360
PARTISAN REVIEW
restricted space in somebody else's property. He never even had a rented
flat that was properly self-contained. This must have a lot to do with
the way that Josef K. in
The Trial
knows himself to be under arrest
though free to move from one place to another. And in
The Castle,
to
stay in the village at all,
K.
has to be both devious and defiant. When he
is given a job as caretaker in the school, he has to misuse space by
sleeping in a classroom. When he tries to accost the castle official
Klamm by waiting inside his sledge, he is like a frightened schoolboy
steeling himself to go out of bounds. He can never feel "This space is
mine. This is my territory." And neither could Kafka.
During office hours he was surrounded by non-Jews : it was
exceptional for a Jew to be employed by the Workers ' Accident
Insurance Association. But from school days onwards, his friends,
almost without exception, were Jewish. Even the sociable Brod had
scarcely any non-Jewish friends. That Kafka was uneasy about this
may be inferred from the critique he wrote in his diary (March, 1911) of
Brod's novel
Jiidinnen (Jewesses).
Kafka complains about the absence
of non-Jewish observers to put the Jewishness into perspective, and,
unflatteringly, he compares the Jewish ladies with lizards. However
happy we are to watch an individual lizard on an Italian footpath, we'd
be horrified to see hundreds of them crawling over each other in a
pickle jar. There was no non-Jewish observer to put his social life into
perspective.
Though he lived in a Jewish world, Kafka began by feeling
himself to be an outsider to the Jewish religion. Its rituals, he wrote in
1911, were "on their very last legs ... have only a historical character."
On his rare visits to synagogue, he felt alienated from the Eastern
European Jews, who were less assimilated than their Western coreli–
gionists in manners, habits, clothing, hair style and language. Most of
the Easterners spoke Yiddish; the more orthodox still wore long
sidelocks. Possibly Kafka's initial hostility to the work of Martin Buber
was partly a hostility
to
Eastern Jews , for what Buber was doing in his
books was presenting them to the West by translating into literature
the oral tradition of Hassidic stories which merged religion, mysticism,
and folklore. A turning point in Kafka's development as a writer and as
a Jew was the arrival of the Yiddish actors in 1911. Their performances
and his friendship with the leading actor, Yizchak L6wy, changed his
attitude to the Yiddish language, to Jewish rituals, and to Hassidism.
In 1912 he started reading books on Yiddish literature and Judaism, as
well as attending events organized by the Bar Kochba society. By the
time he met Buber in 1913, Kafka had already taken his first step-in
