Jews

"At eight o'clock on the evening of 6 September, Kafka looked from the street into the banqueting room of the Jewish Town Hall, where more than a hundred Russian Jewish émigrés were queuing for their American visas. Around half past midnight, he looked through the illuminated windows again. (...) The electric light shone all night long on the sleeping forms stretched out on chairs, and Kafka looked longingly on these people – hungry as they were, prone to disease, victims of anti-Semitic threats hurled at them through the windows – and confessed that 'if I'd been given the choice to be what I wanted, then I'd have chosen to be a small Eastern Jewish boy in the corner of the room, without a trace of worry'. Their soon-to-be-realized dream of escape, their concentrated purpose, their risk of everything for a certain goal, the fact, above all, that 'they are one people', moved him with its simple manifestation of something from which he felt himself to be totally excluded. Instead he was going nowhere, except to his death."

Nicholas Murray. Kafka. London: Abacus, 2014, p. 308-9

Foto: Jewish Town Hall (prédio com o relógio), em Praga - República Tcheca