In a review of Kafka: The Decisive Years and Kafka: The Years of Insight, by Reiner Stach (Princeton University Press), writer Cynthia Ozick took exception with Updike’s remarks made in the introduction to Kafka’s Collected Stories:
“In an otherwise seamless introduction to Kafka’s Collected Stories, John Updike takes up the theme of transcendence with particular bluntness: ‘Kafka, however unmistakable the ethnic source of his ‘liveliness’ and alienation, avoided Jewish parochialism, and his allegories of pained awareness take upon themselves the entire European—that is to say, predominantly Christian—malaise.’ As evidence, he notes that the Samsas in ‘The Metamorphosis’ make the sign of the cross. Nothing could be more wrong-headed than this parched Protestant misapprehension of Mitteleuropa’s tormented Jewish psyche. . . . The idea of the parochial compels its opposite: what is not parochial must be universal. And if the parochial is deemed a low distraction from the preponderant social force—’that is to say, predominantly Christian’—then what is at work is no more than supercilious triumphalism. To belittle as parochial the cultural surround (‘the ethnic source’) that bred Kafka is to diminish and disfigure the man—to do to him what so many of Kafka’s stories do to their hapless protagonists.”
Here’s the full review, which appeared in the April 11, 2014 Books section of the New Republic: “How Kafka Actually Lived; He did not transcend his Jewishness, no matter what Updike claimed.”
