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gentile, impelled him to a peculiar vehemence. He wants, perhaps, to
divest her of her illusions about life. So she is spared nothing of his
situation-past, present and to come. His oppressive father, his cruel
childhood, his "obscene" sexual history, his mortal thinness of body,
his
insomnia, his coughing fits, his dreams-all are made to contribute to
her enlightenment. Increasingly, he reminds her of his Jewishness.
"This means, expressed with exaggeration, that not one calm second
is granted me, nothing is granted me, everything has to be earned."
"My nature is: Fear." At one moment Prague is full of Jewish refugees
from revolutionary Russia and there are anti-Semitic riots in the streets.
He spends an entire afternoon among the demonstrators, "wallowing" in
the spectacle. And on this occasion his cries are dreadful to overhear,
like those of a man in the embrace of a nightmare. As Mr. Haas ob–
serves, for Kafka the "love of a non-Jew was evidently a serious, tragic
problem."
Yes, but all of life tended to become such a problem for him. The
inescapable
unity
of his experience was his despair, his joke and his
glory. His candor in expressing, in
feeling,
his situation as a Jew was
like a fire in which that situation got refined of all local, temporal,
special considerations and so came to serve his great primary
art.
"Out
of the quarrel with ourselves, we make poetry," in Yeats's phrase. Else–
where in the letters, at calmer moments, he writes about his people in
a spirit which has little to do with Milena, much to do with his mind
and art. "The insecure position of Jews, insecure within themselves, in–
secure among people, would make it above all comprehensible that they
consider themselves to be allowed to own only what they hold in their
hands or between their teeth, that furthermore only palpable possessions
give them the right to live, and that they will never acquire what they
once have lost but that instead it calmly swims away from them forever."
A similar paradox gives energy to Kafka's fiction, in which man in
general is shown as holding life "between his teeth" in return for the
insecurity of his spiritual existence. And this conception, which dis–
tinguishes Kafka from Kierkegaard no less than from Eliot (for whom
religion is so much a matter of "belief," and unbelief is so often asso–
ciated with mere debility), Kafka owes to the tradition of Moses, Job
and Ruth. His unique place among the great recent writers consists in
his bringing that tradition to bear on the preoccupations of modernity.
There are in the
Letters to M ilena
other evidences of the Kafka
who had written
The Trial
and was soon to write
The Castle.
These,
however, are mostly evidences of his general mind and style, rarely of
his opinions or his reading. For all his distress, he usually sustains a
