It took time, but the tuberculosis that would have killed him in Prague began to recede in Palestine. And though one might be tempted to attribute this to the care of his excellent doctors, or the frequent sojourns to the desert, where the dry air did wonders for his lungs, to do so, said Friedman, would be to ascribe to reality powers that in truth belonged to Kafka himself. He’d always maintained that his lung disease, like his insomnia and his migraines, was nothing but an overflowing of his spiritual disease. An illness born of feeling trapped and suffocated, without the air he needed to breathe or the refuge to write. At the very first hemorrhage, when the blood kept coming, he’d felt a stir of excitement. He’d never felt better, he later wrote, and that night he slept well for the first time in years. To him, this terrible illness had arrived as the fulfillment of a profound wish. And though it would almost certainly kill him, Friedman said, until then it was his reprieve: from marriage, from work, from Prague and his family. Right away, without any delay, he broke off his engagement to Felice. And as soon as he’d done that, he applied for immediate retirement from his job at the Workers Accident Insurance Company. He was granted only temporary leave, but the eight months that followed were, Kafka often said, the happiest of his life. He spent them on his sister Ottla’s farm in Zürau, in a state of near euphoria, working in the garden and fields, feeding the animals, and writing. He’d always felt that the nervous disorders of his generation came of being uprooted from the countryside of their fathers and grandfathers, estranged from themselves in the claustrophobic confines of urban society. But it was only during his convalescence in Zürau, Friedman told me, that Kafka had the chance to experience firsthand the restorative effects of being in contact with the soil. He became passionate about the Zionist agricultural schools opening all over Europe, and tried to convince Ottla and some of his friends to enroll. That same year he’d begun teaching himself Hebrew, and in Zürau he diligently worked through sixty-five lessons in his textbook, progressing far enough to be able to write to Brod in Hebrew. Woven together, Friedman said, the longing for a lost relationship to the land and for an ancient language coalesced into something more concrete, and it was during this same period that Kafka began to seriously develop his fantasy of emigrating to Palestine.
He may never have been as ardent or involved a Zionist as his closest friends, Friedman said. Max Brod, Felix Weltsch, and Hugo Bergmann, his oldest friend from school, all took active roles in the movement, first becoming involved in the Bar Kochba student group in Prague, then publishing essays, lecturing, and committing themselves to making aliyah. But Kafka’s most famous line about Zionism—“I admire it, and I’m nauseated by it”—says more about his constitution than anything else, one that couldn’t abide conforming to any ideology. He read the Zionist newspapers and journals compulsively, and published his stories there. He attended the Zionist conference in Vienna, and even promised to promote shares of Hapoalim, the Workers’ Bank. It was through exposure to thinkers like Buber and Berdyczewski, whose lectures he heard in Prague, that Kafka came into contact with the Hasidic folk tales, Midrashic stories, and Kabbalistic mysticism that had such a profound influence on his writing. And the more fascinated and consumed he became by these texts, Friedman said, the more taken he became with that distant, lost native ground they originated from and referred back to.
And yet, Friedman said, holding up a thick finger—to truly understand why Kafka had to die in order to come here, why he was willing to sacrifice everything to do so, you have to understand a critical point. And it is this: it was never the potential reality of Israel that inspired his fantasies. It was its unreality.
Here Friedman paused, letting his watery gray eyes rest on me. Again I felt he was deliberating, that the jury was still out on me, though it seemed too late for that now that we had found ourselves sitting across from one another, with Kafka’s suitcase in the trunk and his secret spilled out on the table.
Friedman asked if I remembered the first letter Kafka ever wrote to Felice. But he had written some eight hundred letters to Felice: No, I said, I didn’t recall the first. Well, they’d met a few weeks earlier, Friedman went on, and as a means of reintroduction, Kafka reminded her of the promise she’d made to accompany him to Palestine. In a sense, their entire relationship began on this note of fantasy, and one might say, Friedman said, that it continued in that vein for five years, for part of Kafka must always have known that he wouldn’t or couldn’t marry her. Once their epistolary relationship was under way, and Felice apologized for not writing back fast enough, Kafka told her that she wasn’t to blame, that the problem arose from her not knowing where or even whom to write to, because he himself couldn’t be found. He who had never really lived, who only felt himself to exist in the unreality of literature, had no address in this world. Do you understand? Friedman demanded. In a sense, Palestine was the only place as unreal as literature, because once upon a time it was invented by literature, and because it was still yet to be invented. And so if he were to have a spiritual home, a place he might actually live, it could only be here.
The fantasy of a relationship with Felice may have begun with the fantasy of a life in Palestine, Friedman continued, but it was only the fantasy of a life in Palestine that Kafka never gave up. Over the years it just changed form. He imagined himself doing manual labor on a kibbutz, surviving on bread, water, and dates. He even wrote a manifesto for such a place, “Workers without Possessions,” outlining a workday of no more than six hours, belongings limited to some books and clothes, and the complete absence of lawyers and courts, as personal relationships would be based on trust alone. Later, once Hugo Bergmann made aliyah and became the director of the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem, Kafka imagined a little bookbinder’s bench for himself in the corner, where he would be left in peace among old books and the scent of glue.
But it was Kafka’s last fantasy, the one he kept alive in the final year before his death in Europe, that Friedman found most beautiful, he told me, perhaps for being the most Kafkaesque. In that last year, he met and fell in love with the daughter of a Hasidic rabbi named Dora Diamant, who shared Kafka’s dream of emigrating to Palestine. They would have a restaurant in Tel Aviv, they decided, where Dora would cook, and Kafka would wait tables. He spoke about this dream more and more often, especially to his young Hebrew teacher Puah Ben-Tovim, who years later pointed out that Dora couldn’t cook and Kafka would have been a terrible waiter, but also that in those years Tel Aviv was filled with restaurants run by such couples, and in that sense Kafka’s surreal fantasy was more real than one might first be inclined to think. Can’t you picture it? Friedman asked me with an amused smile. The wooden tables and the faded poster of Prague Castle ironically hanging on the wall, the kuchen under a glass dome on the counter? And the waiter with the black widow’s peak in a short, dark jacket, who swats at a fly with a wry little smile?