KAFKA—OR PERHAPS BETTER, Kafkas, those multiple readings of the works and life of Franz Kafka—have become an industry. One of Kafka's English-language editors, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, wrote to the publisher Salman Schocken on August 9, 1946: “Though during his lifetime he could not make a decent living, he will now keep generations of intellectuals both gainfully employed and well-fed.” Yet it was not only academics, like the present writer and his colleagues, who live off of the bones, but ironically also Anglophone poets. For what is odd about Franz Kafka is … that he seemed to have had no ear for poetry. He writes prose of every genre we can imagine (and invents some); poor plays; journalism and technical writing; BUT he does not write poetry. His fragmentary poetic juvenilia are just as embarrassing as all of ours would be. And yet he inspires poets. At least those writing in English following Edmund Wilson's New Yorker critical comparison of Kafka with Gogol and Poe: “He is quite true to his time and place, but it is surely a time and place in which few of us will want to linger.” The Kafka craze hit English-language poets especially after World War II, in a Britain celebrating a new age in the Festival of Britain (1951) as well as in Eisenhower's conservative America, the America of Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956).

One simple reason for this powerful identification is that his work seems to have been prefigured in American poetry by another writer who spent his life working for an insurance agency, though much more successfully. Kafka, who worked at private and state insurance agencies in Prague, has been read as a prophet of the collapse of civilization into the banalities and destruction of modernity. This view was shared by other Anglophone writers of the 1920s, especially Americans abroad such as Ezra Pound and his friend Tom Eliot. As Kafka was approaching the end of his life, dying slowly of laryngeal tuberculosis in a sanatorium on the outskirts of Vienna in 1924, a young insurance executive was beginning his poetic career in Hartford, Connecticut (almost as peripheral as was Kafka's Prague).

HAPPINESS IS A “peculiarly modern, Western idea,” as Richard Sennett has observed. Actually happiness is multiple, conflicting ideas — often changing from context to context with each change presaging a cascade of different meanings and interpretations. In this essay I shall try to link a number of them in a manner that is not causal but I hope rather evocative. I want to begin with a specific “Jewish” turn in the history of the concept of happiness at the close of the nineteenth century (one that turns out not to be very “Jewish” in its origin) and conclude with some thoughts on Michael Jackson and our need to understand happiness in the twenty-first century.

The close of the nineteenth century was for European — especially for German — Jews the best of times and the worst of times. Civil emancipation, increased economic and social mobility, and access to secular education were all balanced by the rise of political antisemitism (which desired to reverse civil emancipation) and the reappearance of anti-Semitism in the form of the “blood libel.” Political realities in the Russian Empire led to massive pogroms and the flight of millions of Eastern European and mostly unacculturated Jews westward to settle in the cities of Western Europe and beyond. Yet these political realities also led to a wide-ranging Jewish response, from Zionism to Jewish political parties (at least in the Austro-Hungarian Empire). This snap-shot is both reductive and crude — but it outlines a brutal contradiction in the mental lives of Jewish intellectuals. For them, happiness was a complex and very “un-Jewish” thing. Kaufmann Kohler’s comment on the meaning of happiness in the Talmud applies very much to the age in which he himself wrote: “The sad present contrasted with the past made the lot of the people seem hard and cruel. Besides the loss of political freedom, the disappointment of Messianic hopes made life dreary.