Franz Kafka Walks Into the House of Morgan, and Makes Himself at Home

The financier John Pierpont Morgan and the writer Franz Kafka appear at first blush to be an odd pair. The titan of finance from Hartford was a modern Midas. The Jewish writer from Prague died young from tuberculosis, but not before he staked a claim to be one of the essential writers of the last century. Yet here they are, brought together on Madison Avenue at the Morgan Library. Lucky us — the reunion of the magus and the moneyman is magnificent.“Franz Kafka,” which runs through April 13, is timed to the 100th anniversary of the author’s death. The Morgan partnered with Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, whose Kafka holdings are making their first appearance in America. The show’s glories are manuscripts in Kafka’s spidery scrawl, the transcript of his flawless German prose. These pages were literally saved from the flames when Kafka’s friend Max Brod disregarded his command to burn them.Kafka has become a brand even as “Kafkaesque” has become an adjective. Witness Andy Warhol’s “Franz Kafka,” a screenprint in electric blue on display here. The place to start, though, are his stories, brisk and baffling. They are melancholy midrashim of modernity. Tales like “A Hunger Artist,” (the Morgan has the manuscript) and “In the Penal Colony” are unsurpassable, as is “Before the Law,” whose meaning surfs a receding horizon. ‘Das Schloss,’ (‘The Castle’) by Franz Kafka. Autograph manuscript, 1922 Bodleian Libraries Oxford. Via Morgan Library“Franz Kafka” aims to show the writer in the round. There is a generous helping of postcards Kafka wrote to his favorite sister, Ottla (she would perish at Auschwitz — Kafka’s two other sisters were killed at the Łódź Ghetto). One letter expounds on the writer’s ardent vegetarianism — ironic given that his grandfather was a kosher butcher — and a program for the Yiddish theater testifies to Kafka’s abiding interest in his ancestral language.Even more powerful is a draft letter in Hebrew Kafka wrote in 1923 to his instructor in the sacred tongue, Puah Ben-Tovim. Next to it is a notebook containing a list of vocabulary words in Hebrew, with their equivalents in German. Kafka apologizes in Hebrew for not being able to spell “Europe” in that language. How extraordinary to see one of the great writers of the Jewish diaspora find his footing in the alphabet of Moses, David, and Solomon. A nearby case contains stamps from the Second International Congress for Rescue Services and Accident Prevention. This would have been a business trip for Kafka, who worked in insurance. Kafka found time to attend the 11th Zionist Congress at Vienna. It was then that the decision was made to establish a Hebrew University at Jerusalem. Kafka flirted with moving to Palestine, but was blocked by his failing lungs and an uncertain heart.Kafka died in 1924 at a sanatorium in Austria. The Bodleian has the final page of Kafka’s last work, “The Castle,” where a viewer can see his hand give way in the middle of his final sentence.* This show’s curator, Sal Robinson, is especially attentive to Kafka’s afterlife. His enigmatic work, on existentialism’s edge, has proven especially popular in Japan, where Nobel Prize winner Haruki Murakami wrote a novel called “Kafka on the Shore.”The American writer Philip Roth was inspired enough by Kafka to write a story about him. The Wylie Agency has lent an annotated page from a galley of that story, which begins as an essay before morphing — we might say “metamorphosising” — into a fictional account of Kafka outliving tuberculosis and the Nazis, escaping to America and settling in Roth’s New Jersey, where he earns a living as a Hebrew teacher. One notebook on display features a deleted sentence that reads “I am the intellectual center of Prague.” Kafka was not usually given to self-seriousness — he refers to himself as “Cornsalad” in a letter to his family — but it is intriguing to imagine that he, if only for a moment, felt himself to be at the center of the city at the center of Europe. The line was crossed out because the center did not hold. Yet Kafka was no less central when the world soon after went black. ________* “She held out her trembling hand to K. and had him sit down beside her, she spoke with great difficulty, it is hard to understand her, but what she said…”

Franz Kafka Walks Into the House of Morgan, and Makes Himself at Home

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