Searching for Roth, Kafka, and the Other Europe in Spain

Abstract

Searching for Roth, Kafka, and the Other Europe in Spain Martyna Bryla (bio) When doing my phd on the literary image of eastern europe in the American Cold-War imaginary, I went to Prague one summer, just like Philip Roth did via Vienna, to follow in the footsteps of Franz Kafka. What I actually did was to follow in the footsteps of Roth tracing the steps of Kafka. Whenever I think back to that trip, I am reminded of this evocative sentence from Angelo Maria Ripellino's Magic Prague (1973): "To this day, every evening at five, Franz Kafka returns home to Celetná Street (Zeltnergasse) wearing a bowler hat and black suit" (3). In my mind, I follow Ripellino's lead: as Kafka's dark silhouette recedes into the distance, another figure materializes on an otherwise empty street hazed in golden afternoon light. That other man is of a similar height (they say Kafka was tall!)1 but of a more athletic build than Kafka. By contemporary standards, the man is dressed in a somewhat old-fashioned but still fairly modern manner. If these were the seventies, he would be pinpointed as a Westerner. Kafka never turns around, and the other man never manages to reach him, but they are linked by an invisible bond that transcends time and place that only literature, with its infinite possibilities for imagining other lives in different places, is capable of accommodating. For a long time, I was not aware that Philip Roth had a meaningful connection to Kafka and my part of Europe. As a teenager, I read bits of Portnoy's Complaint (1969), which, per Roth himself, was inspired by Kafka's stories of "spiritual disorientation and obstructed energies" ("In Search"). At the time, however, I would simply reach for whatever my older brother was reading, and Portnoy must have found its way into my hands somewhere between Polish modernism, which we were studying at school, and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934). Roth's fiction was not on the syllabus when I was a student of English Philology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, but I remember devouring several [End Page 102] novels by Milan Kundera after my translation theory professor recommended The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). The mind likes to detect patterns in seemingly unrelated occurrences, so, in hindsight, there seems to be something augural about my reading of Kundera, who had been friends with Roth and whose works I would be rereading several years later for my Roth-inspired PhD. However, when I was an undergraduate, the events of the Prague Spring, Soviet "normalization," and the Velvet Revolution were to me, born in 1983, little more than history book entries vaguely related to Poland's own struggle against communism epitomized in the red clumped letters of the Solidarity logo and Lech Wałęsa's mustachioed profile. My earliest association with the former Czechoslovakia must have been the rubber squeaky toys, including the little mole Krtek—the Mickey Mouse of the Eastern Bloc—my father once brought me from Prague for Christmas. Since we lived close to the border with eastern Slovakia, in the summer we would take short trips to Svidník, Bardejov, or the adjoining spa town, Bardejovské Kúpele, where the empress Sissi once took her water treatments. Whenever we crossed the border between Poland and Slovakia, following a routine wait and search at customs, I was amazed at the jarring contrast between the lush greenery of the Slovakian forests and the ugliness of World War II tanks and planes exhibited along the road in a manner of giant art installations. I was reminded of this intrusion of history and politics into the landscape of everyday life when as a teenager I was introduced to the East-Central European canon: Hašek, Kafka, and Hrabal. However, it was Kundera who brought Czechoslovakia into light for me, even if at the time I was reading him mostly for the titillating intertwining of politics and eroticism. In comparison to Kraków in the early 2000s, the Prague of the 1970s seemed tragic and romantic at the same time, while Kundera's fiction evoked the...