Letter to the Father/Brief an den Vater: Bilingual Edition (The Schocken Kafka Library)

Franz Kafka wrote this letter to his father, Hermann Kafka, in November 1919. Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, relates that Kafka actually gave the letter to his mother to hand to his father, hoping it might renew a relationship that had lost itself in tension and frustration on both sides. But Kafka’s probing of the deep flaw in their relationship spared neither his father nor himself. He could not help seeing the failure of communication between father and son as another moment in the larger existential predicament depicted in so much of his work. Probably realizing the futility of her son’s gesture, Julie Kafka did not deliver the letter but instead returned it to its author.

• The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910-1923 (The Schocken Kafka Library)
• Letters to Milena (The Schocken Kafka Library)
• The Castle
• Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories
• The Trial: A New Translation Based on the Restored Text (The Schocken Kafka Library)
• Letters To Felice (Schocken Classics)
• Aphorisms (The Schocken Kafka Library)
• Amerika: The Missing Person: A New Translation, Based on the Restored Text (The Schocken Kafka Library)
• Letters to Friends, Family and Editors
• The Northway (Terrapin Poetry)