Everywhere and Nowhere

T here were homeless people on my walk home from school. A drunk man, thin, with a red shirt. A man who I’d see on my way to the local library. He had a full white beard and a carefully reinforced cardboard box to sleep in. The red-shirt man was scary and I’d say Tehillim as I walked past. The white-haired man was sweet but sad.

And I’d wonder: If I were homeless, where would I find shelter? What’s it like to have no home? What’s it like to be displaced in spirit, pushed this way and that, never quite knowing who you are or to whom you belong?

This is what it was like to be a Jew in Prague. They lived at the seamline of society. Not quite German. Not Czech. Not quite part of the bourgeoisie. Not quite the Jews of old. Not part of the sophisticated West, but not Eastern Europe, either. So what were they?

In Prague, 1881, the Jews were outsiders. A product of Prague society, Franz Kafka compares his life to “a moment that is never quite lived.”