I arrive in the former Jewish ghetto in Prague on July 2, the day before Kafka’s birthday. I’d been reading him all year. And not only him—but about him--the biographies, the criticism. Kafka and the Cabbalah, Kafka on Film…why was I so hung up on him? At first glance, one wouldn’t immediately associate me with Kafka. Kafka was a vegetarian; I would consider selling my soul for a good pastrami and chopped liver sandwich. Kafka lived with his parents as an adult; I moved out as soon as possible. Kafka wanted the majority of his writings to be burned; I want to yawp my poetry on every street corner.

And yet…fellow Kafka-cool-aid drinkers understand: to fancy one’s self as Jewish writer is to relate to the big K. Aren’t we all alienated, contradictory, attempting to figure out how to negotiate our lives in this vast absurd universe? Kafka, the Jew in a Christian world, writing in the German in a predominately Czech-speaking country, sensitive soul in a highly practical family and profession. But, he said: “writing is a form of prayer,” and I was hooked. And his ambivalence—about relationships, about his place in the world, about his Judaism, about his writing, about simply how to live his life, his internal questioning, self-criticism, uncertainty…those characteristics jive, most especially, for me, the writing and the Judaism. He’s the quintessential Jewish writer in that, though the word “Jew” never occurs in his fiction, it does often in his Diaries in which he writes, true to the committed alienated soul he is: “What do I have in common with Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself, and really ought to go stand myself perfectly still in a corner, grateful to be able to breathe.” But later—and true to the contradictory soul he is— he dives into the Judaism he previously rejected: learning Hebrew, longing to move to Israel. Beneath that shift is something about which he couldn’t be ambivalent: his writing.

“In the most Christian of worlds, all writers are Jews,” said Marina Tsvetaeva. Can the opposite be true: “All Jews are writers”? What brought me to Kafka most, even beyond the Judaism, is the writing—his real “religion,” his crazy devotion. Importantly, unlike so many of us immodest writing egomaniacs, who want everyone to read every word we write and promote it incessantly on social media, he was stringent and disciplined about separating his writing from the rest of his life: his day job at the Workers Accident Insurance Institute (he was an excellent employee), his homelife with his parents and siblings (which, as all Kafka lovers know, was the epitome of dysfunctionality), his love life (ditto)…But the writing was sacred, and he required—but could never attain—like an ascetic in a monastery, the purity of the devotee’s total silence:

The Heron

A cage went in search of a bird.

The commotion of sunlight, rattling

of clouds, the impossible crash

of daybreak, how loud the grass, how noisy

the gossamer wavering in the dust, how terrible

the explosion of the human heart. The silence

you need cannot be found on this earth,

the circular saw grinding across the road,

the chattering teeth of mice in the floorboards.

At least from food you can escape into air,

like your hunger artist, you can dissolve

into skin and bone, into straw in a cage,

you can disappear into your own obscurity

Zaru, Schelesten, Meran, Molinary—

you tried sanitarium after sanitarium,

Ottla’s retreat into the countryside,

but sound materializes even in empty air.

If only a composing hut like Mahler’s, deep

in the woods, before dawn, after bathing

for purity, breakfast prepared, trees surrounding

in their host, where you can be unnoticed

like an indistinct insect, protecting

the writing from every disturbance, if only

a burrow big enough for your thin frame,

and a desk that keeps madness at bay,

like the one I’m writing on now, old oak,

in a cabin the other end of a hay field,

facing a pond where a blue heron,

thin neck curving into a pencil-pointed beak,

on the edge of the water, its image

doubled back to the surface as the sun

poured beyond the trees paused,

all attention, waiting, eyes fixed skyward,

standing stock-still in a concentrated silence,

waiting for something, a quality of light

to emerge or a cry inaudible to human ears,

and here it is, its wings outspread,

gone. I trace it long as I can into its next life.

Excerpt from  memoirs – in progress.