Excerpt of a May 1920 letter from Franz Kafka, 36, to Milena Jesenska, 24, a Catholic writer married to a Jew, and likely Kafka’s lover:
You don’t seem to be afraid of Jews. And that is rather heroic considering the last two generations of Jews in our cities and—all joking very far aside!—when a pure, innocent girl says to her relatives, “Let me go,” and moves to one of these cities, it means more than Joan of Arc departing from her village. Furthermore you may reproach Jews for their particular type of anxiety, nevertheless such a general accusation shows a more theoretical knowledge of human nature than a practical one, more theoretical because first the reproach does not—according to your earlier description—apply to your husband, second—according to my experience—it does not apply to most Jews, and third it only applies in isolated cases, but then very strongly, as it does to me.
The strangest thing of all is that the reproach is generally unfounded. Their insecure position, insecure within themselves, insecure among people, would above all explain why Jews believe they possess only whatever they hold in their hands or grip between their teeth, that furthermore only tangible possessions give them a right to live, and that finally they will never again acquire what they once have lost—which swims happily away from them, gone forever. Jews are threatened by dangers from the most improbable sides or, to be more precise, let’s leave the dangers aside and say: ‘They are threatened by threats.’ An example close to you. It’s true I may have promised not to speak about it (at a time when I scarcely knew you) but now I mention it without hesitation, as it won’t tell you anything new, just show you the love of relatives, and I won’t mention names and details since I have forgotten them. My youngest sister is supposed to marry a Czech, a Christian; once he was talking with one of your relatives about his intention of marrying a Jew, and this person said: “Anything but that, just don’t go getting mixed up with Jews! Listen, our Milena, etc.”
Kafka wrote the letter in Merano, Italy, to Jesenska in Vienna. Published here. No copy of Jesenska’s letter, to which Kafka was responding, survives.
Jesenska’s father had sought to block her marriage to Ernst Pollak, even committing her to a sanatorium (per Philip Boehm here); but she had eloped from Prague to Vienna with Pollak.
The trend of Jews moving to the big central European cities from the shtetls and then succeeding in business was very familiar to Kafka from his own father’s progress. And of course, Kafka feared/chronicled anti-Semitism. Two statements from his letters and diaries:
“From early on [Jews] have forced upon Germany things that she might have arrived at slowly and in her own way, but which she was opposed to because they stemmed from strangers. What a terribly barren preoccupation anti-Semitism is, everything that goes with it, and Germany owes that to her Jews.”
“At times I’d like to stuff them all, simply as Jews (me included) into, say, the drawer of the laundry chest. Next I’d wait, open the drawer a little to see if they’ve suffocated, and if not, shut the drawer again and keep doing this to the end.”
Jesenska died in a Nazi concentration camp, as a member of the Czech resistance. Kafka’s three sisters also died in the Holocaust.
