Kafka: Letter to the Father

What happens when your beloved family members know that you are blogging? They send you once in a while recommendations - where to travel, what to write about, what to read and what not, what to write and what not about, for different reasons. Also, you can receive questions of the kind: What are you not writing about...for instance, classical authors instead of all those debut novels or new titles or chicklit or and or...But they are part of my - steady and stubborn - audience, so answering the requests of my readers is a matter of online survival. 

What exactly can I do for them now? I´ve read most of the classical books and authors long before starting blogging. I am not always in the mood for that kind of authors that were part of the bibliography of my beloved relatives. Difficult bookish times. However, as I decided to dedicate my summer months to a lot of foreign language writing and reading, after a serious scrutiny of my messy book shelves, I´ve found what I was looking for. A book I wanted to read for a long time: Letter to the Father by Franz Kafka, in the Italian translation Lettera al Padre - by Claudio Groff).

No pun intended: there are my relatives on my father side which are very active in following my professional steps, by my father - of blessed memory - died when I was too little to remember him. My stepfather had no influence in my upbringing and reading blogs, in English especially, is not part of his lavish retirement plan.

I´ve found the translation excellent with an extraordinary attention to convene subtle emotional details that can be easily lost when switching from languages so different as structures and . The terrible torment the 36 years old Kafka is going through when writing this letter is a tensed testimony of a failed parent-son relationship. 

At the time when Kafka wrote this letter, dr. Freud was elaborating his classification of mental disorders including narcissism among them. Freud´s writings about the psychological mechanisms of the relationships between father and son were also probably well-known to Kafka at the time of the letter - end of 1919.

The father will not have the chance to discuss or apologize or to reconsider his relationship with Franz, but the letter addressed to him remains available for many strained relationship between fathers and sons. Many of them, at least.

The beginning reminds of a discussion the two of them had before, when the father asked his son what he is afraid of him. This fear is constant and mentioned more than once in the letter. Time for Kafka to mention the real everyday conflict between one of them. It starts from the son´s lingering to emulate his father but ending up being the opposite of him and especially of his expectations of him. Kafka is craving for the attention of his father, but every time he is reminded he is a failure. A weighty oppression - which is emotional therefore harder to cope with - which comes from the judgemental and narrow-minded attitude of the father. A hurtful emotional behavior that, among others, explains Kafka´s failures in finding a wife or to take over the family business, managed in a dictatorial way by his father. Indeed, his father allowed him to do whatever he wanted, but the free choice is a curse for his son because of the extremely critical evaluation of the father. Manipulative, emotionally limited, unable to properly listen and communicate with his son and family, he is the victim of his own upbringing as well. His mother is compensating with ´infinite kindness´ the dry and emotionally abusive character of the father, but Kafka wanted desperatelly to please his father an no one else.

Also in terms of Jewish education, their relationship is problematic. A son is learning from his father the main Jewish obligations in terms of praying and everyday practice but in this case, the communication is missing or is distorted again, with the father unable to understand the emotional needs of his son. 

The relationships between father and sons do have a deep psychological complexity, similarly with that between mothers and daughters. No matter how outdated Freud is nowadays, his basic observations about those binomial relationships do operate in very strange ways, especially if not nurtured by understanding and love, emotional availability on both sides, especially parents´. Kafka´s Letter to the Father is a sad meditation about how the missing love of a parent can affect one child´s emotional and personal development. Physical abuse is indeed a serious threat to a child development but so is the emotional one. In both cases professional support to overcome such threats to an everyday life normality are more than recommended. Taking the rightful distance and even leaving completely behind the source of abuse, with or without a letter is what such narcissists deserve. 

Rating: 4 stars