When Brod began publishing my works, I realized that the little bonfire I had seen at the cemetery could not have been Brod’s doing.
APRIL 1933. TWO WORLDS EXIST
I have come to the conclusion that there are two worlds. One is ours over which we have no control. The other God is in, in a parallel world, and He closes His eyes and spins a wheel of fortune, which determines what happens here.
NOTE: It is quite likely that this is K’s veiled comment about Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. (K.L.)
JULY 1933. A FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY K SYMPOSIUM
At the K fiftieth-birthday celebration in Prague in 1933, I had an interesting encounter. The girl who showed me to my seat was a Jewish graduate student in Prague University. She said she was writing a dissertation on K. Because she was quite attractive I told her I knew intimately a number of the people in K’s circle, including Max Brod and others. Will you have time to talk to me? she wanted to know. (The very question I was hoping for.) I took her to a café and as I spoke about K and Brod, she reveling in anecdotes she had never heard, I looked into the girl’s eyes and saw she was falling in love with me. Her name was Sara.
It was my last affair. The one that followed, many years later, was not an affair. That was destiny.
But even destiny has its quirks and ironies. When we parted, I asked Sara her family name. She said Diamant. My heart fell. “From the family of the girl who was K’s love?” I asked, my words quaking. I wavered in and out of consciousness. “I’m her much younger cousin. I had to leave Poland because the religious life there was too oppressive for me.” I asked about Dora. Married? Children? Well? “No, not married, never married. And how do you know so much about K and his circle?” Sara asked. “I’m Philippe Klein, K’s second cousin,” I said. “K told me everything.”
“We live in a mirror world, don’t we?” were Sara’s parting words. “Another K and another Diamant together again.”
JUNE 1938. [UNTITLED]
In his biography of me, Max says that my “childhood must have been lonely.” He was right. It was. Despite parents and sisters.
I had a Dickensian imagination even in my twenties, before I began to write. I dreamt of becoming a rich man and driving into the ghetto on a horse-drawn coach and rescuing a beautiful girl whom someone was beating.
I look at old photos of myself now and see a handsome man. But then I thought of myself as ugly, poorly dressed, hunched over despite my height. I was thoroughly dissatisfied with myself. If you think of yourself as a lowly worm, it’s not too great an imaginative leap to imagine yourself waking up one morning as a long worm or insect. I once mentioned this to a fellow writer, who asked if this might be a direct influence on my famous story. I told him: in writing the only direct influence is plagiarism.
I was a rather good student except in mathematics. I passed only because I cried during the exams. Yes. Literally. I cried. And the boy who sat next to me, I still remember his name, Hugo, let me copy his answers. Once, in the seventh grade, our teacher told us to make up a history exam. There were twelve boys in the class and each one would have to submit a question by the next day. Of course, all the students got together that day in my house while my parents were away working and we exchanged questions. But we did it cleverly. If everyone was to get one hundred the teacher would suspect collusion. So we assigned grades. Our two class dummies, Mordecai Sahn and Samuel Dankhalter, who usually failed, were allowed to get seventy, and not a drop more. We forced them to give some wrong answers. And those who usually got C’s got B’s and so on.
JANUARY 1939. WITH MAX BROD TO A HASIDIC SHALESHUDESS
With my Prague friends, Felix Weltsch and Franz Werfel, we discussed literature and, of course, Zionism. In addition to those topics, with Brod I also had religious encounters. Once Max took me, on a Saturday evening, just before the Sabbath was departing, to the home of a Hasidic rebbe. He was a refugee from Poland, now living in a suburb of Prague. The rebbe had an open house for the shaleshudess meal, which is a redundancy, for the word “meal” is contained in that Hebrew/Yiddish word.
In the dining room, the Jews, all wearing the round fur hats known as shtreiml, sat around the table singing sad songs, trying to extend the Sabbath, trying to hold on for just a bit longer to its mystic power. These Sabbath songs, these zemiros, replete with sadness — not gloom, mind you, not depression, not unhappiness or despair — just sadness at the departure of the Sabbath, which relieved the Jews of their earthly woes, and for the love of which they expressed with their lively but minor-key melodies, made an impression on me.
Impression, yes. But they didn’t snare me. I did not become a participant. It was as if I were attending a theater, as if watching one of Chekhov’s plays. Fascinated. Intrigued. But not moved to the point where I would ascend to the stage and sit with the characters. I was just an observer. The only difference was that this Hasidic shtibl, as I watched the Hasidism singing their shaleshudess zemiros, this was my theater, my stage. Nevertheless, it didn’t move me enough to join. Yet I admired the devotion of the participants.
Years later, just before the Great War, I went to another such evening when I was traveling in Munkatch in northern Hungary. In Roman Vishniac’s wonderful collection of photos from Eastern Europe there is one he secretly took from the women’s gallery without the rebbe or the Hasidim realizing it. A Hasidic friend of Vishniac’s had helped him get into the shul and hide him upstairs in the woman’s gallery. Of course they were totally against letting themselves be photographed, and especially on the Sabbath. The picture was taken on a time exposure. A flash would have been too obvious. If one looks carefully at the photograph one can see Max and me, the only men without a shtreiml, sitting at the table, the sixth and seventh men to the left of the white-bearded Munkatcher rebbe.
AUGUST 1939. A DREAM
I once had a dream that I was traveling to the USA, which I have never visited, and put my belongings in a room with a false front so that the enemy wouldn’t get them. Then, in a hotel in Alabama, the clerk says to me, while I’m registering, How come you’re not wearing your yellow star if you’re…*
*Rest of line illegible.
SEPTEMBER 2, 1939. THE PENAL MACHINE
Yesterday the Penal Machine took over Europe. What device can counteract it?
1942 [NO MONTH GIVEN] THE GERMANS
They went upstairs even though there was no upstairs. They were everywhere. In attics. In cellars. In wood they were termites. In air, microbes. Under water they were sharks. On land they were power, terror, the ubiquitous evil beast in ancient fables.
NOTE: These are K’s only journal entries during the war. (K.L.)
JUNE 1945. EATING IN THE ATTIC
Behold, truly the eye of the Lord is on those who stand in awe of Him and await His lovingkindness to deliver them from death and sustain them in famine.