By Rick Kardonne
Tribune Correspondent
Highest praise is due to Alon Nashman for his performance in his one-man play Kafka and Son, which he and director Mark Cassidy adapted for the stage from Franz Kafka’s Letter to His Father, which can be seen at the Al Green Theatre at the Miles Nadal JCC until March 18.
Alon Nashman does Kafka proud in his one-man show of Kafka and Son at Al Green Theatre.
Franz Kafka, together with Edgar Allen Poe, were the first writers who created surrealism in literature. His four best-known novels, Amerika, The Trial, The Castle and The Metamorphosis depicted little humans who were overwhelmed by mysteriously sinister forces beyond their control.
While Poe’s demons came from the realm of gothic fantasy, Kafka’s sinister forces were more modern and political: an eerie precursor to the totalitarian tyranny that gripped Europe in the mid-20th century. This perception was especially remarkable when one realizes that Kafka died in 1924, before the full manifestations of Italian fascism, Soviet communism, or German Nazism became apparent.
Nashman’s premise is that Kafka, who was born in Prague in 1883, was motivated to create this literary style, by the experience of living under his tyrant father Hermann: an authoritarian clothing merchant with a military background who married the daughter of a brewery owner and whose social-climbing pretensions were constantly mocked by the antisemitic sentiments of the late 19th century. Hermann, according to the letter, demeaned young Franz physically and emotionally. Physically, since Hermann was brawny and Franz was scrawny, Franz was made to feel inferior. Emotionally, since Hermann ran his household in military fashion, Franz was made to feel that he was constantly misbehaving. Franz felt that he grew up in a prison, and he felt that through his emerging writings, which Hermann disdained, he was beginning to revolt against his father, who also constantly doubted Franz’s ability to form a successful marriage.
While Franz Kafka made several marriage proposals, none of them succeeded and he died at the age of 40.
At the end, Nashman, in the same monologue, portrays Hermann’s attitude towards his son. He despises his son, significantly accusing him of ‘parasitism,’ a slur uttered by both Nazis and Soviet communists against Jews. Thus, Hermann Kafka, although himself Jewish, projected central and eastern European antisemitic stereotypes against his own son in order to justify his dislike of Franz for not conforming to traditional pre-Holocaust central European traditional gentile disciplines to which he so desperately aspired.
In the letter, Franz depicts Hermann’s formalistic but largely indifferent attitude to Judaism. Hermann attended synagogue only four times per year, when he emphasized, in Franz’s words, the most boring parts of the service. In response, Franz felt attracted to a more emotional Jewish expression, which was amply present in the traditional Jewish area of northwest Prague, where he had been born and raised.
The focus of the play is properly Franz Kafka’s relationship with his father.
Those seeking excerpts of Kafka’s writings will not, and should not, find them here. However, as the chronology of both Kafkas’ lives, which are listed in the program mentions, Franz, from 1911 onwards, began to study Judaism and Jewish folklore. His diaries depict in some detail his association with a Jewish social and cultural club in Prague.
These specific references towards Franz Kafka’s positive experiences with Yiddishkeit should have been referred to at some point in the monologue: not only to underscore his revolt against his father, but also to indicate to today’s audiences, that the avant-garde, which Kafka personified in his writings, and Jewish culture, are indeed compatible, both then and now.
One must read this chronology in the program to fully understand the context of Kafka’s brief life, which Nashman so accurately personifies.
While there are those who insist that “the play must speak for itself,” a reading of this fascinating chronology will emphasize Nashman’s powerfully effective interpretation of bringing to life this very important literary figure.
Cassidy’s direction of Nashman on stage is masterfully natural. Marysia Bucholc’s original set design is perfectly stark and surrealistic, and sets the mood for the works of Franz Kafka. Special mention is also due to Andrea Lundy’s lighting design and the original abstract background music by Osvaldo Golijov, recorded by the St.Lawrence String Quartet on the Grammy-nominated CD.
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