My Kafka kick began a few weeks back, when an anti-Zionist friend sent me an email containing a story by Kafka. Here's the whole story, which his friend Max Brod, going through his papers after his death, titled "A Little Fable":
“You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up.
I asked my anti-Zionist friend why he was sending it to me and he said it was just one of those days, and the story was "shattering." The next weekend I was at my parents' house and saw Kafka's letters to his mistress in an upstairs room and fell into that. The very first letter, reintroducing himself strangely to Felice Bauer a couple of weeks after their meeting in person, begins with Palestine. This has led to my appreciating a central truth of Kafka's life: he was, as Hannah Arendt says, a Zionist. Maybe just a cultural Zionist, certainly an imperfect Zionist, certainly an areligious disliker of creeds more drawn to Dostoyevsky's (Christian) religiosity than to what he called the "hot Jews" of eastern Europe. Feeling like a wooden coatrack pushed around the room when he attended Zionist meetings… Still he was a Zionist for a simple reason: he understood the Jewish condition of Europe. It was his condition and it is reflected in the fable. As it is in so much of his work. In his diaries and letters, Kafka worried over assimilation, Jewishness, emancipation, and Zionism constantly. He died even as he and his last mistress were thinking of moving to Palestine.
The other night a friend said that one problem he has in pro-Palestinian situations is that there is not an understanding of "the Jewish experience," which he learned about from his grandfather. I don't reflect that experience enough on this site. P.S. Kafka's sister died in the Holocaust. P.P.S. If you think I am changing my views on Israel, you have another think coming.
