Franz Kafka
The name of Franz Kafka, still, in our opinion, a genius never fully appreciated, does not say much to most unpretentious readers.
His name, in the vast majority of those who have read or only heard of him, causes a fit of longing, associations with something dark, incomprehensible, illogical, or at best, reminds of some secret depths of the subconscious.
Nevertheless, the name of this writer is certainly fashionable and no self-respecting reader can admit that he has not read Franz Kafka, even if, having stumbled on the first story, he slammed the book of this amazing author forever.
At the same time, or rather, despite all the contradictory attitudes of the reading public towards this writer, we can say without a doubt that Franz Kafka is not only a brilliant writer, but certainly one of the unique Jewish prophets of the so-called “New Age”.
As a writer, he brought about a complete revolution in thinking and in literature, exposing the bottom of consciousness, and as a tragic prophet (were there any optimistic prophets among the Jews?) he shouted to us all about the horror of the European New Age, which, as one of its most impressive achievements, the modern European civilization is still proud of. The Jewish catastrophe, which the Europeans (or rather, the Germans, with the tacit consent and participation of other European peoples) organized for us, was only a nightmarish and logical continuation of the horror of which Kafka cried out.
So, where do geniuses come from, and where did Franz Kafka come from? In this study, we will try to rely on the statements and works of his biographers, in particular such prominent ones as Claude David, Max Brod and Elias Canneti, his friends, relatives, acquaintances and the women who loved him.
Franz himself distinguished all too well between two family lines. And the first one is certainly the Kafka branch, marked, in his opinion, by “strength, health, good appetite, strong voice, gift of words, self-confidence, a sense of superiority over everyone, persistence, wit, knowledge of people and a certain nobility”. Note, in parentheses, how strong positive, even excellent qualities endow this family Franz himself – while it is with these relatives, and primarily with his father Hermann Kafka, his relationship was difficult, not to say terrible. These relatives could never understand him, and he could never understand them.
Another branch is the maternal line of Löwy’s family, which he endows with somewhat different qualities, apart from the same “perseverance”, just the exact opposite – “sensitivity, sense of justice, restlessness”. In his famous “Letter to his father”, which, according to his biographer, “the latter never read”, he openly declares himself, even insisting on it, to be a Löwy, at most, “with some Kafka background”.
Who are the Kafka’s? And what does their very last name mean? The answers to both of these questions are rather prosaic. Let’s start with the latter. As researchers insist – “the surname Kafka on its sound is clearly Czech: Kafka – is a jackdaw, and the jackdaw will serve, in the future the emblem of their trading house.” This surname was assigned to the family, most likely, under Joseph II, that is, by his famous decree of 1797, according to which “until January 1, 1798 all Jews of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had to adopt surnames”, thus obtaining civil status. The surname came, apparently, from the nickname of the founder of this family. Why this or that nickname arose – we do not know. Perhaps it was born from – “black as a jackdaw”.
Franz hated his last name, especially the two “k “s. So, who are these people, once nicknamed by such an unsound nickname as “Galka”? Here’s what we know, from David’s study of these strong, healthy, with excellent appetites and strong voices. “The Kafka family was distinguished by its giant stature. It is said that the grandfather, Jacob Kafka, a butcher in Vossek, could lift a sack of flour with his teeth. Everyone in the family was tall, even Franz’s sisters. But he himself was ashamed of his tall stature, which made him feel not strong, but frail, clumsy and ridiculous. In his genealogy Kafka do not go back further than his grandfather Jacob, the same one who had to wait for the revolution of 1848 to get the opportunity to marry and lived in the town of Vossek.
Vossek is a village in the south of Bohemia. It is inhabited by Czechs and Jews. Life in Vossek was characterized by extreme squalor. Hermann Kafka’s ancestral home was found – a thatched hut. All slept in one room – Jakob Kafka, his four sons and two daughters. The writer’s father repeatedly revived in memory of the difficult years of his childhood: hunger, when there was not enough potatoes, the cold, which caused the ankles non-healing open wounds, at the age of seven Herman Kafka had to go from village to village, pushing a handcart, his sister Julia sent to one family as a cook. As Franz recalled his father’s stories – “she had to go on errands in the bitter cold in her little soaked skirt, the skin on her legs cracking, the little skirt freezing and drying only in the evening in bed.”
Hermann Kafka, however, reproached his children for not knowing these sufferings: “Who knows about it today! What can children know about it! No one has suffered like this! How can a modern child understand it?” At the same time, the same biographer expresses some doubt about the absolute veracity of these stories, which have become a family legend among the Kafoks. “In truth, the surviving photographs, which show Jakob Kafka and his wife, dressed as real bourgeois and looked very prosperous people, suggest that this extreme poverty was not always, or the memory little by little dulled and slightly mystified the past.”
Here is a brief biography of Franz’s father. Poor Jew Herman Kafka, having served three years in the imperial army, in 1881 comes to Prague and a year later married Julia Löwy, “a girl from a family of wealthy provincial clothiers, who at the same time were the owners of a beer house.” Let’s listen to the biographer: “Julia Löwy undoubtedly brought a very substantial dowry, and it is difficult to imagine that in this wealthy family accepted some small merchant without means”.
Nevertheless, in 1881, Herman opened a fashion store on Zeltnerstrasse and the business began to flourish. Herman grew rich and soon transformed the small store into a large wholesale firm, which was now located “on the first floor of the magnificent Kinski Palace on the Great Square of the Old Town”. Herman is “rich”, “successful”, “accomplished”, “achieved his goal” and, in any case, ahead of all his brothers and sisters. More precisely, nothing is known about the sisters, Anna and Julia, they seem to have faded into obscurity, and the brothers…..
Their fate is traced in some detail. Ludwig first worked in Herman’s store, then became a small insurance agent and apparently did nothing more with his life. Heinrich died young, his daughter Irma, with poor health and an unhappy husband, worked for a long time in the same store for her uncle Hermann. Franz Kafka recalled that even at her funeral service, her father did not find a kind word for her. The only thing Herman squeezed out of himself was: “Poor Irma bequeathed me a pretty pig”.
Hermann’s last brother, Philip had a small business in a backwater Czech town. One of Philip’s sons dies very young in 1901. His other three sons and two of Herman’s sons emigrate. Four of them to the United States, one to Paraguay.
“Fortunate” by the standards of the Kafka family becomes only one cousin of Franz – Robert, the fifth son of Philip. He becomes quite a popular lawyer and is admired by Franz: “My cousin is an excellent man. When this Robert, aged about forty, would come in the evening to Sophia’s pool – he could not come earlier, he was a lawyer, a very busy man, more about work than pleasure – when he arrived in the evening after five o’clock, he would take off his clothes with a few quick movements, throw himself into the water and swim with the power of a beautiful wild beast, all flowing with water, with sparkling eyes, and swim immediately towards the dam, he was brilliant.” In “brilliant” Robert Franz admires all those qualities that are absent in himself. However, remembering Robert, he adds: “And six months later he died, tortured uselessly by doctors.”
By the way, from the Kafka family came another, even more than Robert, a successful man. As Claude David writes “it is Bruno Kafka, whose name, however, never mentioned in the “Diary” of the writer, nor in his correspondence, was the son of one of the brothers of grandfather Jacob. He was practically the same age as the writer, but his career took a very different turn. The son of a lawyer, he converted to Christianity, became a professor of law, dean of the faculty, then rector of the university. After the war, Bruno Kafka was a member of Parliament, editor-in-chief of Bohemia, one of Prague’s major newspapers, and, had it not been for his untimely death, he would probably have played an important role in Czechoslovak history. Max Brod, who hated him, reports that he bore some physical resemblance to his cousin Franz: “Black as tar hair, sparkling eyes, the same courage in the face-even the movements indicate the nobility of an exceptional personality. Only in Franz everything was more dignified and gentler; in Bruno it was close to caricature, with a tendency to ingenious fraud, violence, and even sadism.” This, at least, was how he appeared to Max Brod, who often did not get along with Bruno. Such were these Kafkaes, whose energy Franz envied, but to whom he did not want to belong”.
The Löwy family, to which the writer’s mother belonged, was even more “successful” than the Kafkis in terms of entrepreneurial acumen. They were similar in some respects. Both families consisted of assimilated Jews, both “came from provincial shopkeepers’ backgrounds”.
Nevertheless, the Löwis were different from the diligent Kafoks. In the atmosphere of the Löwy family there was still a certain air, a backlash, a gap in this rigid shop practicalism, a certain “impression of instability,” something that could not be programmed.
For example, there were many bachelors among them, which was extremely atypical for such families. In general, of all the five siblings of the writer’s mother Julia (her father remarried shortly after the death of his young wife), only two created a family. One of the brothers, Alfred, who went to Spain and became director of railroads in Madrid, was, as the biographer points out, “a family celebrity.” “Apparently, it was he who in “The Process” became the prototype of the “provincial uncle”, pompous, imperious, whose endeavors, however, mostly end in failure. Kafka did not dislike him, he found a common language with his uncle much better than with his parents. Most importantly, Alfred Löwy was for him the symbol of the bachelor.”
Another brother of his mother and Franz’s favorite uncle, Siegfried Löwy, to whom he often goes on vacation to Trieste, has chosen a strange profession for the family – a country doctor. He, too, remains a bachelor and, staying in the countryside, contemplates nature and silence. Franz writes in his diary that he has “an unhumanly thin mind, a bachelor’s mind, a bird’s mind that seems to burst from too narrow a throat. So he lives in the village, deeply rooted, content, as one does when a slight delirium, taken for the melody of life, makes one content.”
Franz’s other uncle, Josef, does no less, but rather even more extravagant – he goes to the end of the world, to the exotic Congo, marries a Frenchwoman and moves to Paris. About another brother of his mother, Richard Löwy, biographers have nothing to say, except that he “was an obscure petty merchant.
Julia Kafka’s last brother, Rudolf, also remains a bachelor for life. Rudolf is regarded in the family as a “loser”, a “weirdo”, a “funny man”, or as Franz writes – “incomprehensible, too amiable, too modest, lonely and yet talkative”. He embraces Christianity, which was already inexplicable in itself, he lives with and clashes with his father all his life, and for all that he serves as “just an accountant in a beer hall.” By the way, one of his and Franz’s ancestors, the son of the writer’s great-great-grandfather, Joseph, also renounced the faith of his fathers, which earned him a corresponding attitude in the family. Rudolph in general can be said to have been a family parable. When little Franz did something that seemed to his father unthinkable stupidity, Herman Kafka used to exclaim: “You look like Rudolf!”. Apparently this comparison became so commonplace in the family that Franz himself partly believed in it. In any case, in 1922, after Rudolf’s death, he wrote in his diary: “The similarity with Uncle R. is striking and more than that: both are quiet (I – less), both are dependent on parents (I – more), at enmity with his father, loved by his mother …, both are shy, super modest (he – more), both are considered noble, good people, which is quite wrong about me and, as far as I know, little corresponds to the truth in relation to him….both are at first hypochondriacs and then really sick, both, though idlers, are well provided for by the world (he, as a lesser idler, is provided for much worse, as far as can be compared) both are officials (he is the best), both have the most monotonous lives, both are undeveloped, both are young to the end – the word “young” is more accurate than “preserved” – both are close to madness, he, far from the Jews, with unheard-of courage, with unheard-of desperation (by which one can judge how great the threat of madness is), was saved in the church, to the end … Nor is it true that he was not kind, I never noticed in him a trace of avarice, envy, hatred, greed; and he was too weak to help others himself. He was infinitely more innocent than I am; there can be no comparison here. In details he was a caricature of me, in the main I am a caricature of him.” Thus Franz, as Claude David writes, tried to recognize himself in Rudolf, in his fate, which, as it seemed to the writer at the time, is destined to him and the heredity of Löwy.
Knowing now the fate of this brilliant man, we can realize how great were his delusions about himself. But Franz was almost certain – he seemed to foresee his own madness – he remembered his maternal grandmother Esther’s brother, of whom he knew nothing, except that he had always been called “crazy Uncle Nathan.
Franz persistently suspected himself of madness, while the world around him had long been mad. It is possible that his sense of personal tragedy was so strong because he was one of the few prophets who recognized the madness of the world around him and yet blamed himself for his inability to live up to it. He was like a tightrope walker dancing a strange unthinkable dance on the wire, a tightrope walker not by choice but by compulsion. Beyond the boundaries of the wire, madness celebrated – ordinary, habitual, pervasive madness.
So where in a family of almost one hundred percent shopkeepers, merchants and keepers of beer establishments came the prophet? In Franz Kafka’s genealogy there was another family line, shrouded in almost sacred legends, in which, as Claude David writes, “traces of spirituality are perceptible.
It’s a line of Porias. Porias is the surname of the writer’s grandmother. Franz himself knew very little about this family branch, mostly some family legends that seemed almost legends after a long time. In his diary he records from someone else’s words the story about his great-great-grandfather Joseph Porias, who lived in the 18th century – “he was an extremely educated man, as respected by Christians as by Jews. During one fire, thanks to his piety, a miracle happened: the fire did not touch his house, and it survived, while all the houses in the neighborhood were burned down.
As the biographer points out, “Kafka’s mother, however, knew Adam Porias, her grandfather, Joseph’s son, because she was six years old when he died. He was a rabbi who also performed the rite of circumcision (i.e., a mohel), and he was also a clothier. She spoke of him as a man “very pious and very learned, with a long white beard”. She recalled how she had to, when he died, “hold the dead man’s fingers and ask forgiveness for all the transgressions she might have committed against him.” She has not forgotten that this grandfather scrupulously practiced the bathing prescribed by the religious canon: “He bathed all days in the river, even in winter. For this he had to cut a hole in the ice with an axe.” What else did the writer know about the Porias family? Not much. For example, the fact that Sarah, the wife of great-grandfather Adam Porias, could not bear the death of her daughter, who died at twenty-eight from typhus – she threw herself into the Elbe. That is all, or almost all, apart from the atmosphere of legends, that was known about the Porias family.
We have undertaken our own research into this family and here is what additional information has come to our attention. Pa(o)rias is a surname of Spanish or Portuguese origin. Migration of this family branch passed through Italy to Bohemia and Czechia which have entered as a result in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. One of researchers of a sort Porgesov has made phonetic-linguistic examination of spelling and pronunciation in different countries of Europe of surname Parias. In Italian this surname has the spelling Parjas or Parges, which was pronounced Parjas or Parias.
When the family moved to Germanic and Slavic countries, the spelling and pronunciation of the surname became different. Those branches of the family whose new documents were transcribed from old Italian documents retained the correct spelling, but lost the original pronunciation and as a result became Parges and Porges. The same families, whose documents were compiled on the basis of oral information began to write the family name in accordance with the rules of local phonetics, i.e. Porias and Parias. Thus, from one family Parjas (Parges) two new surnames Parges and Parias arose, which, in fact, are one and the same family name.
While researching this family, we were finally able to answer our main question – where Franz Kafka, this unique writer and prophet, came from. It turned out that the Parias (Parges) family gave the world many famous rabbis, Talmudists, and later, already in the 20th century, writers and cultural figures. Here are just a few of them:
Moshe, son of Israel Naftali Hirsch Porges was born in 1600 in Prague and died in 1670 in Jerusalem. He was a rabbi in Prague and later an emissary of the Ashkenazi community in Jerusalem. There he also received the nickname Prager. The Jewish community of the Promised Land was supported in those years by generous donations from Polish Jews. During the years of Khmelnitsky’s pogroms in Ukraine and Poland, the economic situation of the Ashkenazi community in Eretz Israel deteriorated sharply. It was decided to send Moshe to Europe to collect donations. During the fulfillment of his mission in 1650, Moshe wrote a small illustrated work about Jewish life in Israel – “The Ways of Zion”. This work was published only once, but it won the hearts of European Jews, who responded generously to the writer’s talent – the mission was accomplished and the economic problems were solved.
Aaron son of Benjamin Porges (Porjes) was born in Prague in 1650. As rabbi of Prague, he wrote a famous work, Aaron’s Remembrance, on ancient Jewish rites concerning death and the dead.
Yosef son of Yehuda Leib Porges, a famous author who wrote in Hebrew in the early 18th century.
In the 19th century in Europe, the playwright Karl Porges, the painter Ingatz Yosef Porges, the rabbi and bibliographer Natan Porges, the composer Heinrich Porges and his daughter, the writer, playwright and actress Elsa Bernstein, all created.
In the 20th century, this family gave the world Franz Kafka.
The Porias family, like many other Jewish European families, spread its branches across the Atlantic Ocean. There, in the United States, Friedrich Porges was at the origin of Hollywood, the brothers Arthur and Irwin Porges created, and Fred Astaire, the most famous dancer of his time, who was also a descendant of this famous family, won hearts with his dancing.