As if he sensed my awareness, Friedman now moved swiftly toward the end of the story. The newly built neighborhood of Rehavia, he told me, soon became filled with intellectuals from Berlin and Vienna who played at the Tennisplatz, met at the coffeehouses they opened, and built art deco houses similar to the ones they’d left behind in the Rhineland. Kafka had moved there in 1925, the same year Brod published Der Process in Europe. If the risk of running into someone in Rehavia who’d known him from home already hung over him, by the following year, when Das Schloss was published in Europe, the situation had become untenable. At his own request, Kafka was transferred to a kibbutz in the north, close to the Sea of Galilee. There he was given a simple house on the edge of the lemon groves and took up work, also at his request, under the head gardener. The life of the kibbutz suited him. Though at first his reticence and penchant for solitude was frowned upon, in time he gained a reputation as a skilled gardener who put in long hours among the plants, and after he found a way to treat the diseased ancient sycamore tree, in whose deep shade the kibbutz members often congregated, his value was secured and he was left in peace to do as he pleased. He was beloved among the children for the little dolls and balsa-wood airplanes he used to make for them, and for his mischievous sense of humor. Because Kafka loved to swim, at least once a week he bathed in the Galilee, where he would swim so far out that to those on the shore he became nothing more than a tiny black dot.
For the next fifteen years, he lived in obscurity on the kibbutz. Even as the writer Kafka gained fame in the rest of the world, Friedman said, in Israel he remained unknown. The first Hebrew translation of a Kafka novel—it was Amerika—wasn’t organized by Schocken until 1945. The Trial wasn’t translated into Hebrew until 1951, and The Castle only in 1967. Schocken had good reason to hold off so long, but even once Kafka was available in Hebrew, he wasn’t embraced in Israel. He was a Galut writer—one who embodied the placelessness of exile, and who’d swallowed the sentence of his overbearing father—and this put him at odds with the muscular culture of Zionism, which demanded a total break with the past, an overthrowing of the father. It was only in 1983, on the centennial of his birth, that a conference on Kafka was finally organized in Israel, but to this day, there is still no Hebrew edition of his complete works. Yet this neglect was what allowed Kafka to preserve his anonymity and his freedom.
Hermann Kafka, who’d nearly collapsed at Franz’s funeral, never got over the loss of his son: his health rapidly deteriorated, he became confined to a wheelchair, and in 1931 the cruel and domineering father whose tyranny and obtuse lack of understanding Kafka blamed for the majority of his sufferings died a broken man. It’s impossible to imagine that Kafka didn’t suffer in a different way when he learned that the death he’d carefully staged, and the mourning he’d childishly fantasized about, had hastened his father’s death. It must have made him question whether his father had been half the colossus he so feared. In March of 1939 Hitler’s troops entered Prague, and in 1941 Kafka’s two older sisters and their families were sent to the Lodz Ghetto. Ottla remained in Prague until August of 1942, when she was transported to Theresienstadt. Brother and sister almost certainly exchanged letters, but if anything of that correspondence still exists, it must be hidden in the trove at Spinoza Street. In October of the following year, Friedman told me, Ottla volunteered to accompany a group of children from Theresienstadt to what she believed would be safety abroad. Instead, they were taken to Auschwitz and murdered in the gas chambers. The last known letter of Ottla’s was written to her husband, who wasn’t a Jew and so had been able to stay behind in Prague with their two daughters. She told him that she was fine. Presumably she wrote something similar to her brother. Almost six more months passed until Kafka got the news of her death.
“I don’t believe he was ever the same after that,” Friedman said. He left the kibbutz soon afterward and, beginning in 1944, took up residence in various apartments in Tel Aviv, restlessly moving around the city, hounded by the idea that he would be found out and exposed. At the end of 1953 the gardener Anshel Peleg moved for the final time. He had come to love the desert during his early sojourns there, when the doctors had prescribed its dry air for his lungs. After fifteen years in the kibbutz, and the perennial drifting around the city, he had very few belongings. Max Brod, who by then lived in Tel Aviv as well, kept all of his papers. And so it was with little more than a small suitcase and a backpack full of books that he set out for the desert in the jeep that Schocken had provided.
Forests of Israel
Epstein dreamed he was walking through an ancient forest. It was cold, so cold that his breath hung frozen in the air. The black needles of the pine trees were dusted with snow, and the air was fragrant with resin. Everything was dark—the damp ground, the great high boughs of the trees bathed in muted cloud light, the bark, the cones hanging on above—all except for the white snow and the pair of red slippers on his feet. Surrounded by the tall trees, he felt a sense of being protected, safe from anything that might wish to harm him. There was no wind. The world was still, a stillness very close to joy. He walked a long time, the snow crunching under his feet, and only when he stumbled on a root across the path did he look down and recognize the slippers. Of red felt, brought by his mother’s cousin from Europe, more beautiful than functional, the soles so thin that they barely did their work of protecting his feet from the cold below. The sensation of seeing something long forgotten but intensely familiar washed over him, and in that instant it dawned on him that he hadn’t grown up after all. Somehow, unknown to everyone, most of all to himself, he’d remained a child all this time.
At last he came to a clearing, and in the center of the glade he saw a stone pedestal. Bending, he brushed away the snow and the golden letters appeared under his fingers frozen with cold:
IN MEMORY OF SOL AND EDIE
THE SUN AND THE EARTH
When he woke, a shivering Epstein discovered that he had sweated through the sheets. He stumbled through the hotel room and turned off the icy blast from the air conditioner. Pulling back the heavy drapes, he saw that it was already morning. He slid open the glass door to the terrace, and a warm breeze floated in, carrying the sound of breaking waves. He felt the sun on his skin and inhaled the salty air. In damp pajamas, he leaned over the railing, squinting at the oily light that sat heavily on the surface of the water. He thought about swimming again. It would feel good after the strange intensity of the last days. He thought again of the Russian who’d pulled him out from under the waves, who had only laughed and clapped him on the back when he’d offered remuneration, and told him that if he stayed out of the water it would be payment enough. But why shouldn’t he go back in again? On the contrary, it was exactly because he had nearly drowned that he should now march right back into the sea, before there was a chance for the fear to gather tension and solidify into an impasse. He was a strong swimmer, had always been a strong swimmer. This time he would pay more attention. And anyway, the water was calmer today, the black flags gone.