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American uncle: “One must learn to obey before one commands.” A no-nonsense, self-confident individual, he never allowed himself to be cowed, even by powerful and well-connected opponents; he sued his business partner, General Coleman T. Du Pont (a former postmaster general and member of the well-known Du Pont industrialist family)—a headline in the
New York World,
29 January 1918, read: “Kafka Threatens Du Pont with Suit.” Several years later he sued the Mexican foreign minister, Adolfo de la Huerta—“Names de la Huerta in $2,500,000 Suit” ran a headline in the
New York Times,
13 June 1922, p. 21. In a letter dated September 1918 to the assistant U.S. attorney general petitioning for his release from prison, where he was held unjustly on suspicion of being an enemy spy, Otto Kafka mentions that he began life in America “as a porter with a corset concern at $5 a week”; although Karl’s American uncle does not mention having worked as a porter, he does take great pride in the fact that he employs a large number of porters. See Anthony Northey,
Kafka’s Relatives: Their Lives and His Writing
(New Haven, Conn., 1991), pp. 52–56.
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    26. Borges suggested that Kafka is “closer to the Book of Job than to what has been called ‘modern literature,’ ” and that his work is “based on a religious, and particularly Jewish, consciousness.” See Jorge Luis Borges,
Selected Non-Fictions,
ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York, 1999), p. 501.
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    27. See, for instance, Robert Alter, “Franz Kafka: Wrenching Scripture,”
New England Review
21, no. 3 (2000), pp. 7–19.
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    28. Rossmann’s hybrid name links him with a large number of hybrid half-human, half-animal or half-insect creatures in Kafka’s fiction, ranging from the bug-man Gregor Samsa to Bucephalus in “The New Advocate,” a lawyer and steed, who in a previous incarnation was the battle horse of Alexander the Great, and also with the narrator of the sketch “The Wish to Be a Red Indian,” who imagines himself riding on the American prairie on a horse that is gradually vanishing underneath him.
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    29. As several critics have suggested, that odd theater, with its religious trappings, conjures up Holitscher’s sketch of the charismatic sects in Chicago, where “on Sundays the dear Lord has a different face and a different name at every five paces” (pp. 285–89), and his description of how land is handed out to settlers in Winnipeg, Manitoba (pp. 131–37).
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    30. Max Brod, “Afterword,” in
Amerika
(New York, 1954), p. 299.
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    31. Karl’s American uncle uses a similar image to describe the way Karl’s parents have treated him: in banishing him to America, they pushed him outside like a cat that has made a nuisance of itself.
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    32. Kafka asserts to Milena Jesenská, a Gentile, in a letter of August 1920, that he and Milena’s Jewish husband “both have the same Negro face.” Kafka,
Letters to Milena,
trans. Philip Boehm (New York, 1990), p. 136. For a discussion of Kafka’s self-image as a Jew, see Sander L. Gilman,
Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient
(New York, 1995).
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    33. See
Der Verschollene: Apparatband,
p. 85.
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    34. Kafka is scarcely implying that Karl’s parents are without means, especially since we subsequently learn that Karl’s father has a business that is sufficiently prosperous to employ a considerable number of people. See
Letters to Milena,
p. 13.
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    35. Here Kafka seems to imply that he harbors a comparable feeling toward his own parents; indeed, as Hartmut Binder has pointed out, he used the phrase “poor parents” similarly in a letter to Felice Bauer of 13–14 January 1913, concerning his sister Valli’s marriage: “My parents (here I