530
PARTISAN REVIEW
impossible, expatnatlOn was not just an extravagant vanatlOn of his
estrangement. Expatriation had been sometimes an immediate, urgent, even
demonic summons. "Filthy brood-is what I heard them call the Jews-"
he tells us in one of his letters. "The heroism involved in staying put in
spite of it all is the heroism of the cockroach," he adds.
The Metamorphosis
can be regarded, from this point of view, as one of the most powerful lit–
erary representations of the corning Holocaust.
Kafka did think of that fifth impossibility not only when he dreamt, in
his last years, to settle
in
the Holy Land. ''I'm here at the General Insurance
Company and yet I hope to sit sometinle,
in
some far-away countries, at a
window of the office of sugar plantations or to look to Muslim cemeteries,"
he had once written. Salvation through self-destruction seemed always to
him
a greatly appealing burlesque. "What I call foolish is the idea that Tibet is far
from Vienna." Such words are indeed his. ''I'm reading a book about Tibet;
at a description of a settlement near the Tibetan border in the mountains my
heart grows suddenly heavy, this village seems so hopelessly deserted, so far
from Vienna. Would it really be far?" Kafka asks Milena, asking himself too,
and knowing too well that the desert is,
in
fact, not far away at all, but dan–
gerously close to Vienna, to Prague, to the General Insurance Company
where he works, to his fan1ily house, to the room and desk of his solitude.
Neither sugarcane plantations, nor Muslim cemeteries, nor the Great
Wall of China of his famous story are far away.
It
is not necessary to imag–
ine Kafka in the Middle-Eastern desert, or in Communist China, or in
Brazil, where that thoroughly unKa£kaesque Viennese Jew Stefan Zweig
would commit suicide, in order to authenticate one of the most expressive
twists of this century that is now counting its dizzying end.
Even imagining Kafka in the world capital of exiles, New York, the
New York of his character Karl Rossman, or next door in Newark, "in a
room in the house of an elderly Jewish lady on the shabby lower stretch of
Avon Avenue," as Philip Roth suggested, would not add a lot to our
knowledge about his or our predicament.
In his nocturnal room in Prague, the exile
par excellence
had already
been in those and many other distant or nonexistent places.
And yet, like many of Ka£ka's premonitions, the snail's impossibility
too, though not mentioned by him as such, would haunt the shadows of
his unsettling, carnivalesque posteri ty.
Ka£ka's posterity extended the Jew's condition to many categories of
exile, but it did not relieve the Jewish "impossibility."
Primo Levi saved himself in Auschwitz through the German language.
Mter the Holocaust, Paul Celan wrote in the language of his mother's
butchers. To the end, Mandelstam's motherland remained the Russian lan–
guage, in which Stalin gave the order for his death.
