Word: kafka
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...Black Monkey." Each foreign student shares a room with a Russian in former. His mail goes through so many censors that "the letters get worn out." The level of instruction is disappointing, the lessons ruled by dogma. Bureaucracy is so dismayingly dominant in Soviet life that Kafka seems to have replaced Marx and Lenin as the prophet of Communism...
Baeck, who died nine years ago, is revered as a saint of modern Judaism, and as one of the last towering figures of the German Jewish renaissance that produced such men as Freud, Einstein, Kafka and Martin Buber. Born in Prussia, he studied philosophy at the University of Berlin, and as a rabbi in Silesia, Dusseldorf and Berlin emerged as one of Germany's great articulators of Reform Judaism. When Protestant Theologian Adolf von Harnack declared Judaism to be a spiritually inferior faith in his The Essence of Christianity, Baeck replied with The Essence of Judaism. Baeck defended Judaism...
Coagulated Syrup. The company's longest single item is "The Post Office," a sort of Our Town story as Kafka might retell it. A dusty, creaky, self-important postmaster rubber-stamps his way through bizarre, touching and humdrum encounters with the town's citizens. At skit's end, the postmaster is walking around with an inverted wastebasket covering his head. Poof! The postmaster disappears, but the basket is still there. This is typical of the evening's pseudoprofundities-here today, and a basket case tomorrow...
Then the growth explosions began. They're still going on. No other city in history so typifies the delusions, the momentum, the pace and direction of its time. Some residents feel its heartbeat and would never live elsewhere. Like Joyce and his Dublin they commune inextricably. Others (more like Kafka and his Prague) live perpetually estranged and threatened by their city. But almost no one is indifferent to New York...
...Kafka evokes the terror of a citizen forced by a faceless and brutalizing state to stand trial for an unspecified crime. Cheever writes of a subtler terror: that of citizens richly and pointlessly rewarded by an equally faceless society. Unsupported by arrogance of family or formal rank, equipped with no irreplaceable skill, the well-to-do suburbanite wonders vaguely and passionately why he deserves the country clubs, the trips to Bermuda and the swimming pools. More sharply, he wonders how long it will last. Will the money stop? Will the unpredictable demons of alimony or Internal Revenue turn treacherous...