Vol. 48 No. 3 1981 - page 358

358
PARTISAN REVIEW
Philip lived, and rumor had it that her Jewish master and his friends
had murdered her in order to use her blood in the matzos. Rioting
ensued. As the grandson of a ritual slaughterer
(schochet)
Kafka must
have been particularly sensitive to the anti-Jewish hysteria whipped up
by the allegation; seventeen years later when he read Arnold Zweig's
play
Ritualmord in Ungarn (Ritual Murder in Hungary),
he was
reduced to tears. Based loosely on the Hilsner scandal, the play cen–
ters on a boy who falsely denounces his father and coreligionists.
Finally he knifes himself in a synagogue. Kafka's vegetarianism may
have had one of its roots in revulsion at the idea of his father's father's
daily activity-ritually slitting the throats of animals, hacking up their
bodies, feeding his family with money earned from butchering. The
butcher's knife will be recurrent in Kafka's nightmares, daydreams, and
fictions. "The regular diet of my imagination is fantasies like this one:
I'm lying outstretched on the floor, sliced up like roast meat, and with
my hand I am slowly pushing a slice towards a dog in the corner." He
also started to write a story himself about ritual murder in Odessa but
destroyed the manuscript. But anti-Semitic incidents are virtually never
mentioned in Kafka's diaries or letters, even when he is attempting an
exhaustive catalog of childhood events that caused psychological
damage.
If
he had the feeling that he was constantly "under surveillance,"
it must have been partly because of these, though mainly because his
nagging father never desisted for long from his diatribe. Humiliatingly
denounced, even in the presence of friends and strangers, Kafka
retained the feeling he'd had as a child of being arbitrarily condemned
and punished without having done anything wrong. This sense of
being guilty and innocent at the same time was shared,
to
some extent,
by other potential victims of anti-Semitism, caught as they were in the
crossfire between pan-Germanism and Czech nationalism.
Like K. in
The Castle,
Kafka would never be able
to
graft himself
into local society; nor could he seal himself off from it:
The forsaken solitary who still wants now and then to attach himself
somewhere, the man who, depending on the time of day, the
changing state of the weather, of his business, and so on, may need to
catch sight of a friendly arm, he could cling to-he can't hold out for
long without a window looking out on the street. And if he feels no
desire for anything at all, and only, as a weary man, leans on his
window-sill with his gaze shifting between sky and passers-by, if he
wants nothing and his head's slightly thrown back, even then the
horses below will draw him down into their traffic of carts and noise,
so ultimately into human concord. ("The Street Window")
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