Kafka in Brontëland
It is getting dark, and all the shops, the Sangha Spice Mart, Javed Brothers, the Alruddin Sweet Palace, are lit up like Christmas. I am filled with nostalgia for something I never had.
Today I read the following lines in my Introduction to Kafka:
More than any other writer, Kafka describes the predicament of the secular alienated Jew. Yet his work, so personal on one level, remains anonymously universal. He has no Jewish axe to grind. Nowhere in any of his fictions does Kafka mention the words Jewish, or Jew.
This seems to me remarkable. Can it be so? I resolve to make a thorough survey. There must be the odd Jew somewhere that my commentator has missed.
I cannot escape the impression that this is a pat on the back for Kafka. Yet they seem rather a sad conjuring trick, these disappearing Jews. A bit like that author who composed an entire novel without using the letter e.
The Brontë sisters did not recoil from mentioning Jews. I know all their references by heart. Villette has an ‘old Jew broker’ who ‘glances up suspiciously from under his frost-white eyelashes’ while he seals letters in a bottle ; but at least he does a satisfactory job. Charlotte describes her employers, ‘proud as peacocks and wealthy as Jews,’ but I have never liked Charlotte much. There is a ‘self-righteous Pharisee’ in Wuthering Heights, and in some ways I am grateful Emily did not live to finish that second novel.
The Brontës, of course, are often praised for the universality of their work. Especially Wuthering Heights, which is extremely popular in Japan. All of which goes to disprove our professor’s thesis: in order to be universal you don’t have to leave out the Jews.
I may change my mind about ripping down the ceiling in my cottage. It is a perfectly good ceiling, after all. A little low, perhaps—it gives the room a constricted feeling—but it covers a multitude of problems. Exposed plumbing, trailing cables, not to mention the dust, the spiders. And there may not even be any beams behind it.
“Can you assure me categorically that the beams are there?”
“Put it this way, I’m ninety-nine percent certain.” Then Derek tells me how once, when he was pulling down a ceiling at Egton Bridge, he found a time capsule hidden in the joists. “One of those old tin money boxes with a lock. But it wasn’t mine, so I gave it to the owner and he broke it open.” What did they find? “A bit of a newspaper, five d. and a picture of a naked lady.”
I say we will hold off on the ceiling for the time being. I ask him to tell me more about Mr. Kafka. Has he lived in the village long?
“I can’t rightly say. Have you seen his place? That cottage on back lane with the green door: looks like a milking shed. The one with thistles growing out of the doorstep.” In winter the thinnest trail of smoke came from the chimney. Sometimes the children played round there, but their parents didn’t like it. Sometimes the old man tried to give them sweets.
No doubt the council were trying to get him rehoused. But, though he was a foreigner, he had Yorkshire tenacity: he wasn’t moving for anyone.
I stop asking questions about Mr. Kafka. I am suddenly embarrassed, as though by taking a special interest I have linked myself to him. It is a kinship I would prefer not to acknowledge.
Not long before she got married, Mrs. Rahim’s father died. She nursed him herself for three months before the wedding. When he died she felt a great peace in her heart, as though she could sense him entering the gates of paradise.
