Il caso Kafka - Author's notes

In the immense depository of interrupted stories, portraits, images, dreams and icy apparitions etched in the gloom which are Kafka's Confessions, a little light is reserved for a character whose name is Yitzchak Löwy, a Jewish actor. Kafka first meets him at the Café Savoy in Prague in 1911. Surrounding Löwy are six actors and musicians who, filthy and uncertain, play, sing and contort themselves in Yiddish. From the very first performance recorded in the diaries, Kafka's passion is evident.

Within the score of sounds extraneous to life, within the Kafkaesque mystery which is consummated day after day in a total absence of life, a song makes way and shows itself, a warm breath of surprising human truth. Löwy becomes a possible companion to follow, to reach for. A soul for Kafka to investigate freely, more freely than the female souls he's known, Felice, Julie, Milena, Dora. Kafka harbors no illusions, but in Löwy resonates the possibility of a retribution, an exchange; he is grateful for his existence. His father tries to butcher this relationship, as well, and warns him not to mingle with the Jewish fleas. Their friendship is clandestine, Löwy waits for his friend in the cold, from the street he observes the lighted window of the writer's prison-house. The dramas, the jokes and songs enchant Kafka, and not because he is interested in the theatre. The enchantment comes from tradition, that same tradition which inoculates from incurable germs, the elective breath mixed with the certainty which will turn those actors into scapegoats, "scum of a soon to be demolished ghetto". Kafka imagines in them a certain degreee of unattainability, a welcoming land where a common existence is possible. In the fifty or so pages of the Diaries that tell of the Café Savoy and of his friend Löwy, color makes an appearance in Kafka's life, a salvation barely glimpsed and surely, inevitably, denied him.

The expression Il caso Kafka, the Kafka Case or Affair, comes from Walter Benjamin. A case because the prophecy has left in it innumerable suspended warnings and ecos of impossible to translate announcements. Yitzchak Löwy – his posthumous brother Moni Ovadia – is the door which opens onto those lost voices, voices exterminated in the Nazi camps, together with the language/treasure-chest to which Kafka will dedicate a lecture, the Yiddish language. That door exists, no one will be capable of opening it. Kafka will describe Löwy as the face in which the door and what is behind it coincide, desperately, faintly. Amshel is the Jewish name with which Kafka can never be conjoined, except a few moments before his death; the cast of Löwy's face on a hypothetical Kafka. In this performance, this fairyland of images, objects, submerged voices dedicated to great writer of Prague, Kafka, in the voice of Bruno Ganz, only hints at an appearance, to then disappear with his disarming travel companions, in an impossible to represent biography in which there remains no trace of memory or chance of theatre, only the simple gesture which installs all things, voices, songs, the bitter and intellectual salvation, the one messianic refuge: literature.

Roberto Andò Moni Ovadia