The Sons Read Free Page A

instructed his son to “put it on my bedside table,” where it remained, unread. Two years later, in November 1919, still smarting from his father’s refusal to let him marry Julie Wohryzek, the daughter of a synagogue custodian, on the grounds that it would have “dishonored” the family name, Kafka sat down to write a one-hundred-page “lawyer’s letter” indicting his father for the tangle of aborted literary projects and frustrated marriage attempts that had left him, at the age of thirty-six, still a son. In many ways the “Letter to His Father” formulates explicitly the same critique of the bourgeois family that Kafka had put into literary terms seven years earlier in
The Sons
. The very first pages of the letter begin to play with titles, dialogue, and images from the earlier stories. Kafka speaks of his father’s “judgment” of him and compares their fight to that of bedbugs, which not only bite but suck their enemy’s blood. Not surprisingly, the bulk of the letter details the contradictory education he received as a child and that also thwarts his literary progeny:
    What was brought to the table had to be eaten, the quality of the food was not to be discussed—but you yourself often found the food inedible, called it “this swill,” said “that cow” (the cook) had ruined it.… Bones mustn’t be cracked with the teeth, but you could. Vinegar must not be sipped noisily, but you could. The main thing wasthat the bread should be cut straight. But it didn’t matter that you did it with a knife dripping with gravy.… In themselves these would have been utterly insignificant details, they only became depressing for me because you, so tremendously the authoritative man, did not keep the commandments you imposed on me.
    What takes place at the dinner table is repeated in Hermann Kafka’s numerous stories of his difficult childhood with which he would reproach his children for their comfortable, middle-class existence. Under other conditions, Kafka writes, such stories might have been educational, might have encouraged him to endure similar torments and become like his father. “But that wasn’t what you wanted at all,” he maintains; such efforts to “distinguish oneself in the world” were labeled ingratitude, disobedience, treachery, and madness. “And so, while on the one hand you tempted me to [imitate you] by means of example, story, and humiliation, on the other hand you forbade it with the utmost severity.” This contradictory pedagogy finally culminates in the impossibility of establishing an independent domestic life, a state Kafka longingly describes as an unattainable Eden. “Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come,” Kafka writes in the “Letter to His Father,” “is, I am convinced, the utmost a human being can succeed in doing.” Yet Hermann Kafka’s nature blocked him from this realm:
    Sometimes I imagine the map of the world spread out and you stretched diagonally across it. And I feel as if I could consider living in only those regions that either are not covered by you or are not within your reach. And, in keeping with the conception I have of your magnitude, these are not many and not very comforting regions—and marriage is not among them.
    Reading the “Letter to His Father” together with
The Sons
, one understands that the early stories are also a form of personal correspondence. For a writer who once declared that he was “made of literature,” the distinction between fiction and autobiography must have seemed irrelevant. Thus Kafka often used his novels and stories to negotiate problems in his personal life. To Felice he once declared that his novel
The Man Who Disappeared
would give her “a clearer idea of the good in me than the mere hints in the longest letters of the longest lifetime.” Later in their correspondence, when the relationship had reached an impasse, he asked Felice if her father was familiar with “The