“You’ve got something in common with Kafka, there,” says an
old man in the tale Kafka’s Leopards
by Moacyr Scliar. “When I told him the story of the Golem, I warned him: we
shouldn’t create things we can’t control. And fiction is just that, something
that can’t be controlled. You start to write, to imagine, and who knows where
it’s going to end? And then, more books for what? Everything important has been
written in the Torah.”
Yesterday afternoon I read Kafka’s Leopards. It’s a fantastic story: I mean really a fantasy,
as well as highly enjoyable and imaginative. Like many fables it reads very
smoothly on the story level, and begs you to read in a variety of meanings –
like the one in the paragraph above.
In the tale, for rather involved reasons, Benjamin, a poor
tailor from Chernovitsky (a Bessarbian shtetl near Odessa) travels to Prague,
thinking he has an assignment from a revolutionary cell led by Trotsky. His
trip to Prague is challenging – World War I is going on in between the two
places and (like my father also a poor tailor in his story of going from his
own shtetl to Pinsk) Benjamin must first overcome a challenge: to cross a river
by hiring a ferry rowed by scary men who could easily steal his money or push
him into the river. Realism in the middle of the story? Or is a ferry boat
symbolic? Real to me.
Once in Prague, Benjamin has no idea what to do to complete
his mission for his idol Trotsky, but thinks he’s supposed to contact a leftist
writer and obtain “a text.” He left his instructions on the train. But somehow,
he goes to a synagogue to find out – and the author he hears of is Kafka. The
shammes of the synagogue, who gives tours in exchange for tips, tells him of
Kafka and much else, including what Kafka said. Benjamin asks for Kafka’s
response: “What did he say?”
The shammes answers, “Nothing. Didn’t say anything. Didn’t
pay any attention to me. … Speaking of treasure and tips, you could contribute
a bit more.”
Soon afterwards, Benjamin actually meets Kafka and asks him
for “a text.” Kafka gives him a mysterious piece of writing – later explained
as a contribution to a Yiddish newspaper, one of many mix-ups in the tale. While the story is pure fantasy, the
one-sentence Kafka story is a real Kafka story: “Leopards break into the temple and drink up the offering in the
chalices; this happens again and again; finally, one can predict their action
in advance and it becomes part of the ceremony. – Franz Kafka.”
The remainder of the story is about the poor tailor’s
experience in Prague, his return to Chernovitsky, and finally about the end of
his life in Puerto Alegre, Brazil (where the first few paragraphs of the story
had already given away his end – as the uncle of another radical in an
oppressive country – repeating his own experiences, sort of). And about a
variety of ways to look at Kafka’s "text."
You can read all sorts of meanings into it. Or not. After
all, it’s a story by a Brazilian Jewish magical realist twentieth-century writer,
what would you expect?
Though Scliar's work was written long ago (and he died last year), the story was
only recently translated into English. Sad that he’s so unknown and
underappreciated. And so sad that this book is published so obscurely and at
such a high price. Another digression: the sad state of publishing, where this
single story less than 100 pages long costs $26.07 on amazon.com (88 cents off
list price), no Kindle edition. Lucky for me the library had it.
