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Freud's Oedipus-Complex and the Problems of Jewish Assimilation in the Writings of

Franz Kafka and Philip Roth


Author(s): Catherine Hezser
Source: Jewish Studies Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 3 (2001), pp. 248-278
Published by: Mohr Siebeck GmbH & Co. KG
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Freud's Oedipus-Complex
and the Problems of Jewish Assimilation
in the Writings of Franz Kafka and Philip Roth
Catherine Hezser

"If European Jewish literature in general, and German Jewish writing


in particular, have any heirs, they are on the other side of the Atlantic.
The culture with its dual identity has passed, in modified form, from
one place of exile to another".1

A comparison between Franz Kafka and Philip Roth can illustrate Ger-
shon Shaked's theory of both continuity and change with regard to the
complex issue of Jewish identity reflected in modern German and Amer-
ican Jewish writing.2 Just as our understanding of Philip Roth is advanced
by reading Kafka, we can also learn a lot about Kafka by reading Philip
Roth.3 In this context the question of the representativeness of individual
literary expressions and their usefulness as historical and autobiographi-
cal sources, issues which have repeatedly been brought up in connection
with the so-called "New Historicism", shall be addressed as well.
Harold Fisch has correctly emphasized that the literary depiction of
conflicts between fathers and sons "is not primarily a Jewish phenom-
enon or problem, but something Jewish writers took over with the rest of
the apparatus of emancipation".4 The sons' rebellion against their

1 Gershon Shaked, The Shadows Within. Essays on Modern Jewish Writers, Phila-
delphia 1987, 79.
2 See also Steven M. Cohen, American Modernity and Jewish Identity, New York
and London 1983, 4, for certain analogies between European and American Jewish
society in the 19th and 20th centuries. According to Cohen, the focus on modernization
serves "to elucidate certain similarities in the rather varied experiences of nineteenth-
century West European Jewries and contemporaneous American Jewry, both of which
encountered and experienced 'modernity'. If these Jewries underwent essentially similar
processes of social change, they should, in some manner, look the same".
3 See Morton P. Levitt, Roth and Kafka: Two Jews , in: Critical Essays on Philip
Roth, ed. Sanford Pinsker, Boston 1982, 245.
4 See Harold Fisch, Fathers, Mothers, Sons and Lovers. Jewish and Gentile Pat-
terns in Literature", Midstream 18 (Mai 1972) 39.

Jewish Studies Quarterly, Volume 8 (2001) pp. 248-278


Mohr Siebeck - ISSN 0944-5706

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(2001) Freud's Oedipus-Complex and the Problems of Jewish Assimilation!^

fathers' generation which, for them, represented a conflict-laden mixture


of old and new values, may be viewed as a necessary prerequisite of their
own emancipation. At approximately the same time when Kafka wrote
his famous "Letter to His Father" (1919), which will be dealt with in
more detail below, D.H. Lawrence wrote the (semi)autobiographical
novel Sons and Lovers (1913) and James Joyce wrote A Portrait of the
Artist As a Young Man (1916). Both Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers and
Stephen Daedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are con-
fronted with fathers who are no longer able to transmit the Victorian
or Catholic value-system to their sons in a persuasive way, since they
themselves are no longer authentic representatives of the traditional
world-view. The sons, whose families were unable to provide them with
a sense of direction, rebel against their fathers and search for alternative
values and ways of life. Like Kafka these sons became artists.
D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka wrote at a time when
Freud had developed his theory of the Oedipus- or father-complex.
Freud alluded to this theory for the first time when talking to Fliess in
the autumn of 1897, and he elaborated it in his Interpretation of Dreams
(1900), Totem and Taboo (1913), and the unfinished Outline of Psycho-
analysis.5 He considered the Oedipus-complex the basic explanatory tool
for understanding neurosis. Freud believed that at a certain age sons feel
hatred toward their fathers and love and attraction toward their
mothers. The ancient story of king Oedipus who unknowingly killed
his father and married his mother serves him as the master story which
illustrates this phenomenon in a particularly elucidating way. Whereas
this parent-child relationship usually changes in the course of puberty,
and the so-called "fear of castration" eventually leads to the son's iden-
tification with his father, some sons are unable to leave the earlier devel-
opmental stage. The grown-up son's hatred of his father and his libidi-
nous fixation on his mother evoke feelings of guilt and determine his
relationships with women.
A diary entry of September 23, 1912, seems to indicate that Kafka
knew Freud's theory already at the time when he wrote the story "The
Judgment".6 With reference to the story, which he had written the night
before and which addresses the conflict between a father and his son, he
writes that obviously thoughts about Freud ("Gedanken an Freud na-

5 Siehe Peter Gay, Freud. A Life for Our Time, New York und London 1988, 100
und 112.
6 See also Walter H. Sokel, "Kafkas 'Verwandlung': Auflehnung und Bestrafung",
in: Franz Kafka, ed. Heinz Politzer, Wege der Forschung 322, Darmstadt 1973, 278.

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250 Catherine Heiser JSQ 8

trlich") had inspired him.7 In a mu


Max Brod Kafka emphasizes, howeve
ested in psychoanalysis as such, b
with the Judaism which the father
"More than psychoanalysis I like th
plex, from which some people receiv
concern the innocent father, but the
who started to write in German wan
with their fathers' ambiguous agreeme
embarrassing); they wanted it, but wit
to their fathers' Judaism and with th
new ground. The desperation about th
This text shows that Kafka considered the connection between the father-
complex and the conflicts of Jewish assimilation9 a widespread phenom-
enon within the sons' generation to which he himself belonged. His was
the second generation after European Jews had experienced political
emancipation. The ways in which the first generation of the fathers re-
presented Judaism and Jewish identity were no longer viable for the sons.
Nevertheless they were unwilling to discard their Jewishness altogether.
They rather tried to find new ways of defining and expressing themselves.

7 T (= Tagebcher) 215. The following German edition of Kafka's collected works


has been used, and is referred to repeatedly throughout this article: Franz Kafka,
Gesammelte Werke, 8 vols., ed. Max Brod, Frankfurt 1995. The following abbreviations
are used: B (= Briefe, letters), E (= Erzhlungen, stories), H (= Hochzeitsvorbereitun-
gen auf dem Lande), T (= Tagebcher, diaries). All translations from these corpora are
my own, except for the "Letter to His Father", where the English translation has been
used. With regard to Kafka's knowledge of psychoanalysis see also the July 10, 1912,
entry in the travel diaries (Weimar- Jungborn), where a conversation about Freud with a
high school teacher from Nauheim is mentioned (T 489).
8 B 337 (my translation from the German). On the subject of psychoanalysis see
also the following passage from a letter which Kafka wrote to Franz Werfel in 1922,
but which was probably never sent off to the addressee: "It is not enjoyable to occupy
oneself with psychoanalysis, and I try to keep my distance from it, but it [i. e., psycho-
analysis] is at least as much in existence as the generation. Since of old Judaism has
been used to bringing forth its sorrows and joys together with the respective Rashi-
commentary, as in this case as well" (H 202, my translation from the German). See also
Marthe Robert, Sigmund Freud - Zwischen Moses und dipus. Die jdischen Wurzeln
der Psychoanalyse, Munich 1975, 11 f.
9 The term "assimilation" is used in its widest sense here to denote the various ways
in which traditional Jewish culture adapted itself to and became mixed up with non-
Jewish Western culture since the time of emancipation. On the difference between
"assimilation" and "acculturation'V'cultural assimilation" see Allen Guttmann, The
Jewish Writer in America. Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity, New York und Oxford
1971, 8, who considers acculturation, that is, the adoption of the larger society's norms
and practices, the first step towards assimilation, the integration into the social, poli-
tical, and economic institutions of mainstream society.

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(2001) Freud's Oedipus-Complex and the Problems of Jewish Assimilation25'

By taking Gershom Scholem (born in Berlin in 1897) and Franz Ro-


senzweig (born in Kassel in 1884) as examples, Michael Brenner has
drawn attention to two ways in which the second generation dealt with
the problems associated with assimilation.10 The families of both Ger-
shom Scholem and Franz Rosenzweig belonged to the upwardly mobile
middle classes. They tried to conform to the values and customs of non-
Jewish society and almost totally abandoned traditional Jewish prac-
tices. We know, for example, that Gershom Scholem' s father Arthur
would eat and work on Yom Kippur, one of the most important Jewish
holidays and a fast day, as he would do on any other day. He would also
light cigars on the Sabbath, in obvious transgression of the traditional
Sabbatical rules.11 The generation of the sons citicized their fathers'
adjustments to non- Jewish habits because, they noticed, these did not
result in their parents' social acceptance by non- Jews. As Michael Bren-
ner has stressed correctly, the sons exposed the bourgeois Scheinwelt of
their assimilated fathers and refused to live in it themselves.12 Instead of
continuing to follow their fathers' directional path away from Judaism,
they rediscovered their Jewishness. Gershom Scholem became a Zionist
and a scholar of Jewish mysticism, Franz Rosenzweig a religious philo-
sopher.
Kafka's reaction to the unacceptable form of Jewishness represented
by his father differed from those of Scholem and Rosenzweig. Kafka
considered himself neither Jewish in a national nor in a religious sense.
He did not join any of the Jewish religious congregations which existed
in the Prague of his day, and he could also not totally identify with the
cultural-political ideology of Jewish student associations such as the one
called Bar Kochba, which he visited occasionally.13 He was neither a
Reform Jew nor a Zionist nor a theologian, but the representative of
an individual and eclectic form of Jewish identity. Therein he resembles
Philip Roth, as will be shown later on. This secular form of Jewishness -
which has often been negated in the past by those who view Kafka as a
Jewish theologian or a German existentialist and who disparage Philip
Roth as a Jewish self-hater or even anti-Semite - this secular and eclectic
form of Jewishness should be acknowedged as a legitimate variant of

10 See Michael Brenner, "A Tale of Two Families: Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom
Scholem and the Generational Conflict Around Judaism", Judaism 42 (1993) 350-52.
On Gershom Scholem (and Walter Benjamin) see also Robert Alter, Necessary Angels.
Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem, Cambridge/Mass 1991, 4.
11 See Brenner 353.
12 See ibid. 355.
13 On the Jewish student organization Bar Kochba see Rudolf M. Wlaschek, Juden
in Bhmen, Mnchen 1990, 66.

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252 Catherine Hezser JSQ 8

Jewish identity represented by many


Holocaust and American Jews today.
Kafka's most comprehensive treatm
father and his father's Jewishness can
"Letter to His Father", which he wrote
the addressee.14 In the following, the
will occasionally be supplemented by
diary entries. Afterwards the stories
phosis", written in 1912, will be elu
Kafka had originally planned to publis
chapter of his novel America in a boo
Kafka wrote the "Letter to His Fathe
six years old, that is, he describes his
retrospectively. Because of the unilate
distance to the described events, an
author, the letter has only a limited (
reveals a lot about Kafka's perception
ilation, which affected his father as w
conflict with his father was not only
Judaism. Their different character tra
of an artist and a businessman, respect
derstandings as well. Yet Kafka's de
from the point of view of a representa
a more than personal, historical relev
The way in which Kafka describes his
image of the so-called "Westjude", t
tional generation at the time of Jewi
who was born in a Bohemian village
conditions, had moved from the coun
young man. In the course of time he

14 See Heinz Politzer, Franz Kafka. Parable


Kafka asked his mother to forward the letter to
After Kafka's death Max Brod found the letter
did he decide to publish it as part of Kafka's
15 See Kafka's letter to his publisher Kurt W
points to the "secret link" ("geheime Verbind
Hartmut Binder, Kaflca-Kommentar zu sm
and Ernst Pawel, Das Leben Franz Kafkas. Ei
16 Politzer's denial of any autobiographical v
autobiographical importance or therapeutical i
have can be dismissed as a decoy") seems to
Politzer, the letter should be understood as an
with the father-god.

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(2001) Freud's Oedipus-Complex and the Problems of Jewish Assimilation253

from a poor pedalar to a well-situated businessman. According to Kafka


the son, economic prosperity was his father's main goal in life, and he
expected his children to acknowledge and be thankful for all that he had
done for them. The children were supposed to take their father as a
model and to follow similar goals themselves.17 As far as social contacts
were concerned, Kafka writes that his father mistrusted most people (H
143 = Eng. 170), especially his servants, whom he called "paid enemies"
(H 136 = Eng. 161). But he sought the company of other Jews of a
similar or higher social standing. According to the son, his father's visits
to the Reform synagogue on the High Holidays were "merely a social
event", which allowed him to meet "the sons of the millionaire Fuchs"
(H 145). 18 His participation in religious ceremonies allegedly served the
preservation of his achieved socio-economic status only. Kafka writes:
"At bottom the faith that ruled your life consisted in your believing in the
unconditional Tightness of the opinions prevailing in a particular class of
Jewish society, and hence actually, since these opinions were part and parcel
of your own nature, in believing in yourself. Even in this there was still
Judaism enough, but it was too little to be handed on to the child; it all
dribbled away while you were passing it on" (Eng. 174).
Retrospectively Kafka noticed, however, that his father's religiosity was
not only externally motivated. Another factor played a role as well: his
father was bound to certain Jewish traditions of his childhood for senti-
mental, nostalgic reasons: "For you they had their meaning as little
souvenirs of earlier times" (Eng. 174).
A conflict ensued because the father was allegedly unable to realize
that times had changed.19 Since the family had reached a relatively high
economic status, the son saw no reason for adopting his father's strict
work ethics and for being concerned about his social acceptance by
those middle-class Jewish circles who frequented the Reform syna-

17 See, e.g., H 1 19 (= Eng. 138): "You have worked hard all your life, have sacrificed
everything for your children, above all for me ...", and ibid. 124 (= Eng. 145): "You had
worked your way up so far alone, by your own energies, and as a result you had
unbounded confidence in your opinion".
18 On Reform Judaism in Prague see Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity. A
History of the Reform Movement in Judaism, 2nd ed. Detroit 1995, 153-55 and 193.
Since 1837, after Leopold Zunz' nine months sojourn in Prague, Michael Sachs was
conducting a moderate Reform service in accordance with the Vienna ritual. In 1839
Sachs was accepted as the fourth rabbi by Prague's rabbinical assembly. According to
Meyer, by the end of the nineteenth century most Bohemian Jews were no longer
orthodox and most of the synagogues had adopted the Viennese Reform ritual.
19 He blames his children for being spoiled (H 135 = Eng. 159) and thereby causes
guilt feelings.

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254 Catherine Heiser JSQ 8

gogue.20 But the son lacked not onl


observe certain Jewish customs; h
well: his father's "youthful memori
be conveyed to others" (Eng. 174); t
Since he could not find anything in
adopt for himself, he considered hi
of his own standing (Eng. 178).
Kafka knew that he was not the on
eration. He writes:

"The whole thing is, of course, not an isolated phenomenon. It was much
the same with a large section of this transitional generation of Jews, which
had migrated from the still comparatively devout countryside to the towns.
The situation arose automatically" (Eng. 174).
He considered his father a typical representative of assimilated Jewish
middle-class values and viewed his personal relationship to him in a
wider historical context.21
Hermann Kafka can be seen as a typical example of Bohemian Jews
of the first generation after Jewish emancipation. Like many of his con-
temporaries he was preoccupied with social advancement and ambiva-
lent about his Jewish identity. Bohemian Jews were granted civic equality
only in 1849. Only then were the many restrictions concerning marriage
and family, settlement and professions removed.22 From that time on-
wards all Jews were able to establish families, move to the cities, and
obtain higher positions.23 The subsequent socio-economic ascent of the
Jewish middle classes happened at the time of beginning industrializa-
tion, when capitalist ideology and remorseless competition reigned su-
preme.24 Jews who had left their traditional enclaves and wanted to suc-
ceed in the world at large were forced to adjust themselves to the con-
ditions of the capitalist economic system. In his memoirs Enoch Hein-
rich Kisch, who was born in Prague in 1841, writes:

20 See H 134 (= Eng. 158): "The situation had, after all, become quite different as a
result of all your efforts, and there was no opportunity to distinguish oneself in the
world as you have done".
21 See also Harriet M. Parmet, "The Jewish Essence of Franz Kafka , Shofar 13
(1995) 30.
22 See Wlaschek 11, and Christof Stlzl, Kajkas bses Bhmen. Zur Sozialgeschichte
eines Prager Juden, Munich 1975, 20.
23 See Stlzl 32.
24 On Jewish participation in the Bohemian economy since the middle of the 18th
century see especially Ruth Kerstenberg-Gladstein, Neuere Geschichte der Juden in den
bhmischen Lndern. Erster Teil: Das Zeitalter der Aufklrung 1780-1830, Tbingen
1969,' 96-1 15.

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(200')Freud's Oedipus- Complex and the Problems of Jewish Assimilation255

"During the years of my adolescence dismal thoughts burdened my mind,


only whipped up by passionate desire: up and away! With diligence and
perseverance, a hot forehead and bleeding hands I was able to push my
way upwards, to reach the heights of success as a hard-working man, to
establish a secure existence for myself, and - by constantly struggling against
the powers of poverty and affliction - to win life's prize: honor, prestige,
position, property".25

The fast economic advancement of first-generation Bohemian Jews26


was not followed by their social integration, however.27 On the contrary,
their economic rise led to jealousy amongst those Czech and German
circles who were unable to keep in step with industrial modernization.28
The Jewish entrepreneur was believed to exploit the working class.29 But
not only the Jewish bourgeoisie suffered from anti-Semitism.30 All Bo-
hemian Jews were affected by the reigning conflicts between German
and Czech nationalists. In his article "The Jews of Prague Between the
Nations" (1897) Theodor Herzl wrote:
"What had they done, the small Jews of Prague, the honest middle-class
merchants, the most peace-loving of all peace-loving citizens? ... In Prague
they were reproached with not being Czech, in Saaz and Eger with not being
German ... There were some of them who tried to be Czech - they were
assaulted by the Germans; others, who tried to be German, were attacked
by the Czechs - and by the Germans as well".31

Against this background Hermann Kafka's suspicions against his non-


Jewish contemporaries, especially those of the lower classes, are quite
understandable. 32
With regard to the transitional generation's ambivalent attitude to-
wards Judaism33 the father of Kafka's friend and contemporary Max
Brod deserves mention as well. Similarly to Franz Kafka, Max Brod
describes the vestiges of Jewish religious observance practiced by his
family as "nothing in matters of tradition, only lacking in purpose and

25 Enoch Heinrich Kisch, Erlebtes und Erstrebtes. Erinnerungen, Stuttgart and Ber-
lin 1944, quoted by Wilma Iggers (ed.), Die Juden in Bhmen und Mhren. Ein histo-
risches Lesebuch, Mnchen 1986, 212 (my translation from the German).
26 See Wlaschek 39. This is not to say, however, that the majority of Prague Jews in
the middle of the nineteenth century belonged to the middle and upper classes. Most
Jews of that period were poor; see Stlzl 22. Yet proportionately more Jews than non-
Jews were members of the middle classes.
11 See Stlzl 26.
See Wlaschek 52.
^ See ibid. 54; Stlzl 36.
30 See Wlaschek 53.
31 Quoted by Iggers 225 (my translation from the German).
32 See also Stlzl 40.
33 See Parmet 29.

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256 Catherine Hezser JSQ 8

intention to be considered hellish blasp


Max Brod considered these vestiges of
tween his own and his father's Jewish
Franz Kafka, who was unable to adop
represented, on the one hand felt guilt
to reject his father's heritage. On the
namely to Eastern European Jewish ci
compensate for the missing family tr
onwards Kafka was a regular visitor o
theatre company from Lemberg gave
with the actor Yizchaq Lwy, who o
family.36 Through him and through G
adherent of the Beizer Rebbe, who had
mily and, on his own accord, become a
contact with an entirely different type
called "Ostjuden".
What fascinated him so much in the
was the authenticity and self-evidence
their Jewish identity. He admired the
particularly pure form, because they liv
out effort, understanding, and lament
tion). For Kafka the Eastern Jews wer
ambiguities between traditional Jewis
which Western Jews like he himself w
Written in a similarly enthusiastic to
meetings with Chassidic Jews.38 He w
34 Max Brod, Streitbares Leben, Munich 1960
from the German).
35 See ibid.: These vestiges of tradition suff
Jewish self-consciousness and even a sort of p
miserable images in the badly printed books
eve, were, in all of their degradation and pove
of the people. And this thin thread has never
German).
36 See Peter Sprengel, Scheunenvierteltheater. Jiddische Schauspieler und jiddische
Dramatik in Berlin (1900-1918), Berlin 1995, 9-24.
37 See Bluma Goldstein, Reinscribing Moses. Heine, Kaflca, Freud, and Schnberg in
a European Wilderness, Cambridge/Mass, und London 1992, 47.
38 On Chassidism see Andrea Wodenegg, Das Bild der Juden Osteuropas. Lin Bei-
trag zur komparatistischen Imagologie an Textbeispielen von Karl Emil Franzos und Leo-
pold von Sacher Masoch, Frankfurt, Bern, and New York 1987, 20: Chassidism devel-
oped in the second half of the 19th century, partly in reaction to the lack of flexibility
amongst Orthodox Talmudists. Instead of Talmud scholarship, piety and belief in the
power of the wonder rabbi are stressed. Both Chassidim and Mitnagdim rejected the
Haskalah and tried to prevent the spread of its influence in Eastern Europe.

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(20Q')Freud's Oedipus- Complex and the Problems of Jewish Assimilation251

tions of community and solidarity amongst Eastern European Jews. In a


diary entry of the year 1911 he writes:
"Amongst Jews, and especially those in Russia, a strict family life does
not seem to be a shared characteristic, ... - therefore it is even more peculiar
for them that they come together so often, at every possible opportunity ...
They almost flee toward each other" (T 155, my translation).
When describing his visit at the home of the Beizer Rabbi in Marienbad
in 1916, Kafka similarly stresses the community feelings amongst East-
ern Jews, which remind him of relationships between lovers or relatives.
The adherents of the Beizer Rabbi "walk alongside each other like
lovers" (B 143). The Rabbi looks like a "father" (ibid.). His appearance
evokes "confidence" (B 144). In his diary entry of September 14, 1915,
Kafka had already described the then visited wonder rabbi in a similar
way. This rabbi allegedly possessed "the strongest fatherly disposition"
(T 348, my translation). At a time when the conflicts connected with
assimilation and emancipation had burdened his relationship with his
real father, the "disinherited son" discovered his ideal father amongst
the traditionally pious Chassidic rabbis.
Kafka's sentimentalizing view of Eastern European Judaism ("Ostju-
dentum") was typical for Jewish intellectuals of his time. Their idealiza-
tion of Eastern European Jews must be understood as a counter-image
to the derogatory stance of assimilated middle-class Jews such as Her-
mann Kafka. In the "Letter to His Father" Kafka accuses his father of
having applied the libel "vermin" (H 125 = Eng. 146) to the actor Yiz-
chaq Lwy. In the respective diary entry he writes that he called him a
"foreign human being" (einen "fremden Menschen", T 97). Whatever
Hermann Kafka actually said, it seems that he shared many Western
Jews' negative attitude toward their Eastern Jewish coreligionists.
Eastern European Jews, many of whom emigrated to Central Europe
after the outbreak of the Russian pogroms at the end of the nineteenth
century and after the onset of the First World War, were often consid-
ered dangerous by Western Jews, who feared that their very existence
and outlook might threaten their own recently achieved social, political,
and economic status.39 Western European Jews were afraid that the im-
migration of Eastern European Jews might lead to an upsurge of tradi-
tional anti-Semitic prejudices which would be directed against them as
well. Therefore they tried to distance themselves from their Eastern Eur-

39 See Hans-Peter Bayersdrfer, "Das Bild des Ostjuden in der deutschen Litera-
tur", in: Juden und Judentum in der Literatur", eds. Herbert A. Strauss und Christhard
Hoffmann, Munich 1985, 214.

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258 Catherine Hezser JSQ 8

opean coreligionists (cf. Tucholsky's de


nenviertel in Berlin) and sometimes
against them.40
The idealization of Eastern European J
to associate the "good" Jew with assim
derstood as the other side of the same
positive and the negative images of East
of stereotyping and projections, which
ceptions of Western European Jews th
ism itself.42
The great interest in Eastern Europea
ters and intellectuals such as Franz Kaf
and Joseph Roth at the end of the 19t
tury may also have been connected wit
ent at that time. While the allegedly fo
was used as a clich by anti-Semites,
adapt the synagogue service to Wester
some Jews accepted the notion of orie
a positive way (cf. the architectural st
synagogue in Berlin). According to Pau
self-understanding, which emphasized
and affiliation with Eastern Europe
new, positive image of the Orient am
and artists.43 The significance of Mart
ism, for example, was due to the fact
teachings in the language and style of
Whereas some of Kafka's contempor
for Eastern European Judaism with (cu

40 See Sander L. Gilman, Jdischer Selbstha


Sprache der Juden, Frankfurt 1993, 190; ide
1993, 9-10: "This excluded Other within the
European Jewish culture took the form of the
it evoked the all-too-familiar recent past of th
of the Jew as physically and psychologically d
only in the fantasy of the male Jew. For the Ar
and remained essentially different and exclude
um ein Entlastungsverfahren, in dem Negative
positiv gewerteten gesellschaftlichen Verfassu
'Anderen', angelastet werden".
41 See Gilman, Selbstha, 191.
42 See ibid.
43 See Paul Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions. Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience
of Modernity, Detroit 1991, 83.
44 See ibid. 85.

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(2001) Freud's Oedipus- Complex and the Problems of Jewish Assimilation259

however, Kafka cannot be regarded as a Zionist. Although - especially


at the end of his life - he repeatedly expressed the desire to emigrate to
Palestine, departing from Prague was always more important to him
than arriving in Palestine.45
An escape from one's country of origin is also mentioned in Kafka's
story "The Judgment", written in 1912. In this story Georg Bendermann
speaks with his father about an old friend, who now lives in Russia as a
bachelor and unsuccessful businessman. Georg had not informed this
friend of his impending marriage and of his business success, allegedly
in order not to hurt his feelings. In the course of the conversation the
father increasingly sides with the absent friend.46 This friend, who pre-
fers the difficult, but morally impeccable, authentic life in a foreign
country to the convenient life at home which is based on reckless com-
petition, would be a son according to the father's liking ("ein Sohn nach
meinem Herzen", E 50), whereas Georg's behavior toward his friend and
his parents is criticized by him. The father accuses Georg of egoism,
deception of his friend, and guilt in the death of his mother. At the
end Georg executes his father's judgment and kills himself by drowning.
A number of scholars have already pointed out that the father-son
relationship is of central importance to the story.47 It remains doubtful,
however, whether and to what extent the text is to be understood auto-
biographically, against the background of Kafka's own relationship with
his father and his later references to the often strained relationship be-
tween Jewish fathers and their second-generation sons. The following
interpretation shall be suggested here: The story can be seen as Kafka's
verdict over the values represented by his father. Not Georg, for whom
social approval in his home-town, marriage, and business success are the
most important goals in life, but his friend, who moved to the East,
remained without a wife and family, and lived in humble circumstances,
is presented as the ideal son here. Georg's norms, which are identical
with those of assimilated Jewish fathers who had worked hard to reach
middle-class status, who hoped that their sons would marry equal-status
wives, and who tried to settle and be socially accepted in their countries
and towns of origin, are condemned as being in conflict with real,

45 In a letter to Max Brod written in April 1921 (B 315) Kafka mentions his desire
to emigrate into "a foreign southern country (it must not be Palestine ...)". Cf. the letter
to Robert Klopstock of September 13, 1923 (B 445): "Palestine would have been un-
reachable for me in any case; in view of the Berlin opportunities it would not even be
urgent" (my translation).
46 See E 51: "I was his representative here at this place" (my translation).
47 See, e. g., Binder 123f.

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260 Catherine Hezser JSQ 8

authentic life, which can be lived only i


East, far away from the comforts and c
The story "Metamorphosis", written in
family conflict as well. Gregor Samsa, w
formed into a giant vermin,48 is willing
family and exiled into his room. Where
try to maintain contact with the alienate
his escape from the room, back into th
noises which no longer sound "like the
(E 72, my translation), and by violent b
apples, since "the father considered only
ate for him" (E 89, my translation). O
become so weak and feeble that he ult
which was then entered by the maid on
his dead body lying on the floor -, did t
Both stories thematize the alienation be
In "The Judgment" and "Metamorpho
reaction to a gradual or sudden change
acter or appearance as well as a chang
initial weakness to vigor, strength, and
alienation does not lead to the killing
Oedipus, however, but to the death, i. e.
After this depiction of the father-son
graphical and literary writings we sh
respresentative of the second generation
migration to America. Philip Roth, who
sey, in 1933, and who is best known fo
published in 1969, has often acknowl
writings on his own work.52 This influe
"'I Always Wanted You to Admire My F

48 According to Ritchie Roberts, Kafka. Judent


1988, 109, three possible meanings may be ass
here: the rebellious son, the Eastern Jew, the ar
zur konventionellen, an westlicher Kultur orien
49 See also Politzer 70.
50 See Roberts 98.
51 For the structural similarities between the stories see also Binder 124f. Cf. Politzer
65: "... his [Gregor Samsa's] death cannot fail to remind the reader of Georg Bend-
ermann's submission to the verdict of his father". On the punishment of the son
through isolation in "The Judgment" see Sokel 283-4.
>2 See, e. g., Bernard F. Rodgers Jr., Philip Roth, Boston 1978, 123-25, especially
124: "Kafka's humor, his preoccupation with moral action and boundless guilt, and his
ability to merge fantasy and realistic detail into a 'magic realism' were all elements

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(2001) Freud's Oedipus- Complex and the Problems of Jewish Assimilation26l

(1973), in which Roth invents an alternative continuation of Kafka's


biography, had he not died at a relatively young age. Kafka is presented
as an elderly bachelor here, who had escaped the Nazis and immigrated
to America, where he settled in Newark - Roth' birthplace (!) - and
earned his living as a Hebrew teacher until he died at the age of seventy
without any literary remains.53
Despite the great significance of his mother in his novels, Philip Roth
repeatedly thematizes the father-son relationship. This relationship is the
main topic of his autobiographical work Patrimony, published in 1991,
on which I shall focus here.54 Philip Roth has given the subtitle "A True
Story" to Patrimony and thereby indicates that despite the work's auto-
biographical character it is also fictional, since memoirs always contain
invented elements as well.55 The blurring of the boundaries between
reality and fiction is typical for Roth's writing.56 In his novel My Life
as a Man (1974) Roth writes:
"Maybe all I'm saying is that words, being words, only approximate the
real thing, and so no matter how close I come, I only come close" (23 3). 57

Since it is impossible to depict reality in a truthful way, a strict distinc-


tion between autobiography and personal memories on the one hand
and literary fiction on the other cannot be maintained. Rather, both
forms of writing should be seen as different forms of approximating
reality. These considerations also apply to Kafka's "Letter to His
Father" and the story "The Judgment". Whereas Neil Kozodoy writes
with regard to Roth's work Patrimony, "Herman Roth himself... may be

Roth admired and related to as he struggled to write about the same subjects in his own
idiom".
53 See ibid. 123-79, and Alan Cooper, Philip Roth and the Jews, Albany 1996, 174-
76.
54 See Cooper 55: "Patrimony also unlocks that easily overlooked vein in Roth's
fiction, the use of fathers, which turns out to be far more remarkable than the bally-
hooed use of mothers. The major use is the test of manhood, and a significant part of
the test is the patrimonial link to the Jews".
55 See ibid. 60.
56 In his book My Life as a Man (1974), for example, the protagonist Peter Tarno-
pol is said to have written two stories with the title "Useful Fictions" and a novel with
the title "My True Story". In The Prague Orgy at the end of the Zuckerman- trilogy
Roth writes: "... another character out of mock-autobiography, yet another fabricated
father manufactured to serve the purposes of a storytelling son" (569, quoted from
Philip Roth, Zuckerman Bound. A Trilogy and Epilogue, London 1989, Penguin paper-
back edition). In Roth's references and allusions to Kafka reality and fiction are mixed
as well; see Theodore Weinberger, "Philip Roth, Franz Kafka, and Jewish Writing",
Journal of Literature and Theology 7 (1993) 230-31.
57 Quoted from Philip Roth, My Life as a Man, New York 1993 (Vintage paperback
edition).

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262 Catherine Hezser JSQ 8

his son's most convincing imaginative c


"Letter to His Father" Kafka remarks:
It was an intentionally long-drawn-ou
Eng. 177). Accordingly, in both autobi
Kafka and Roth tried to come to term
their relationship to their fathers.
Philip Roth wrote Patrimony shortly
brain tumor. In this work he not only
with illness, but also deals with his fa
tionship to his father. The account is wr
the perspective of a son who has lost h
from Kafka's perspective when he w
Kafka never experienced his father
he himself who felt physically inferior
as persistently strong and healthy.
Despite this different perspective, Ph
man Roth is very reminiscent of Fran
Kafka: both fathers are presented as i
humble backgrounds who succeeded
ascended to the middle class. Because o
tion in Roth's writing it is possible th
was actually influenced by Kafka's "
certainly knew well.59
Herman Roth was the son of an Easte
who worked in a hat factory on New
while still a young man, his father Se
father, had left the small Galician tow
ied to become a rabbi. When he came t
Yiddish rather than learning English p
man could go to school only until he w
he was sent to work in order to suppo
cially (160). After many years of work
was eventually promoted to the posi
1780- Retrospectively Philip Roth adm

58 Neil Kozodoy, "His Father's Son". Comm


59 Already in the 1960s Roth studied Kafk
published in the collection Reading Myself a
before writing Portnoy 's Complaint he had ta
of Pennsylvania (see ibid. 21). Kafka's "Letter
My Life as a Man (86) and in The Professor
60 These and the following page references r
Story, London 1992 (Vintage paperback editi

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(2001) Freud's Oedipus-Complex and the Problems of Jewish Assimilation263

parsimony, and energy, but he admits that as a child these qualities


would drive him crazy (16, 24-25), for example, when his father gave
away his stamp collection, which he considered superfluous (29), or
when he gave orders to his employees, his wife and his children (36-
37), insisting on the undebatable correctness of his own opinion:
"... he had his own particular Jewish style of insisting on his absolutely
totalistic notions of what is good and what is right, and as a kid it really
used to get me down. Everybody has to do it exactly the same way. The way
he does it" (127).
Like Hermann Kafka, Herman Roth could not understand that all hu-
man beings were different and differed from him: "They all had to work
the same way, want the same way, be dutiful in the same way" (ibid.).
With the benefit of hindsight, recollections of his father's authorita-
tive and obstinate behavior and of his own feelings of superiority be-
cause of his better education become mixed with feelings of solidarity
in view of the anti-Semitic and discriminatory behavior to which his
father was subjected at his workplace (180). Roth comes to see his father
as "a roughhewn son of Jewish immigrants vulnerable to social preju-
dice" (180). A father whom he had perceived as strong and authoritative
within the private domain of the family is increasingly seen as the de-
fenseless victim of external social, political, and economic circum-
stances. Besides his compassion for his father owing to his illness, this
greater insight into the real conditions of his father's life distinguishes
Philip Roth' relationship to his father from that of Franz Kafka, at least
as far as the latter's "Letter to His Father" is concerned.
Whereas Philip Roth' grandfather Sender Roth had received a tradi-
tional Jewish education in Galicia, his father Herman Roth, who be-
longed to the first generation of Jews who grew up in America, became
increasingly alientated from Jewish religious rites:
"Back when my father was an overworked insurance man, being a Jew for
him hadn't much to do with formal worship, and like most of the first-
generation American fathers in our neighborhood, he visited the nearby
synagogue only on the High Holidays and, when it was necessary, as a
mourner. And at home there were really no rituals he observed" (92-93).
Only after his retirement did he become accustomed to regularly visiting
the Friday night service in the synagogue:
"... and though he still didn't go so far as to lay tefillin [that is, phylac-
teries] in the morning, his Judaism was more pointedly focused on the sy-
nagogue and the service and the rabbi than it had been at any time since his
childhood" (93).

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264 Catherine Hezser JSQ 8

Philip Roth assumes that this late r


based on his father's desire to establis
bears.
The son was unable to adopt this trad
have seemed dishonest to him, since it
way of life (97). The title of the book
Jewish son's difficulty with accepting
was aware of this difficulty, too: sinc
for his phylacteries after his death, he
gym:

"Yes, the locker room of the Y, where t


stank, where, as men among men, fam
their worn-down, old, ill-shapen bodies
jokes, and where, once upon a time, the
temple and where they remained Jews"
Both father and son would have considered the father's transmission of
his phylacteries to his son a symbolic form of patronizing, which had
become inappropriate once the father had recognized his son's inability
to imitate his form of Jewish life. The other, more material form of
inheritance, that is, the money, which Roth's father had planned to be-
queath to his son, the latter rejected as well, a decision which he re-
gretted later on, realizing that the property was, "if not an authentic
chunk of his hard-working hide, something like the embodiment of all
that he had overcome and outlasted" (104-5). At the end, the son was
left with his father's shaving mug, a family piece which had originally
belonged to his grandfather Sender. Seen on the basis of the humble
circumstances of his grandfather's life on the Lower East Side, this shav-
ing mug was "an artifact signalling an unexpected level of cultural re-
finement" (28).
Like Kafka, Philip Roth considers his relationship to his father repre-
sentative of the father-son relationship of many of his Jewish contem-
poraries. A non- Jewish taxi driver's confession to having killed his father
by force makes Roth realize that he belongs to the Jewish sons, who do
not use physical violence to kill their fathers but upset and anger them
with their words:

"We are the sons appalled by violence, with no capacity for inflicting
physical pain... When we lay waste, when we efface... it isn't with raging
fists ... but with our words, our brains, with mentality, with all the stuff that
produced the poignant abyss between our fathers and us and that they
themselves broke their backs to give us. Encouraging us to be so smart
and such yeshiva bchers, they little knew how they were equipping us to

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(2001) Freud's Oedipus- Complex and the Problems of Jewish Assimilation265

leave them isolated and uncomprehending in the face of all our forceful
babble" (159).
In this text Philip Roth suggests that the conflicting relationship with
their fathers was partly due to the sons' better educational background.
Both Roth and Kafka were intellectuals, whereas their fathers were busi-
nessmen. This difference was an important aspect of the father-son re-
lationship.
Milton N. Gordon has pointed out that during the first half of the
20th century American intellectual life was dominated by White Anglo-
Saxon Protestants, the so-called WASPs. After the Second World War
this situation changed. Within American society, which consisted of var-
ious "ethclasses", that is, sets of people who shared the same ethnicity
and class membership, an "intellectual subsociety" emerged. The mem-
bers of this intellectual subsociety shared a certain lifestyle, and ethnic
affiliations were of minor importance to them.61 The result of this devel-
opment was that "many intellectuals - perhaps the large majority -
became alienated from their ethnic subsocieties of origin".62 This does
not mean, however, that Jewish intellectuals gave up their Jewish identity
entirely. It only means that they were usually uninterested in Jewish
communal life and in formalized religious ceremonies.63
As an intellectual and artist Kafka differed from petty bourgeois so-
ciety no less than Philip Roth did. But in contrast to Philip Roth's post-
war America, in Kafka's Prague no multi-cultural intellectual milieu
existed, in which Kafka could have felt comfortable and which would
have substituted for his missing links to the Jewish community.64 This
problem of having to remain an outsider with respect to all of the exist-
ing social subgroups seems to be indicated in Kafka's letter to Max
Brod, already quoted earlier. In this letter Kafka writes that Jews of
his generation are "unable to find new ground". One may assume,
then, that because of the lack of "new ground", for example, in the
form of a multi-ethnic intellectual milieu, to Kafka his ethnic Jewish

61 See Milton M. Gordon, "Marginality and the Jewish Intellectual", in: The Ghetto
and Beyond. Essays on Jewish Life in America, ed. Peter I. Rose, New York 1969, 485.
62 Ibid. 487.
63 See ibid. 488.
64 On the marginality of Jewish intellectuals in 19th-century Europe see especially
Mendes-Flohr 23-53: the Jewish intellectual was both an "axionormative stranger" and
a "cognitive insider" (see ibid. 37). Jewish intellectuals had no access to professions
which were otherwise open to academics, they were social outsiders and in this regard
considered dclasse (see ibid. 40-41). With regard to the different situation in America
Mendes-Flohr writes: "In other societies, however, particularly in the post- World War
Two U.S.A., it can be argued that social exclusion of the educated Jew is not nearly so
severe as it was in Germany..." (45).

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266 Catherine Hezser JSQ 8

affiliation remained more importan


which will be addressed again below.
Another aspect determining both Kaf
their fathers are the generational diffe
of the Jews and their increasing partic
economic life of modern Europe led
ments and to what may be called the "
religion.65 In the case of both Kafka a
parents, that is, the transitional gener
form Judaism, which had developed in
Jewish tradition and modern culture.6
Herman Roth are not described as reg
to have gone there occasionally, at leas
maintained social contacts to other Je
Judith R. Kramer and Seymour Leven
transitional generation in America, th
Roth, a "gilded ghetto".68 Their East
parents, that is, the generation of Send
family's economic survival. In America
dish language and their traditional sht
York's Lower East Side, in which they
the ethnic and religious enclaves of the
By contrast, their children (like Herm
with being acknowledged and accept
Standing between traditional Easter
modern American non- Jewish culture

65 See Guttmann 8; Michael A. Meyer, "Mode


(1989) 155.
66 On Reform Judaism see Gnther W. Plaut, "Emancipation - The Challenge of
Living in Two Worlds", Judaism 38 (1989) 442: "Its continuing goal was to keep Jews
Jewish by making Jewish practice and education such that people would consider them
compatible with^ their modern sensibilities".
67 Hermann Kafka's suspicions against his non- Jewish servants and employees has
already been mentioned above. He was particularly concerned with being accepted by
Jews of his own or a higher social status. In the insurance company Herman Roth
worked together with non- Jewish colleagues, but he was discriminated against by his
superiors. He seems to have frequently told his son stories about his Jewish acquain-
tances and friends. In Elisabeth, where he had moved to with his wife, he lived in an
exclusively Jewish residential area: "Used to be only Jews around this part of Elisabeth
when Mother and I moved from Newark" {Patrimony 85).
08 See Judith R. Kramer and Seymour Leventman, Children oj the Gilded Ghetto.
Conflict Resolutions of Three Generations of American Jews, New Haven und London
1961, 5.
69 See ibid. 6.

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(2001) Freud's Oedipus-Complex and the Problems of Jewish Assimilation261

ficult to maintain.70 They were inclined to abandon the traditional forms


of Jewish life, since they considered them an obstacle in social advance-
ment.71 Most Jews of this generation were able to rise to the middle
strata of society, but their non- Jewish peers refused to accept them as
social equals. Therefore they tended to socialize only with fellow- Jews of
their own social standing, that is, with members of the same ethclass.
Accordingly, they lived in a "gilded ghetto", a situation which sustained
ethnic solidarity.72 The traditional orthodox lifestyle was abandoned,
but conformity with Jewish values was maintained. Reform and Conser-
vative synagogues were the contexts in which this generation's Jewish
religious identity could be preserved.73
The next generation, that is, the generation of Philip Roth himself,
felt much more integrated into society at large. This generation already
grew up in middle-class families, moved away from the traditionally
Jewish quarters, and had many private and professional contacts to
non- Jews. For Jews of this generation the definition of their Jewish iden-
tity was not limited to the alternative: affiliation with one of the estab-
lished denominations or total abandonment of their Jewishness. Their
identity problems required a much more complex, eclectic and varie-
gated answer.74
With regard to such generational differences between father and son,
similarities between Kafka and Roth exist. With one important excep-
tion, however: Although both Kafka and Roth were born into middle-
class families and differed from their fathers in this regard, in Kafka's
Prague the social integration of Jews into society at large, that is, the
relationship between Jews and non- Jews, had not significantly changed
from one generation to the next. Rudolf M. Wlaschek has pointed out
that eight major anti-Semitic attacks happened in Prague between 1844
and 192 1.75 The first generation's economic ascent did not lead to Jews'
acceptance by and integration into society at large but caused envy,

70 See especially Marcus Lee Hansen, "The Third Generation in America. A Critical
Essay in Immigrant History", Commentary 14 (November 1952) 494: "How to inhabit
two worlds at the same time was the problem of the second generation". See also
Gordon 481.
71 See Kramer/Leventman 9.
72 See ibid. 11.
73 See ibid. 12.
74 See ibid. 14-18. See also Kurt Dittmar, Assimilation und Dissimilation. Erschei-
nungsformen der Marginalittsthematik bei jdisch-amerikanischen Erzhlern (1900-
1970), Frankfurt, Bern, and Las Vegas 1978, 59: "Das traditionelle Judentum als Ein-
heit von Religion, Kultur, Geschichtsbewutsein und Sprache ist aufgelst, es gibt
keine gltige Definition des Juden mehr".
'* See Wlaschek 53.

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268 Catherine Hezser JSQ 8

accusation, and animosity. Faced with a


ish student organizations, such as Bar
ish self-confidence. After the First W
Czechoslovakia was founded, the offic
somewhat, but popular anti-Semitism
As an intellectual and a member of
differed from his father just as Ph
Roth, he did not experience his own ge
at large or into an intellectual subsocie
feel that his Jewishness was important
ficulties with defining his Jewish iden
being forced to be Jewish from outsi
Jewishness positively from within, co
blem. His was a condition of double
marginalized as a Jew in relation to n
tion which necessarily led to feelings
also as a Jewish intellectual in relation
the one side and non- Jewish intellectu
lip Roth belongs to a pluralistic and m
ety. From this secure standing point
Jewish identity in full autonomy.
In the following part of this essay re
works shall serve to illustrate the theo
far. The focus will be on Roth's depict
fathers and sons, and especially on the
defining their Jewish identity. The wo
Portnoy's Complaint and the Zuckerm
In the novel Portnoy's Complaint Ro
son's problems with his parents. Lik
this novel can be understood both as an accusation and as a confession
of guilt or apology. In contrast to Kafka's letter, however, in Roth's
novel not the father but the mother stands in the foreground. The
mother is presented as the parental authority figure who inhibits the
proper development of the son and causes fears of castration.77 She
considered her son "Albert Einstein the second" (2), and her expecta-
tions in him were extremely high. Like Kafka's father she continuously
mentions her own sacrifice on behalf of the son: "she is vying with

76 See ibid. 56-57. Cf. Kafka's report on his experiences in a boarding house in
Meran in his letter of April 10, 1920, to M. Brod and F. Weltsch (B 270-71).
77 See Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint, New York 1969, 133: "... the most castrat-
ing mother, ... the most benighted father".

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(2001) Freud's Oedipus-Complex and the Problems of Jewish Assimilation269

twenty other Jewish women to be the patron saint of self sacrifice" (15).
This sentence also indicates that Roth considered the mother's behavior
representative for Jewish mothers of that time - and the son's problems
typical for Jewish sons of his generation: "I am the son in the Jewish
joke - only it ain't nojokel" (39-40).
By contrast, the father is depicted as the powerless and oppressed
victim of the Protestant American elite. His superiors in the insurance
company assign the poorest districts to him and a professional promo-
tion is out of reach:

"Oh, this father! This kindly, anxious, uncomprehending, constipated


father. Doomed to be obstructed by this Holy Protestant Empire! ... How
could he oppress? - he was the oppressed. How could he wield power? - he
was the powerless..." (43).
Philip Roth alias Alexander Portnoy is aware of the reversal of familiar
power relationships here:
"If my father had only been my mother! And my mother my father! But
what a mix-up of the sexes in our house!" (45)
As in Kafka's story "The Judgment", in which the son commits suicide
instead of killing his father, a creative adaptation of Freud's theory is
recognizable here. In his review of Portnoy 's Complaint Bruno Bettel-
heim takes on the persona of Dr. Spielvogel, Alexander Portnoy's psy-
choanalyst, whom he invented for this purpose.78 Bettelheim alias Spiel-
vogel accuses Roth alias Portnoy of reversing the Oedipal situation in
order to disparage psychoanalysis.79 He subsequently explains Portnoy's
"mother-complex" in harmony with Freud's theory, however: Portnoy's
overbearing love of his mother leads to a negative projection: he blames
her for oppressing him because he is unconsciously disappointed that
she does not pay even more attention to him; that is, the model of the
son's libidinous fixation on his mother and his rejection of his father
remains valid.80

78 See Bruno Bettelheim, "Portnoy Psychoanalyzed. Therapy notes found in the


files of Dr. O. Spielvogel, a New York psychoanalyst", Midstream 15:6 (Juni/Juli
1969) 3-10.
79 See ibid. 4: "It was like a satire on the complaints of most of my patients and on
the tenets of psychoanalysis: that of the dominating and castrating father, and of a
mother too involved in herself and her own life, to pay much attention to her son.
This extremely intelligent young Jew does not recognize that what he is trying to do,
by reversing the Oedipal situation, is to make fun of me, as he does of everyone, thus
asserting his superiority over me and psychoanalysis itself".
80 See ibid.: The son felt "an incredibly deep disappointment that she was not even
more exclusively preoccupied with him"; and ibid. 5: "he, too, felt cheated at not being

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270 Catherine Hezser JSQ 8

Some scholars have suggested that Rot


the mother is based on a change of role
milies in the period following the Secon
nard F. Rodgers, "in part, it is a natural
a patriarchal to a matriarchal culture".81
social transformation had not taken p
roles of women in American society. M
care for her son is rather based on the f
tures confine her to the domestic sphere
to home, kitchen, and family. In Philip
reemerges as the dominating figure, as
victimizer at one and the same time.
As far as the son's definition of his Jewish identity is concerned, the
replacement of the "father-complex" by a "mother-complex" is not de-
cisive anyway. Like Franz Kafka in confrontation with his powerful and
authoritative father, Alexander Portnoy rejects his weak and powerless
father's version of Jewish identity.82 In Philip Roth's works the father
remains the representative of a form of Jewishness from which the son
distinguishes himself. This distinction shall be discussed in more detail
here.
Like Franz Kafka Philip Roth's protagonist Alexander Portnoy re-
jects the type of Judaism which his father represents:
"...just because it's your religion doesn't mean it's mine" (66).
In arguing with his father Alexander Portnoy even identifies himself as
an atheist and denies any interest in Judaism as a religion:
"A Jew? No! No! An atheist, I cry. I am nothing where religion is con-
cerned and I will not pretend to be anything that I am not!" (80)

The son's refusal to identify with the Jewish religion and his difficulties
with defining himself positively as a Jew seem to be connected with his
notion of being fully integrated into American society.

given enough". A libidinous relationship to his mother is also indicated by the fact that
the mother allegedly called her son "my lover" once (see Portnoy's Complaint 108).
81 Rodgers 130. See also Melvin J. Friedman, "Jewish Mothers and Sons: The Ex-
pense of Chutzpah". Contemporary American-Jewish Literature. Critical Essays, ed.
Irving Malin, Bloomington and London 1973, 159; Rachel Monika Herweg, Die j-
dische Mutter, Darmstadt 1994, 167-87; Zena Smith Blau, "In Defense of the Jewish
Mother", in: The Ghetto and Beyond. Essays on Jewish Life in America, New York
1969, 59. Fisch even maintains that "the replacement of the Jewish father by the Jewish
mother is in a way the most important event in twentieth century Jewish life and
letters" C41.
82 See also Rodgers 128: "Both sons see their difficulties as a direct result of their
family's Judaism".

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(20Ql)Freud's Oedipus-Complex and the Problems of Jewish AssimilationllX

The rejection of all secondary or inauthentic forms of Jewishness is


also stressed in connection with the impact of the Holocaust on Amer-
ican Jewish identity. Whereas in Patrimony Philip Roth writes that his
father suffered from anti-Semitic discrimination at the insurance com-
pany for which he worked, the protagonists of some of his novels refuse
to identify with the victims of a virulent anti-Semitism and point to the
difference which living in America makes. When his sister asks Alexan-
der Portnoy, "Do you know... where you would be now if you had been
born in Europe instead of America?", he answers, "That isn't the issue,
Hannah", and continues: "/ suppose the Nazis are an excuse for every-
thing that happens in this house" {Portnoy 's Complaint, 85-86, italicized
by the author). In My Life as a Man, published in 1974, Peter Tarnopol
tries to explain his refusal to identify with the victims of anti-Semitic
violence with his lack of respective experiences and changed external
circumstances:

"I happened to have been born a Jew not in twentieth-century Nurem-


berg, or nineteenth-century Lemberg, or fifteenth-century Madrid, but in
the state of New Jersey in the same year that Franklin Roosevelt took of-
fice..." (93). 83
"... we are Jews who live in the haven of Westchester County, rather than
in our ravaged, ancestral, Jew-hating Europe" (248).
For the son the fact that he has not experienced virulent anti-Semitism
himself in democratic twentieth-century America renders an identifica-
tion with Judaism on the basis of an allegedly common Jewish tradition
of suffering and victimization impossible.
This topic is taken up again in the Zuckerman-trilogy of 1985.84 The
differences of opinion between the writer Nathan Zuckerman and his
father are incited by the son's publication of his novel Carnovsky*5
which deals with conflicts within a Jewish family. Philip Roth also seems
to react against accusations of Jewish self-hatred and anti-Semitism di-
rected against his novel Portnoy 's Complaint here. Nathan's father fears
that Carnovsky could cause anti-Semitic reactions. In his opinion, his
son's well-protected childhood makes him unable to understand the si-
tuation of Jews in America properly:

83 For the positive view of Roosevelt shared by Peter TarnopoPs parents see also the
scene ibid. 273-74.
84 See also Hana Wirth-Nesher, "The Artist Tales of Philip Roth". Proof texts 3
(1983)266-71.
85 On I. J. Singer's Yiddish family novel by the similar title, Di mishpokhe Karnovski,
see Malka Margentsa-Shaked, "Singer and the Family Saga Novel in Jewish Litera-
ture". Prooftexts 9 (1989) 31-33. The novel describes the gradual decline of a family in
the course of increasing assimilation.

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272 Catherine Hezser JSQ 8

"I wonder if you fully understand just h


world for Jewish people. I don't mean in
mean in run-of-the mill Americans, Mr
you and I consider perfectly harmless..
Like Alexander Portnoy and Peter Tar
to see a direct connection between the
ing the Third Reich and the situation o
time:

"In Europe - not in Newark! We are not the wretched victims of Belsen!
We are not the victims of that crime!" (77)

The son perceives the relationship between Jews and non- Jews in Amer-
ica entirely differently than his father does. The different circumstances
of his own life make it impossible for him to identify with his forebears
who actually suffered from anti-Semitism. In contrast to his father, he
fells perfectly secure and fully integrated into American society.
Another aspect of Jewish self-definition addressed in Roth's novels is
the significance of the family and the maintenance of family traditions.
The protagonists of the novels My Life as a Man (1974) and The Pro-
fessor of Desire (1977) are writers and professors of literature, who - like
Frank Kafka and Alexander Portnoy - are unable to marry a Jewish
woman and continue the Jewish family tradition, in reaction and contra-
distinction to their parents' stress on family values. In My Life as a Man
the psychoanalyst Dr. Spielvogel - whom Roth seems to have taken over
from Bettelheim's review of Portnoy 's Complaint - explains the son's
difficulties with reference to his alleged fear of castration:86 the son
spoiled by his mother and distanced from his father has developed a
narcissistic personality, degrading other people to masturbatory objects
whose sole purpose is to confirm him in his self-love.87
Peter Tarnopol, the Jewish son of this novel, naturally denies these
allegations, maintaining that they misrepresent his relations to his par-
ents. He is conscious of the good intentions of his mother and the pro-
fessional obligations of his father, whom he describes as follows:
"... he was harrassed by his own vigor, by his ambitions, by his business,
by the times. By his overpowering commitment to the idea of Family and the
religion he made of Doing A Man's Job" (243).
As in Kafka's "Letter to His Father" the father is presented as the
victim of circumstances here and his self-sacrifice on behalf of his family

86 See My Life as a Man 216.


87 See ibid. 214ff and 296.

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(2001) Freud's Oedipus-Complex and the Problems of Jewish Assimilation273

is, at least to a certain extent, acknowledged by the son.88 Nevertheless,


the reader of the novel will eventually agree with Dr. Spielvogel's theory
and become aware of the ironical undertone of the title of the novel, My
Life as a Man: Peter Tarnopol who considers himself a man has, in
reality, remained an adolescent son unable to lead the life of an adult.
In his recent book Philip Roth and the Jews Alan Cooper has pointed
to the Zuckerman-trilogy (1985) as a particularly good example of the
significance of the father-figure and the father's Judaism in Roth's writ-
ing:
"What keeps all the Zuckerman books bound, with their different obses-
sions with fathers, is the tug of Jewish origins, the father principle in its
larger sense, and Jewish authenticity as measured by the bond of fathers".89

The collection Zuckerman Bound (1985), a new combination of works


which had previously been published separately,90 deals with Nathan
Zuckerman's rise to the position of a famous but heavily criticized Jew-
ish writer. In the first part of the book the promising young writer
chooses the already well-known Russian-born author Lonoff as a sub-
stitute for his real father, "seeking patriarchal validation elsewhere",
"from a father who was an artist instead of a foot doctor" (7).91 When
he was five years old, Lonoff had immigrated to Palestine with his par-
ents, after his father had almost died from the wounds inflicted on him
during the Shitomir pogrom. Later, as a teenager, Lonoff had come to
America alone and worked on a chicken farm. The literary productions
of this "quaint remnant of the Old World ghetto" (8) remind Nathan of
the world which his ancestors had left behind geographically as well as
socially and intellectually (see ibid. 9). They evoke in him
"feelings of kinship... for our own largely Americanized clan, moneyless
immigrant shopkeepers to begin with, who'd carried on a shtetl life ten
minutes' walk from the pillared banks and gargoyled insurance cathedrals
of downtown Newark; and what is more, feelings of kinship for our pious,
unknown ancestors, whose Galician tribulations had been only a little less
foreign to me, while growing up securely in New Jersey, than Abraham's in
the Land of Canaan" (9-10).

88 See ibid. 244. See also The Professor of Desire 245, where the "exemplary life" of
the "industrious" and "slave-driving" father is described.
89 Cooper 182.
90 The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson
(1981), supplemented by the new epilogue The Prague Orgy.
91 See also ibid. 57, where he describes his real father as "the foot-doctor father, the
first of my fathers".

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274 Catherine Heiser JSQ 8

Nathan's rekindled interest in the life


are strongly reminiscent of Franz Kaf
theatre company and the Chassidic wo
The son's interest in shtetl life and life on the Lower East Side is
distinguished from the father's sentimental predilection for "Jewish
kitsch", however. Nathan's father is said to have bothered his son for
years by reciting the Yiddish chant, "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen" as well as
the Israeli song "Tzena Tzena", both of which occasioned disputes: "But
by the mid-sixties, when he played for Nathan the Barry Sisters singing
the songs from Fiddler on the Roof, the struggle was about over" (215).
Like Roth's father in Patrimony, Nathan Zuckerman's father began to
visit the synagogue on a more regular basis only in his old age, "So
that the rabbi who buried him wouldn't be a total stranger" (216). Only
when his father had died, did Nathan become aware of the deeper roots
of his father's Jewish identity: "If ever there was a man to bury as a Jew it
was his father" (271).
The description of Nathan's mother resembles Kafka's references to
his mother in the "Letter to His Father": she was "boundlessly good"
and the "archetype of reason", but also loyally devoted to her husband.
In discussions she always sided with her husband without ever insisting
on or at least uttering her own divergent views. Similarly Nathan de-
scribes his mother as "the most loyal of wives to her demanding hus-
band" (255), who would listen to the stories of his childhood in poverty
hundreds of times without falling asleep: "she was the wife whose very
thought the man had been thinking for her since she was twenty years
old" (260).92
Nathan, in his attempt to escape from the narrowly-defined world of
his middle-class parents, discovers the "emancipated world of art" (261).
Yet not without feelings of guilt toward his parents, whose expectations
of a "good Jewish boy" he is unable to meet. He suffers from guilt-
evoked phantasies of his mother's abduction (see also ibid. 257) and
dreams that on his deathbed his father called him "bastard" (270). He
considers himself an aberrant son and is accused by his brother of hav-
ing caused his father's death (287). Fittingly, the third part of the Zuck-
erman-trilogy thematizes the punishing castration of the son: the physi-
cal pain from which Nathan suffers and which prevents him from writ-
ing are seen by him as the self-inflicted punishment for the distress he
caused to his father with the novel Carnovsky (see above).

92 See also ibid. 324 and 328, where the much greater significance of the father for
the intellectual development of the son is stressed.

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(2001) Freud's Oedipus- Complex and the Problems of Jewish Assimilationll 5

In this third part of the Zuckerman-trilogy Philip Roth poignantly


describes the son's paradoxical situation:
"... to be raised as a post-immigrant Jew in America was to be given a
ticket out of the ghetto into a wholly unconstrained world of thought ...
Alienated? Just another way to say 'Set free!' A Jew set free even from
Jews - yet only by steadily maintaining self-consciousness as a Jew. That
was the thrillingly paradoxical kicker" (348).
The formulation, "a Jew set free even from Jews", alludes to the phe-
nomenon that not only Jewish religious but also Jewish ethnic identity
became less and less significant for the Americanized sons, and that this
disengagement with the ethnic community is judged positively, as the
freedom to define oneself without external constraints.93
Israel also plays only a minor role for the fictional-autobiographical
Nathan Zuckerman. When he had become a famous writer and was
asked to write an essay in favor of Israel for the New York Times, he
declined this request with the explanation, "I am not an authority on
Israel. I am an authority on Newark" (366), and when he was further
urged to write the piece, "I want to forget Israel. I want to forget
Jews" (368).94 Different American Jewish views concerning Israel are
reflected in the novel Counterlife (1987), again represented by members
of the family Zuckerman, which cannot be further discussed in this
context.95
What is most characteristic for Roth's protagonists and probably for
Roth himself is the entirely negative definition of their Jewish identity.96
In the Zuckerman-trilogy Philip Roth alias Nathan Zuckerman seems to
welcome the writer Appel's former opposition not only to his own father
but to all "inauthentic" forms of Jewish self-definition:

93 See Cooper 21 1: "Choice rather than compulsion meant freer Jews able to define
their Jewishness".
y4 See also Cooper: Even now, Roth probes myth ol Jewish history by suggesting
that not Israel but America may be the new Zion. American Jews may be more at ease
in their land than Israelis in theirs". In Counterlife the common distinction between
Israel and the Diaspora is given up. Zion is defined as "any place where Jews feel
collectively secure enough to be themselves" (221, quoted from Philip Roth, The Coun-
terlife, London 1988, Penguin paperback edition). The Diaspora is not defined geogra-
phically but can also be in Israel, that is, everywhere where as a Jew one does not feel at
home.
95 For the depiction of the father-son relationship in this novel see especially Mat-
thew Wilson, "Fathers and Sons in History: Philip Roth's The Counterlife", Prooftexts
11 (1991)41-56.
96 See Cooper 211: "assertions of a Jewish self not so much arguing over as shrug-
ging off the fine print of the covenant".

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276 Catherine Hezser JSQ 8

"... a stand against the secret shame o


distortions of the Jewish nostalgists, a
the new suburbs" (348).
The danger of this negatively defined
nents are gone, one's own identity wa
text referring to the death of Zuckerm
"No new Newark ... no fathers like thos
ing with taboos, no sons like their sons b
father and a mother and a homeland, h
a son, no longer a writer" (323).
And further down Philip Roth alias N
subject matter of the Zuckerman-trilo
"A first-generation American father p
second-generation American son posses
whole story" (ibid.).

Summary

Franz Kafka and Philip Roth treated their relationship toward their
fathers both autobiographically and literarily, both can be called
"father-obsessed writers", to use Matthew Wilson's term.97 The so-
called father-complex, the son's rebellion against his father, is addressed
not only with regard to the father himself, but also with regard to the
Judaism of the father.
Franz Kafka's and Philip Roth's problems with their fathers are
based on the fact that the sons belong to a later generation and are
intellectuals and artists. Whereas the "transitional generation" of the
fathers was especially concerned with economic ascent and a secure life
in the realms of their families and equal-status Jewish friends, the sons
were already born into more or less affluent middle-class families, from
which, as intellectuals, they tried to distinguish themselves. They rejected
the liberal communal form of Judaism represented by their assimilated
fathers and tried to define their own Jewish identity in an eclectic and
individualistic way.
As an intellectual and as a member of a later generation Philip Roth -
in contrast to his father - is integrated both into American society at
large and into the pluralistic sub-society of intellectuals. For Franz Kaf-
ka, who lived in Central Europe at the turn of the century, such integra-

97 See Wilson 46, who uses this term for Philip Roth alias Nathan Zuckerman.

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(2001) Freud "s Oedipus-Complex and the Problems of Jewish Assimilationlll

tion into mainstream society cannot similarly be assumed. Social inte-


gration of Jews into American society, and especially the type of inte-
gration experienced by Jewish intellectuals, would lead to a diminuation
of the significance of ethnic allegiance. The Jewish community's loss of
significance for the sons of immigrants is poignantly expressed in Philip
Roth's literary works. Franz Kafka, on the other hand, who was "un-
able to find new ground" under his feet, remained an outsider both as a
Jew in relation to other religiously and/or socially affiliated Jews and as
an intellectual in relation to other intellectuals and writers of his time.
Since his Jewishness was considered a significant aspect of his identity
by the society in which he lived, one may assume that he himself also
continued to deem his Jewishness important, even if this identification
was not, in the first place, internally motivated but forced on him from
outside.
Philip Roth, who is able to determine his Jewish identity without any
external constraints, with "firm ground under his feet", to use Kafka's
expression, does so mostly in a negative way, by distinguishing himself
from various forms of Judaism which he considers inauthentic, such as
the assimilated Judaism of his father, the ghetto Judaism of his grand-
father, and the Zionism of national-religious circles in Israel.98 Kafka,
on the other hand, lacked this "firm ground under his feet" and
searched for security and an authentically lived Judaism amongst the
so-called "Ostjuden" of the Yiddish theatre company and his Chassidic
friends.
Both Franz Kafka and Philip Roth knew that their "father-complex"
was shared by many Jewish sons of their generation. Therefore they did
deal with it not only autobiographically, but also fictionally and litera-
rily. Their autobiographical and literary works reveal the closeness be-
tween fiction and reality, personal and social conflict, individual and
society, autobiography and history. The one is not imaginable without
the other. With regard to the initially mentioned questions addressed by
the so-called New Historicism it has to be stressed that as representa-
tions of discourse" autobiographical and literary texts always have a
social and historical meaning. In accordance with New Historicism

98 See also Dittmar 354, who points to an interview with Roth in Commentary 31
(April 1961) 350f, where he stresses that Judaism does not mean anything to him
personally, but that this very fact constitutes a challenge for him as a writer: "one
had to invent being a Jew".
99 On discourse analysis see Moritz Baler, "Einleitung: New Historicism - Litera-
turgeschichte als Poetik der Kultur", in: New Historicism: Literaturgeschichte als Poetik
der Kultur, ed. Moritz Baler, Frankfurt 1995, 14-17.

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278 Catherine Hezser JSQ 8

and its emphasis on the "textuality of


increasingly be taken into account by
tory.

100 See Baler 9-13 and especially 11-12: "Wenn Geschichte nicht mehr als eine
monologische Wahrheit gesehen wird, der man sich annhert, sondern als historisch
kontingentes Ergebnis einer selbst immer historischen und historisch je verschiedenen
Vertextung, dann und erst dann lt sich generell von einer 'Textualitt der Geschichte'
reden".

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