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PARTISAN REVIEW
In
1915 Kafka did not go to synagogue on the Day of Atonement,
but far from feeling indifferent to the Jewish Day of Judgment, he
called his behavior "suicidal."
In
the summer of 1916 he was reading
Genesis and excerpting it in his diary with interpolated notes such as:
"God's rage against humanity. " During his first days in Marienbad
with Felice, he read nothing but the Bible, at leas t half-aware that he
was learning from it about how
to
tell what struck him as th e truth.
"Only the Old Testament can see-say nothing about it yet." His diary
entry for July 20 is a direct address to God: "Do not consign me to
perdition. I know that what speaks here is a self-love, absurd, whether
viewed from near or far, but I am alive for once, so have the self-love of
the living."
At the beginning of 1917 Brod wrote
to
Buber that Kafka was
drifting " unawares into Judaism. "
In
the spring Kafka wrote 'The
Great Wall of China" in a style th at sometimes parodies Talmudic
commentary. Though the wall never becomes a m ere symbol for the
Law, Kafka was now tackling the problem of how it was evolved, and
at the same time writing a miniature history of the J ews in the
Diaspora.
One of Kafka 's greatest enthusiasms in the las t few years of his life
was for the study of modern Hebrew, and his only symbiotic relation–
ship with a woman was also a relationship with the traditions of
Eastern European Judaism. Dora Dymant's fa ther was an Orthodox
Polish Jew and one of Kafka 's earli es t conversations with her culmi–
nated in h er reading from Isaiah in H ebrew. Kafka 's parents disap–
proved of her, looking down on her in the way most Western Jews
looked down on Easterners, but with her help he found the courage to
defy his father and live with her in Berlin . Meeting Brod in August
1923, shortly before he left Prague, he read ou t the curses from
Leviticus and said that h e wanted
tefillin ,
the phylacteries used by
Orthodox Jews for prayers every morning except the Sabbath. And
during 1923 he borrowed his parents ' Hebrew prayerbook.
The hemorrhage of 1917 had had a radical effect on his thinking,
which had become more transcendentalist.
It
was a matter of having to
believe-not merely in a God who had struck a t him but in an Absolute
and in a higher rea lity without any law of gravity or any mockery for
things that to us seem ridiculous . Pulling against gravity is a "heav–
enly collar and chain" which choke us if we try
to
stay on earth, while
the gravitational collar and chain choke us if we try to reach heaven .
But only the spiritual is real.
Abstracting himself as far as he could from his diseased body,
Kafka wanted to feel passive in the caress of his own phrases. At the
