arbitrarily gives and takes and does not want to help us, spinning our wheels between active resistance and passive resignation, all the while wondering if our misfortunes are not the world's fault at all but our own...and without ever being granted an answer.
It is 101 years since Kafka's death, and while the America he was writing about is not the one we currently inhabit (nor was it really the America of 1912—Kafka could only read and dream about it, he never left Europe), it is hard not to connect the cruelties the immigrant Karl Rossmann encounters with the cruelties currently being inflicted on our entire immigrant population. Kafka imagined a Statue of Liberty bearing a sword instead of a torch, and that image now has a potency he could not have predicted. So perhaps that is the secret of this book. Particular yet universal, it embodies the torch that Kafka replaced—a flame held aloft that never expires.
