Amerikafka
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In the early 20th century, Yiddish theater symbolized everything that “respectable” German-speaking Jews wanted to leave behind. The 1899 Prague anti-Semitic riots, which destroyed many Jewish-owned businesses, were fresh in the city’s memory; Kafka’s father, a successful shopkeeper, had escaped attack by registering his family as Czech nationals. Like many “civilized” Western Jews, he’d made every effort to assimilate and forswear the “old ways,” even giving his children German rather than Jewish names. When Kafka befriended Lowy, championed his theater, and even lectured on “the Yiddish tongue,” he was standing in defiant opposition not only to his father but to the dominant culture.
Still, Kafka’s relationship to “backward” Judaism was hardly simple. Though Harold Bloom asserted that Kafka “quite simply is Jewish writing,” the writer regularly denied or evaded the connection. “What do I have in common with the Jews?” he wrote in his diary. “I don’t have anything in common with myself.” And when he sat down to write his first novel, Amerika, in 1912, he figuratively ran screaming from the cultural minefield of Prague: his plucky, robust 16-year-old alter ego, Karl Rossmann, sails to America in search of a new, innocent self. The journey is a failure for Rossmann–who descends the social ladder into oblivion in an ironic subversion of the American myth of the self-made man–as the novel was for Kafka, who left it unfinished.
Watching Amerikafka is hard work–I often felt utterly defeated by Prestininzi’s maddening vision. But, as in any contest, watching the maneuvers of an extraordinarily talented opponent is mesmerizing.
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