KAFKA: FATHER AN]) SON
27
seemed to you that I was busying myself more with Jewish matters.
You have always been prejudiced in advance against my occupations,
and even more so against my enthusiasms. Here you showed the same
distaste; yet in this case you might have been expected to make a
slight exception, for this was Jewishness of your Jewishness and hence
offered the possibility of a new relationship between us. I do not deny
that
if
you had taken any interest in these matters, they might have
aroused my suspicions by that very fact; I do not claim to be any
better than you in this respect. But the matter never came to a test.
Through me Jewishness became repulsive to you, Jewish books
unreadable. They 'disgusted you.' This may have been because
you insisted that the Judaism you taught me during my child–
hood was the only true sort and that beyond that there was nothing.
But it is hardly thinkable that you should have insisted on this point.
In this case your 'disgust' (let us forget for the moment that it was
immediately directed not against things Jewish but against my person)
could only signify that you unconsciously recognized the weakness of
your Jewishness and of my Jewish training, but, not wishing to be
reminded of this, replied to all reminders with open hatred. Anyway,
the negative importance you attached to my new Jewishness was much
exaggerated; in the first place it bore your curse within itself, and
moreover, since this sort of development depends largely on the
nature of one's relation to one's fellow men, it was in my case
doomed to failure."
Compared to Kafka's father, his mother, seen "in the kaleido–
scope of childhood," seems "a paragon of reason." Her son indeed
deplores her lack of independence toward his father, but also under–
stands it. He understands her love for her husband and realizes that
opposition to his will would have been impossible. Yet he resented
the fact that his parents formed a sort of unit, a common front against
their son, which his mother dared abandon only in secret. This resent–
ment has left a profound trace in Kafka's work. See
Das Ehepaar
(The Married Couple),
which from this point of view is one of
Kafka's most revealing works.
The Kafka household in many ways resembled the Prousts' (see
Leon Pierre-Quint:
Marcel Proust, sa vie, son oeuvre:
"His father
left home early in the morning and rarely saw his son." His mother,
by contrast, "was gentle and kind ... she watched over him with the
utmost care, excusing in advance his fantasies and the careless habits
in which he indulged.")
If
we study the common elements in the
relations of Proust and Kafka to their parents we may perhaps begin
to understand the similarity in outlook and style of two writers who,
