By George Elliot Clarke
Faithfully Seeking Franz
by Elana Wolff
Guernica Editions (2023)
Elana Wolff is a cosmopolitan poet—with eight collections to her credit and English, German, and Hebrew at her command—who exhibits irrepressible wanderlust as well as unrepressed wonder about our current, war-cursed world (itself the result of the Holocaust of a people and the wholesale destruction of topographies). A sometime instructor in English at Toronto’s York University and at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the prize-winning, Jewish-Canadian poet undertakes her most significant prose work to date in Faithfully Seeking Franz, a travelogue cum literary biography that retraces the Euro-continental itinerary of Franz Kafka (1883-1924) the German-Jewish-Czech writer—from birth to death, with all the principal stops—tours and signal events (love affairs, manuscript starts, false starts, and completions, and illnesses)—in between. Still, not only does Wolff recap the chief moments of Kafka’s bio, she also reveals how the author’s life-story impinges on her own autobiography—and her relationship with her husband, Menachem.
Thus, the book opens with author “E.” and companion “M.,” during a stopover in Vienna, Austria, in January 2014, taking a bus to Klosterneuburg to tour Kafka’s Death House—Sterbehaus. Thanks to an instance of “fortuitous momentum,” the inquiring couple encounter Herr Winkler who escorts them to “apartment 6—the Kafka Memorial Room”—where, in fact, Kafka did not expire. However, thanks to Winkler’s shepherding, the Wolffs are able to ogle the second-floor “balcony”—visible from a parking-lot—where Kafka once sat, a shirtless tuberculosis (TB) patient—taking in sunlight or chill—to relieve his blood-streaked breathing while scrutinizing a garden or the Viennese woods. And so it goes: Seldom is the couple able to view the precise, palpable situation wherein Kafka is said to have written, eaten, courted a dame, or escorted a gent (whether Kafka was sexually Queer or just imaginatively queer is unknown), or written a text, or been bitten by Love or
vermin. The miscues, faux pas, or rendezvous half-suspicious or half-suspect, are the result of a passage of a century of wars, the Holocaust, and, of course, that vicious, existentialist bulldozer, namely, “urban planning” (translation: dynamiting the historic and erecting the inferior). So, Elana Wolff’s quest for Kafka’s traces—of ink-and-paper or “realia” (3-D objets related to the gent)—narrates the grappling with a ghost or the spectre of an event, but chases a fragile paper trail that bridges Europe and Israel, translators and archivists.
As I mentioned above, Wolff’s own life—and her companion’s associated story—both intersect with 1) Kafka’s life and 2) his texts. Occasionally, the connections seem coincidental or “magical,” or simply reflect “how the plane of reading and writing, like skin, can be continuous.” So, the search for Kafka’s memorials—or sanatoria or hotels—across Central Europe, or the studious investigation of his betrothed-and-then-sloughed-off (but likely never bedded) lovers, or of his fearsome papa and fiercest defenders (like his BFF, Max Brod), reinforces for Wolff her own aficionado obsession with the strange, the bizarre, the cabalistic, and/or spectral intersections. Simultaneously, E. & M. have to negotiate, while “faithfully seeking Franz,” their own recognition of how one may be able to experience only adulterous flirtations with happiness due to an enthralling (appalling) marriage to despair. Thus, in a text copious with B&W photos of places, rooms, rubble, and memorials, perhaps the most affecting is that of Wolff herself, sitting at a desk in Berlin’s now-shuttered Askanischer Hof Hotel, looking out of a window in a room where Kafka “did not” stay: I see a mature woman-version of Anne Frank, chronicling mounting absurdity and mounting atrocity—the absurdity of the present quest, the atrocity of the present past, the damnable absurdities now dubbed Kafkaesque, the atrocities sired by unkillable Fascism. Wolff registers how her quest has perpetrated “Little breakdowns and breakthroughs in relationship…. The complicated un/happiness picture that we carry and don’t discard.” Then again, Kafka himself “presents a murky, shadow-side of personhood—hidden impulses, cover-ups, projections and deflections.” Thus, the search for traces of Kafka is as frustrating as is the search for God, especially the potentially bipolar,r Hebrew deity who also fascinated Kafka, a Jew who seldom writes of Jews, but who found frissons of the erotic in Hebraic mysticism and who had imagined that either Berlin or Palestine/Israel could be his utopic site of idyllic exile from Prague’s workaday duties and familial expectations. Perhaps the true answer to the implicit query (of the whereabouts of Wolff’s consistently disappearing quarry) in Faithfully Seeking Franz is the title of Todd Haynes’ 2007 fanciful, Bob Dylan biopic, i.e., I’m Not There.
For the author, Kafka is “K.,” and so I think suddenly of Special K cereal and of Kmart department-store specials, though I don’t intend to sound specious or facetious. Rather, I mean to accent an accidental by-product of Wolff’s absorbing study, which is to forward “K.”—the bureaucratic, bourgeois clerk of accident insurance claims—as also being the poet of transient, capitalist spaces: hotels, inns, hospitals, and spas. Yet, many of these ephemeral spaces are now eternally erased, having become war rubble, or been reborn as ersatz, holiday architecture, while their once visitors and occupants got reduced to the ink-black ash of statistics. Wolff tells us that she found “in Kafka’s eccentric story: a backward clarity, … the dialectics of reversals.” True, oh so true! In fact, E. & M. seek to excavate, to recover, the signatures of a self-confessed hypochondriac and pessimist, who relished his TB diagnosis because he could pretend his bleeding lungs were, in reality, symptomatic of his bleeding heart, that he was a martyr to the terrifying prospect of (heterosexual) matrimony.
What Wolff accomplishes in her excellent mix of non-fiction, autobiography and biography, photographs, and poems distilling the meaning of experience, of subjectivity, is the elaboration of a cartography of reading, of how the cardinal points of one’s own life can somehow be graphed—paranormally—on the recherché plots of another. So, as Wolff herself notes, given that, “Wherever there’s a building, there’s a mash-up of the unsettled present and a multifarious past that’s not fully gone,” her transit amongst the dwellings and detours of the living Kafka can only exist now as her own self-haunting of these same spaces, “Questing,” restless, “unsettled,” her own being becoming—like his—a shadow cast upon soon washed-away sand. Except where their ink proves incandescently indelible—like that of divinely inspired scripture. Selah.
George Elliott Clarke, OC ONS is a Canadian poet, playwright and literary critic who served as the Poet Laureate of Toronto from 2012 to 2015, and as the 2016–2017 Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate. One of Canada’s most illustrious poets, Clarke is also known for chronicling the experience and history of the Black Canadian communities of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. His latest work, Whiteout: How Canada Cancels Blackness (2023) is available from Véhicule Press.