His Hebrew name, Anshel, was all he’d kept from his old life. It’s a Yiddish diminutive for Asher, interchangeable with Amshel, which is also derived from amsel, German for blackbird. It might easily have been discarded for a name more commonly chosen by those emigrating to Palestine, for Chaim, Moshe, or Yaakov, had it not held the echo of the last name he had to give up, and which would one day become more famous than he could ever imagine. Kavka, in Czech, is a jackdaw, a word so common that Hermann Kafka chose that species of crow as the logo for his fine goods and clothing business. That his son, Franz, was drawn to transmogrification between human and animal, and that at times the writer identified with the animal side more, is obvious in works that would one day be read all over the world. That with his glossy helmet of black hair, pulled low over the forehead like a severe cap, and his piercing, widely set eyes and beaklike nose, the writer looked like no animal so much as the jackdaw is perhaps one of those accidents of fate, Friedman asserted, which in his many stories Kafka was master at revealing to be the projection of a conflicted inner desire. That the surname he assumed, Peleg, was commonplace for those who arrived during the Third Aliyah, suggests that it was chosen in the interest of anonymity, presumably by some other authority, who saw no reason to object to the name Anshel, or failed to see the blackbird Kafka had smuggled through inside it.
He barely survived the journey. When the ship docked in Haifa, the deckhands, who had grown fond of the pale, kind, impossibly thin man, had to carry him off on his back so that his first view of the Promised Land was of the brilliant blue, utterly cloudless sky that arched above it. A child who had been waiting to welcome a distant relative on the dock began to cry, believing it was a corpse they were unloading. So it was that the first Hebrew sentence Kafka heard spoken in Palestine was “How did he die, Father?” And the impossibly thin man, face turned heavenward, who had always been posthumous to himself, smiled for the first time in a week.
He’d been staging his own death for years, hadn’t he? Away from here, just away from here! Remember the line? Friedman asked, his glasses casting muddy shadows over his eyes. It’s what the horseback rider in one of his parables shouts when asked where he’s going, but it might well have been the epitaph carved on Kafka’s headstone in the Jewish cemetery in Prague. All his life, he’d dreamed of escape, yet he remained unable to bring himself to so much as move out of his parents’ apartment. To be trapped and confined in a bewildering environment hostile to one’s inner conditions, in which one is fated to be obtusely misunderstood and mistreated because one can’t see the way out—from this, I don’t need to remind you, Friedman reminded me, Kafka made the greatest literature. No one—not Joseph K. or Gregor Samsa, or the Hunger Artist or the mouse who flees as the world narrows toward its trap without realizing that all it need do is change direction—not one of them manages to escape their absurd existential conditions; all they can do is die of them. Is it any coincidence that Kafka believed his finest passages were enactments of his own death? He once told Brod that the secret to them lay in the fact that while his fictional surrogates suffered, and felt death to be hard and unjust, he himself rejoiced in the idea of dying. Not because he wanted to end his life, Friedman said, dropping his voice as he leaned toward me across the table, but because he felt he had never really lived. The light was diffuse in Friedman’s soft white hair, and for a moment he wore it like a halo. He continued: When Kafka imagined his own funeral in a letter to Brod, he described it as a body that had always been a corpse being at last consigned to the grave.