ON TUESDAY AFTERNOONS, following my seminar on the works of Franz Kafka, I climbed down the Vyšehrad steps, boarded a tram underneath the Výtoň bridge and rode for ten minutes alongside the Vltava past the National Theatre and the colonnades of the Clementinum to Staroměstská, where I stepped off and walked the three remaining blocks to the Old Jewish Cemetery. At the turnstile I paid one hundred-fifty koruna and hurried past the crowded interior exhibitions to the narrow stone path wending through the cemetery itself. The wind, rain and occasional snow of February kept the path empty, emptier in any case than the several museums and synagogues within the five-block radius which comprised Prague’s former Jewish quarter, none of which interested me—all, that is, but the one referred to in tourist brochures as the Old-New Synagogue, a squat building of twin-nave design built in the thirteenth century inside which I felt I had crawled into an earthen hole no light would touch. Later on, the interior of this ancient building seemed to me the very realization of the environment described by Kafka in “The Burrow.” From my place in one of the several oak pews I sensed the absolute stillness of the burrow, that deceptive stillness which at any moment might be shattered. The stillness carried a message of strange comfort: you are (I am) a Jew no longer.

My weekly stroll on the stone path in the Old Jewish Cemetery confirmed, by turns, the contents of this message. It seemed I was bound for a different calling than “Jew,” that name which I now understood never to have comprehended at all. There was no indication what this calling might be, other than that it would be totally other than “Jew,” my present and heretofore incomprehensible name. I took photographs with my phone of several gravestones. I took these photographs, if it can be said, that I might never look at them again. In addition I photographed the leaves, dirt and moss beside, atop and underneath the graves. And finally I photographed, prostrate on the stone wall encircling the graves, the sleeping body of a black cat.

…

The seminar was composed of eleven American students and taught by a man called Jan. The instructor was often late and the solitary window in the classroom was positioned such that the students could stand together and watch him speedwalking regretfully up the bricklaid Vyšehrad hill. At this point one or another of the students—and on occasion myself—joked that Jan had done the utmost to make himself appear like Kafka. In practice, this meant he wore the same pressed brown suit and felted hat each Tuesday and Thursday afternoon and had not an inch of fat on his strange, arching body. We admired Jan’s excitability. When finishing an argument, he brought a triumphant fist down on the desk in front of him, which cracked and shook. Thereafter he looked down in embarrassment.

Certain students said the works of Kafka reminded them of dreams. One clarified that the works were for her like nightmares. Others held the works resembled black parables. One passionate student believed the works contained all available facts about God. A reticent young man with wireframed glasses claimed the works contained all available facts about machines and believed whoever read them to completion would become an expert machinist.

For me the works of Kafka, with all their crisp force, were the exemplary model of the life of the not-Jew. By this I do not mean a Gentile.

Often our seminar discussions alighted upon the meaning of words. These words-in-question—German words—Jan turned and wrote on the board in chalk. After the completion of certain words, our instructor wrung his hands as if to dry them of water and shook his head vigorously. In defeated tones he explained an insurmountable gap between the two languages called English and German. He then explained the further gaps between his native Czech and our native English, the gaps it seemed to us he traversed with perfect ease for three hours each week but which caused him no small measure of distress, and which only advanced the difficulty of explaining the former gaps, those gaps which opened up between words like Ungeziefer and “vermin,” or “pestilence,” or “unclean animal.” Sometimes in lieu of explaining the existence of the gaps, Jan simply stared out the window at the falling snow.

Among my classmates were several Jewish-American students. These students distinguished themselves by the prominence of their Ashkenazic features and by the wearing of hamsa or stars of David on silver chains. Automatically they detected certain of these features in me, too, and endeavored to speak with me about the phenomenal situation of the Jew. These conversations often took place in crowded cafes or student bars. As though telling horrible secrets they leaned forward and spoke about those experiences indivisible from the name “Jew.” This indivisibility was often described as a form of limit. A common pattern of conversation dealt in sets of comparisons between my classmates’ experiences of this limit. It was in this sense that my classmates began to speak of themselves as belonging to further categories, “woman” being one example, “gay” another. Even the category “from California” was introduced as a variable in the drawing of the limit.

Each of my classmates was quick to acknowledge that the designs of these further categories did nothing to quell the fundamental nature of the category which had brought us together, the category “Jew.” Equally they held that in other circumstances—among other groups—certain other categories might attain this fundamental character.

An even more popular topic among my classmates was the Holocaust. I did not enjoy speaking about the Holocaust, though I often engaged in discussions about it and even admitted on occasion that it was one of the truly worthwhile subjects of discussion contingent upon the name “Jew.” In fact, a number of us together attended a course dedicated to the reading of Holocaust literature and were thus asked to expound on the subject once a week for several hours. I admired that certain of these students approached the discussions without, it seemed to me, a veneer of apprehension. When I spoke of those texts which took as their central subject the set of events often termed “Holocaust,” my voice grew tremulous and thin. Though it was a certain paradox, it seemed ridiculous to show emotion in relation to the dryness of words written in description of the unimaginable. I use the word “dryness” to here describe the phenomenon known in common speech as matter-of-factness and referred to by our instructor, himself the son of a writer of Holocaust literature, as “literary realism.”

To supplement the realism of the texts, our instructor buffeted us with the realism of film images. Some of these images, he explained, were representational images shot as part of the production of fiction films. The others were shot as part of the production of documentary films and expressed, he claimed, nothing less than the fullness of truth.

As part of the course we were to travel to the nearby ghetto of Terezin and, later on, to the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Though we would visit several existing structures formerly containing those Jews whose absence gave the term “Holocaust” its meaning, our instructor warned us to prepare for the fact that much of what we would actually see was empty field.

…

Among Jan’s favorite subjects of discussion was the power of the symbol. This power, he claimed, could be equaled only by the power of the symbol’s lack. The former was easy enough to understand, the teaching of literature in my life to that point often consisting of the identification of a substitution between an image in the text and another distant image, the absence of which made clear an immanent meaning at the text’s heart.

More baffling was the notion that no substitution had been made at all. So uncomfortable was this realization that many of us grew indignant at its expression, spitting back at Jan a succession of possible meanings we were sure he had never considered. Jan rejected none of these advances, listening in full to each riposte before reciting Kafka’s three-sentence fragment “The Trees”:

For we are like tree trunks in the snow. In appearance they lie sleekly and a little push should be enough to set them rolling. No, it can’t be done, for they are firmly wedded to the ground. But see, even that is only appearance.

The moments we so looked forward to occurred when Jan closed his beaten edition of Kafka’s complete stories and spoke of his own life.

Jan lived with his mother and father in a large apartment block at Nádraží Veleslavín. These monolithic concrete buildings formed the city’s outer rim, visible in clear weather from the benches of Riegrovy Sady, only ten minutes’ walk from my apartment. When unblemished sunlight struck the gray-white walls of these structures, they seemed the last defense of an honorable guard keeping the city of Prague safe from the wilds of Bohemia; in dark weather, however, each tower was transformed into a harbinger of enormous danger.

Nádraží Veleslavín was far outside the spheres we Americans comfortably traversed, consisting of no more than four or five square miles in the centermost districts of the city. The outer districts, rising higher and higher from the Old Town into scrubby hillsides on the northern side of the Vltava, might well have been populated by alien races. On multiple occasions I had tried to wander beyond those areas of the city with which I had in the first two months of my life there become familiar, only to find this going-beyond made impossible by the labyrinthine warren of streets leading away from those neighborhoods I had come to recognize. Each time I endeavored to discover what lay outside these zones of comfort, I rode the funicular at Újezd to the uppermost level of Petrín, the city’s largest park. I then, intending especially not to make recourse to the maps readily available on my phone, chose one of the several narrow roads leading out of the park—away from the city—and walked as far as I could in a straight line. My attention was drawn away from the sidewalk under my feet by the vertiginous upward lines of the boxlike apartments binding me in from either side. In the windows of these buildings, I could see behind drawn curtains the outlines of men and women sitting and standing, gesticulating to one another or facing in opposite directions. By the time I looked back to the road ahead, it had opened at one end to an enormous rectangular field. Patches of frozen grass shone with the dull silver of hoarfrost. This field formed the uppermost level of Petrín, from the southern end of which the funicular would carry me, disappointed, back to the Vltava’s edge.

In the second week of March, an elderly woman who had grown up in the city of Brno visited our course on Holocaust literature to deliver a lecture on the situation of her family during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia from 1938 to 1945. Though her family was not Jewish, her father had worked in a mill with several Jews in those years prior to the Anschluss and therefore decided the family would harbor in their cellar the children of these fellow millworkers for such time as their lives were under threat by the roving patrols whose pummeling fists so often resounded in the small hours of the morning as they slammed them against the doors of the houses in which had once lived the Jews of Brno—patrols often composed not only of young German infantrymen but also the feverishly excited teenaged boys of Brno who wanted nothing more than to see some commendation vested on themselves or their family names. Night after night, the woman explained to us, she and the children of the millworkers had crouched together in the cellar of their Brno home as they together engaged in imaginative games they hoped might transport them to some foreign province on the hills of which no army had ever stood.

One such game involved placing in the center of a circle drawn on the cellar floor a colored map illustrated with the vague shapes of mysterious cities or the outlines of famous monuments or the frightening forms of creatures of myth or legend that supposedly belonged inside the myths of the nations atop which each were illustrated. Eyes squeezed shut, one of the children would toss above the map a small silver coin, the landing-place of which determined the contents of the tales the children would thenceforth together weave.

The elderly woman of Brno did not or could not tell of the sensation of the moment when the coin hung suspended above the map. It seemed to me this moment, if properly described, would contain the answer to every one of the questions my classmates and I would soon ask about the contents of the woman’s mind during those years when she and the children of the Jewish millworkers banded together on the cellar floor spinning yarns about those far-flung lands to which they would never go.

As the lecture of the elderly woman of Brno continued, I found its trajectory increasingly difficult to follow. Up the cellar stairs and into the small kitchen of her family home the lecture wandered, right into the heart of that kitchen from which the elderly woman’s mother often had to shoo the family’s old black cat Marushka in the course of an evening spent butchering a chicken from the coop in the adjoining yard to be spatchcocked and roasted above the wood-stove, that kitchen from which the elderly woman’s father had one unseasonably cold morning at the end of September 1940 been dragged by three Moravian boys, not one of them over twenty-five, who suspected the unusually quiet millman was harboring if not Jews in the shadowy depths of his Husovice cottage then at the very least a pack of unspeakably dirty secrets, secrets for which these not unhandsome boys of Brno—who represented in cheek, hair and build the sublime Aryanizable potential of the whole Czech race, that wonderful potential for which the nation received the gift of warmer treatment from their occupiers than their neighbors in Poland or Hungary were ever afforded—would punish on that windchilled morning the slippery millman who had not so much as spoken one kind word about the German people since the fall of the Second Republic in March of the previous year. The kitchen, the side-door, the yard, the coop, the silent frosted streets of Brno’s Husovice district, the German tanks manufactured in the Skoda works at Pilsen now parked at the gates of Špilberk Castle, the entire city wreathed in morning fog, all Moravia, all Czechia, all Europe—each successive leap in the lecture of the elderly woman of Brno constituted in my mind the traversal of a distance unnavigable except by the tossing into the air of a silver coin that for one pellucid instant would hang above the illustrated surface of a map of an imagined world.

On my seventh visit to the stone path wending through the Old Jewish Cemetery, I was reprimanded by one of the museum’s docents. This incident resulted in my removal from the cemetery and the receipt of a fine of seven-hundred koruna.

Since such time as my third or fourth visit to the cemetery, I had formulated a plan which I hoped to execute on one of my next visits. In preparation for the execution of this plan I purchased white paper and crayons. These materials I carried in my backpack on those Tuesday afternoons during which I left my seminar in Vyšehrad and rode the tram along the Vltava past the Clementinum, afternoons during which I thought incessantly about the proper execution of this plan and the possibility of being reprimanded by one of the museum’s docents for carrying it out, resulting in my removal from the cemetery.

The plan involved the creation of crayon tracings of various gravestones. Using these crude tracings I wished to translate the script on the gravestones into English and record the information in my notebook for future use in a work of fiction.

In the northeast corner of the Old Jewish Cemetery, I knelt in a patch of yellow-green moss and spread a sheet of white paper against the surface of a stone. A slow rain fell. With dry red crayon I traced the alien shape of the script there etched.

The stone was cold and wet. It seemed to pulse with coldness and wetness.

Co to děláš, a voice called from outside my shivering body. Ty blázne, ty americký blázne. The insistence of the voice brought to mind the voices of teachers and parents. In my thoughts I had already begun to write.

On the curb outside, my passport and student identification card were examined by police. The cops had large horse teeth. They issued a ticket which I was to pay within fourteen days. A child clutching their mother’s waist passed by in a tiny peacoat.

I began to walk. Every paper-skinned shopkeeper hunched over her register shared the eyes of the docent as she tore to pieces my rainsoaked tracing.

The rain doubled. I drew up the collar of my coat and ducked into the metro, another of the evening tired proceeding by escalator into the earth.

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Field is forthcoming from Staircase Books in 2026.

Adam Judah Krasnoff is a writer and editor based in New York. His work has appeared in The Oxonian Review, Harvard Review, and Arrowsmith Journal, among others. He has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the New York State Summer Writers Institute.