OPEN LETTERS
An Open Letter to Franz Kafka’s Father
Who tuned his son into a cockroach
Dear Hermann Kafka,
I am sending you the letter your son, Franz, couldn’t send. He was afraid of your negative reaction—too scared of your tyrannical presence. But I’m not frightened. I hope your spirit will read this and realize your lack of judgment—although it’s too late to do anything about it now.
It puzzles me how you could treat a literary genius so cruelly. Did you honestly think you were serving him well by disapproving of the one he loved and attempting to dissuade him from being a writer? It was as if you were intent on sabotaging his life and purposely trying to make him unhappy.
“I am a cage, in search of a bird.” — Franz Kafka
I wasn’t the best parent, either, but my son was a juvenile delinquent and not a literary genius. I never had a child whose brilliant literary career changed the face of literature or who created a whole new genre. Somewhere in your heart, you must have known he was talented — but why didn’t you support him? Were you too ignorant to see it? Or were you too arrogant to admit that your son was better in some aspect of life than you? If that was the case, you were an utter fool, Hermann Kafka — more ignorant than I ever thought.
