Marc Estrin

Marc Estrin turns tragic Kafka story into poignant fairytale

Friday, March 1, 2002

Marc Estrin turns tragic Kafka story into poignant fairytale

Times-Argus, March 1, 2002

By Jules Rabin 

Correspondent 

Vermont’s own Marc Estrin has written a whale of a book about a man-size cockroach named Gregor Samsa. This Samsa started out in life as the sad and doomed alter ego of Franz Kafka, as one suspects, and went on to become the merry and cultivated alter ego of Estrin himself. 

As we remember, the original Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” had been a humble fabric salesman who lived a dreary and repressed life in his parents’ home in Prague in the early part of the 20th century – and woke up one morning to find that he now inhabited the body of a giant cockroach, while fully retaining his human mind and sensibilities. 

There was nothing that Kafka’s original Gregor could do about his nightmare awakening. A man he had been, and a cockroach he now was. 

That fact and the realization of it were absolute. His days in the parental home were henceforth numbered, and he pined away in the dust under a sofa in his room, an object of revulsion to his shamed parents. 

Estrin’s long book, “Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa,” begins with a hopeful revision of Kafka’s account of the sad ending of Gregor Samsa’s life. In Estrin’s telling, the woebegone cockroach-man doesn’t end up in the trash bin a short time after his metamorphosis, as Kafka, burdened with Old World morbidity, intimates he did. Rather, he is rescued by the Samsa cleaning lady, who sells him to a freak show run by a kindly impresario. There Gregor recovers both his health and confidence, and embarks on a wondrous career – here is the great heart of Estrin’s picaresque fairy tale – of conversing and collaborating with some of the most brilliant men and women of the first part of the 20th century, from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Robert Musil, and Wilhelm Roentgen (whose astonishing X-Ray machine proves that there isn’t a man’s body concealed beneath the cockroach’s chitin), to Sacco and Vanzetti, Charles Ives, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, and a great cast of the other founding Los Alamos atomic scientists. 

And also Alice Paul, the American feminist, whom Gregor seduces in an improbable scene where, for probably the first time in literary history, a cockroach attempts the act of love with a woman. 

The Alice Paul episode is hard to take; an anatomical astonishment and improbability, not to mention an unkindness to the memory of that woman. Estrin requires further radical suspension of disbelief on the reader’s part when we see that, once Gregor arrives in America, hardly anyone in the tale bats an eye at his, shall we say, “unusual” appearance; not in his first months in New York, when he takes an ordinary job as elevator operator, hardly disguised by the clothing he throws on (he has also learned to stand and walk erect), or later, having moved up in the world, when he goes to work every day as a risk-management analyst in a great insurance company, or later still, when he offers FDR, as he does other great figures he meets, a claw to shake, rather than a hand. 

The joke submerged in Estrin’s fancy is that what Europe, with its historic constraints, has no use for – a cockroach-man – can establish a place for himself in dizzy, motley America. There is no shock at the sight and feel of him, or even raised eyebrows. “So what else is new?” 

Estrin’s elan and his conviction catch the reader up, and we become comfortable ourselves with the cockroach Gregor as a marvelous device for entering our author’s head, which we discover to be furnished – teeming – with a wide range of scholarship. Einstein, Fermi, Ives, Roosevelt; atomic physics, musicology, medicine, philosophy, entomology (of course) ; and the politics of The New Deal – Estrin moves and discourses comfortably with all personages and through all fields. Remarkably, he doesn’t casually drop names and then skitter away. He’s in fact a great hand at the mini-treatise. It’s difficult to think of another novel that displays such a variety of scholarship in as responsible depth. (Nor can I think of another novel where such a germane and usable bibliography is provided – 60 items in Estrin’s case.) Estrin, at least to the non-specialist’s eye, has done his homework competently in every field he visits. 

The second metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa, the one wrought by Estrin, from European to American, is, like the first metamorphosis revealed by Kafka (from man to cockroach), astonishing. "Samsa" (Gregor’s second name) in Czech means something like "I am alone." That is the situation of Kafka’s Gregor, and it was, one speculates, the situation of Kafka himself. Kafka’s Gregor is the inward-turned man of the first half of the 20th century, which was Sigmund Freud’s half-century, too. He was enveloped in his own woes, a man alone in his private ghetto. 

Estrin’s Gregor is a man altogether of another epoch and disposition. He is socially energetic, intensely humane (this picaro of ideas and causes is not a rascal but a great-soul), and is conversant with the best thought and culture of his day. Out from under Kafka’s couch he comes, and into the daylight of America! 

Two authors, Kafka and Estrin. And two Gregors, two continents, two Weltanschauungen, and two very different Jewish sensibilities. Kafka, Estrin, and both Gregors were all born Jewish, and while none of the four was in any ostensible way a practicing Jew, all bore The Mark. 

Kafka’s Gregor was timorous and depressive and led a claustrophobic life. And – how prophetic was Kafka in 1913! – once revealed as a cockroach (Jew?), he ended his life sequestered in the filthy death camp of his own room, foreshadowing the fate of his fellow Jews thirty years later. The other, American Gregor, to whom Estrin gave a second, generous metamorphosis by the simple act of transportation from Europe to America, turned his being outward to the wide horizons of the world, and in Estrin’s fiction, no one barred his way. His charm and his intelligence together opened all doors, even the portal of Alice Paul’s virginity. 

The first Gregor cowered in the prison of his room when his cockroach nature became manifest, and there he languished. Wasn’t a favorite Nazi epithet for Jews “vermin,” and didn’t vermin, once identified, have to be separated from civil society and exterminated? 

Identically with the first Gregor, the second Gregor was visibly and strikingly coated with chitin and bore six roach-legs on his body and weird saucer eyes, to the end of his days. But in America, where anything goes and everyone is too busy scuttling through his own affairs, each of us his or her own ultimate cockroach ... who noticed or cared? 

No one did, in Estrin’s generous continuation of Kafka's woeful tale, except perhaps the indecipherable Alice Paul.