EDITH KURZWEIL
11
are artfully displayed, ready to be ordered and shipped. Money-changing
establishments abound, although credit-card purchases are preferred, in
part because this may be financially advantageous, in part because it
proves to the new capitalists that the Czechs are with it. In sum, Prague
is rapidly becoming a Western city and is as hell-bent on showing off its
enormous progress as it is on retaining its nineteenth-century charm, on
displaying it and capitalizing on it - in the manner of Vienna.
The greatest attraction is Zidske Hrbitov, the Jewish cemetery
which, according to one guide, was in use between the tenth or
eleventh century and the nineteenth: gravestones are piled one atop an–
other, serving specific families - who had to bury their dead within the
space allotted them - for centuries. While a guide pointed to the ghetto
wall and explained that the inhabitants of this ghetto always had been
governed by strict sovereigns who could confiscate at will their property
and impose exorbitant taxes, a middle-aged woman took notes . Her
husband, however, was uneasy hearing that only under Joseph II, in the
eighteenth century, had Jews been allowed to leave the ghetto during
certain hours of the day and that to distinguish them from everyone else,
they had to wear broad-brimmed hats and yellow badges. At another
place, a guide indicated where Kafka's father's house had stood before
the ghetto was torn down at the beginning of this century: "You see,"
she said, "it was set against the wall, so that when Kafka grew up he
could observe what was going on in the ghetto and look outside it as
well." Even though we all have read Kafka and much of Kafkaiana, it
was astonishing to learn that much of K's walk through Prague in
The
Trial,
for instance, was lifted straight out of his life.
It's become a cliche to recall that travel produces a time warp, that
it propels us out of our own reality and deposits us in another one.
However, it seems to me that the associations we make are speeded up
when, in addition to moving from one place to another within a short
time, we also change context. I had just attended a conference on the
history of psychoanalysis in Brussels, where discussion of Freud's
Jewishness and his alleged devotion to as well as his ambivalence about
his religion had been as central as his early relation to Czechoslovakia.
But none of the psychoanalytic historians, including myself, had fully fo–
cused on the fact that this ambivalence itself was the result of the
European Enlightenment and that psychoanalysis was its inevitable end
product; or that Jewish intellectuals not only were created by these
conditions and by the ambivalence of their lives but that the scientific
ethos of the Enlightenment was calling out for a theory of human am–
bivalence. Thus it may be beside the point whether or not psychoanalysis
is or is not a "Jewish science": this question arose not only from the
