It is déjà vu all over again. The Occupy Wall Street movement has pirouetted onto the political center stage just as France is marking the 75th anniversary of the mass strikes that accompanied the electoral victory of the Popular Front government led by Léon Blum. The many parallels between then and now, particularly in the personalities of Blum and Barack Obama, cast the OWS movement in a new and intriguing light.

To better understand them, we’d do well to look at France in the mid-1930s. The country’s economy, still staggering under the weight of the Great Depression, was in a shambles. The policies of France’s deficit hawks had come home to roost with a vengeance. Entrenched conservative distrust of deficit spending had catastrophic consequences for French workers: By the summer of 1936, at least 2 million men and women—one out of six citizens—were unemployed. The lives of those who still had jobs were flushed with anxiety. The French philosopher Simone Weil, who worked for a spell as a power press operator at a Paris factory in the 1930s, was ordered at the end of her first day at work to double her output if she wished to keep her job. The employer, she told a friend, “makes a favor of allowing us to kill ourselves and we have to say thank you.”

Popular Front poster from 1936. (Bibliothèque nationale de France)

In order to underscore the nation’s economic inequality, leftist politicians denounced the power of the nation’s “two hundred families.” While the phrase at first designated the 200 shareholders who ostensibly oversaw the monetary policies of the Bank of France, it came to crystallize the popular anger of those who suffered the consequences of a global financial meltdown. At the same time, the Taxpayers’ Federation, an organization funded by the manufacturer François Coty—a great fan of Mussolini—declared that France could recover only if the government cut taxes on the wealthy. Given the abysmal state of national debt, successive centrist governments concluded that they had no choice but to retrench. As credit tightened, the building industry cratered, as state and municipal bureaucracies began to shed workers.

In May 1936, a series of strikes upended France. Business and industrial interests were horrified, claiming that the strikes were the work of communists. But the communists were terrified as well: The leaders of the French Communist Party, along with those of the trade unions, were caught flat-footed by the speed and magnitude of the strikes. As the social media of the era—newspapers, radio, and letters—carried news of the rapidly unfolding events, workers elsewhere were mobilized to follow suit. By June, nearly 2 million French workers had either walked out of their workplaces or simply sat down: Along with Edith Piaf and Pastis, interwar France also gave the world the sit-down strike.

By early summer, as the nation lurched to a halt, the party began. The events of May and June had far more in common with Mardi Gras than with Molotov cocktails. Far from establishing soviets along the Seine, workers instead dressed in drag and did the jig on factory floors. Instead of taking the Bastille, millions of protesters took a break. It was a revolution only insofar as the world was, if only temporarily, turned upside down.

The vast and unruly movement known as Occupy Wall Street is yet another American remake of a French original: OWS has grown in political, ideological, and economic circumstances that echo those 75 years ago in France. The character of the strikes is also remarkably similar. Just as American unions and some Democratic politicians have been playing catch-up with OWS, so too were French Communists, Socialists, and trade unions. As for the carnival-like behavior, it is hard to decide which wins first prize for outrageousness: OWS protesters wearing Superman suits (or nothing at all), or muscular Renault workers donning skirts and bras.

There are, of course, differences. The French workers had specific demands: a 40-hour work week, paid vacation, and higher wages. Yet, like the OWS, French workers expressed a more systemic dissatisfaction with the economic and social inequities tolerated by their republican state. And, like America’s Occupiers, they suddenly saw themselves as actors, not passive bystanders, in a political process indifferent to their material needs and social aspirations. Both then and now, protesters were flush with hope and believed, in the famous French phrase of the era, that “tout est possible.”

Perhaps one English translation of that slogan would be “We are the change we are waiting for.” Which brings us to the most striking parallel of all: the two men leading their nations at these critical moments.

Léon Blum, the French prime minister, was a formidable intellect trained in law and a remarkably eloquent writer. He was a committed socialist, but cautious and consensual to a fault. He was, in brief, a humanist who lacked a human touch, a man who embraced the left less for reasons of the heart than of the mind.

Much of this portrait resembles Barack Obama: His sharp analytical mind, his tendency to didacticism, and his attachment to deliberation match Blum’s character. So too does his ethnic background. Blum was not just the first socialist to become prime minister, but also the first Jew. He immediately became the target of the interwar equivalent of our own “birthers.” French pundits and politicians questioned Blum’s Frenchness, insisting he was instead Hungarian. Their accusations and attacks proved so distracting that they forced Blum to publish an open letter in a newspaper, with documents at hand, titled “I am French.”

The novelist and political observer André Gide’s remark about Blum—“He is never sure, he is always seeking; too much intelligence and not enough character”—has also been echoed by supporters of the current American president. But as historian Tony Judt noted, this was Blum’s strength as well as his weakness. Allergic to dogma, Blum recognized the provisional nature of most political truths, yet never lost sight of his particular brand of socialism, believing that all human beings have basic rights, including that of dignity.

Yet Blum’s moment was short-lived. In June, he used the strikes as a stick, forcing French industrialists to accept all the demands made by the striking workers. It was a remarkable moment—too remarkable, tragically. Historians take Blum to task for doing both too much—by hiking up wages and shortening the work week—and too little by refusing to devalue the franc until it was too late. It’s a very similar situation to the reaction of our own left and right to Obama’s $787 billion stimulus plan. Ultimately, the resistance of French banks and the massive flight of capital overwhelmed Blum’s reforms. A year after he came to office, France’s first Jewish prime minister was forced to resign. It turned out that everything was not possible.

The institutions that challenged Blum are, of course, the very same ones whose power and apparent immunity are now being challenged by the carnival we call OWS. Just as the expectations stirred by the strikes in France were probably too great an aspiration to be met by any government, so too might this be the case with the hopes raised by the men and women, young and old, employed and unemployed now occupying public spaces across the country. But as Blum might have told Obama, this is no reason not to take a stand—one more forthright and determined than he himself took.

This has to do less with the fruit than with the pit. Known in Hebrew as “gogo,” the apricot pit—resilient and shiny!—was the chief object of summer’s entertainment. When June arrived and school let out, we would collect as many of these pits as possible—the plural word is gogoim—and dash outside to play. The rules of the game were simple: You’d dig a hole 6 or 7 feet in the distance, just big enough to snugly contain a single gogo, and then do your best to throw your own precious pits into the hole; the first to succeed collected all the gogoim that fell short of the target.

It sounds simple. It wasn’t. Like everything else in Israel, the game of gogoim was never too far from life’s harsh realities.

For one thing, one could never truly win: Once a game session was over, the winner was obliged by gogoim decorum to toss his precious pits in the air while yelling “Kululushu!” —a beautiful and nonsensical word. Then, we’d all scramble about, collecting the gogoim from the ground. It was a schoolyard version of redistribution of wealth, befitting a nation that, at the time, was still somewhat true to its socialist roots.

It never occurred to us kids, of course, that there was something strange about forfeiting one’s profits. Nor did we realize that by being gogo enthusiasts, we were helping Israel’s then-predominant industry, agriculture. When I was growing up, before the days of the burgeoning software industry and electric cars and the other high-tech fruits of Israeli ingenuity, agriculture made up more than 6 percent of the gross domestic product; today, the number has dropped below 2.5 percent. Our mothers, then, were thrilled to acquiesce to our nagging demands that they buy more, more, and more apricots. The game was not only fun but a Zionist statement as well, helping our farmers thrive, boosting our nation’s economy.

And whenever Zionist sentiments are involved, geopolitics are never far behind. Once we hit third or fourth grade, we kids—by now, expert gogo handlers—started craving new variations on the game. The most popular mutation had us placing all of our gogoim save for one in a larger hole, and then throwing our sole gogo into the hole as hard as we could in an effort to cause as many pits as possible to come flying out. We needed a name for this enterprise, something that would capture its brutality, its mindlessness, its sense of raw power. We were Israeli kids, and above the blackboard in our classroom hung Joseph Trumpeldor’s famous last words: “It is good to die for one’s country.” We called our new game “Arab hole.”

But our thirst for nomenclature transcended our racism. Even as we busily played, we were well aware that in a few weeks’ time, apricots would go away and with them our gogoim, and we’d be back in school and back with less magical games, like soccer, which we loved but which it was much too hot to in the summer to play. Arabic provided just the proverb we needed to express our appreciation for this fruity, fleeting wonder of ours: Bukra fil mishmish, which translates roughly as “tomorrow, when the apricots bloom,” and which we took to mean something like “tomorrow is another day.”

Tomorrow, as it turned out, was just that: By the time I started junior high, the first Atari video game consoles made their way to Israel en masse, and kids just three or four years younger than me started spending summers fending off space invaders. And television—in my day, a single-channeled enterprise that offered us young drab educational programming and third-rate American detritus from the 1960s—blossomed into a medium in full. Apricots were abandoned, their pits unplayed.

I’ve moved on, too. I now have a doctorate in video games, which means I spend a lot of time playing with electronics. I live in Manhattan, where there are few places to dig holes. But every summer come the apricots, and with them, the memories.

Was it hard to return to Orthodox Judaism after all those years in which you called yourself a “freethinker”?

Well, don’t forget I was educated Jewishly, thank God, and I’ve never had trouble admitting I was wrong. Thank God for that, too, and that may be because I made so many mistakes. Thank God for all of them.

Was it a mistake going underground against the czar?

No, I don’t think so, though it was a mistake going against Judaism—or at least abandoning it for freethinking. It would have been better to have fought the czar and defended Judaism.

Who made you realize that?

Levinsky. David Levinsky. He was a fictional character, of course, my own creation. But it’s no coincidence that at the start of the novel and the end of it, Levinsky notes that all his worldly success meant nothing to him and he was still, in his innermost being, the same Yeshiva boy who had swayed over his prayers. I wrote that at the peak of my career, and it was the most important thing I ever wrote, and it just came out of me. And I began rethinking my whole life at that time.

When was that?

Well, I started writing The Rise of David Levinsky in 1912 for McClure’s. I’m not sure the magazine understood what it was getting in to. I finished it in 1917, and we brought it out just before the Bolshevik Revolution. I was 57 at the time. There were a lot of friends, including that young fellow Mencken, who wanted me to give up newspaper work and spend the last third of my life writing fiction. I rather liked Mencken, by the way, despite his attacks on the Jews; we used to lunch once in a while at the Algonquin, and I helped him with his Yiddish monograph. He later wrote of his disappointment that I couldn’t give up the “razzle dazzle” of the newspaper life.

Was that it, the razzle dazzle?

Well, there were serious matters. And not just World War I, which was one of our mistakes, and a serious one—the pacifism was a serious mistake, but not as bad a mistake as the cynicism about America and America’s motives. The fact is that even as we all came to America we underestimated her.

Someone once made a remark about the little speech in David Levinsky about how, for all the exploitation of Jewish garment workers by the bosses, the Americans were the best-dressed people in the world. The remark was that it signaled your understanding that maybe the labor unions themselves were too cynical.

While I was writing that chapter, the garment workers were outside the Forward building throwing stones at my office. That’s because I’d urged a settlement in the strike. It was a bitter time. I began to rethink a lot of things then.

Like Zionism.

That, too.

What was your error?

Arrogance. A lack of vision. I came to understand only later that no socialist, not one of them, could compete with Herzl in that department. He was just way ahead of us. And the people were with him.

Meyer London taught you that?

He was the first socialist ever elected to Congress, and he lost his seat over it because the voters, the workers, right here in the Lower East Side, the workers who had just elected a Socialist, they understood what it would mean to have a Jewish state. He was asked about the Balfour Declaration. He said: “Let us stop pretending about the Jewish past and let us stop making fools of ourselves about the Jewish future.” He promptly lost his seat. Looking back, we can see it was a kind of socialist arrogance. His own workers were ahead of him.

Can that be said of about your movement vis-à-vis the communists?

No, I think we adjusted to the facts sooner than most anyone. I declared my position in 1923 when I got back from the Soviet Union and said: “Russia has at present less freedom than it had in the earliest days of Romanov rule. … The world has never yet seen such a despotism.” It would have been impossible, illogical for me to go back to a literary career at that point. It was essential that we defeat the communists here, and that was what I gave it all up for. In the fight against the Soviet, we were not followers but we were in the lead. I gave up a lot for that fight. I think Mencken understood that better than most, believe it or not. I am like the son who gave up a literary life for business—only on my business everything depended, and I have sorrows, but no regrets.

You failed to lead on Zionism.

I met my match in Jabotinsky. It was an important error in my life, my denunciation of him after his speech at the Manhattan Opera House. That was 1940. He called then for the urgent evacuation of the Jews from Europe to Eretz Israel, and I turned around and belittled him in the pages of the Forward. I gave a whole page to it, and that’s when I wrote, “Six million is a pretty small state.” I was derisive, and I was wrong.

When did you realize that?

Immediately, and when Jabotinsky died a few weeks later—he lay down from fatigue at a right-wing camp in upstate New York where he was training young Jews to defend themselves, and his heart gave out as he was lying down—it was a terrible blow for all Jews. I was furious at the staff of the Forward, which refused to cover his funeral. So, I wrote the editorial that has been quoted ever since, saying that his death was, coming as it did at such a grim time for the Jewish people, “in the true sense of the word, a national catastrophe.” I predicted that he would be missed not only then, in the middle of the storm, but later, “when the storm is over and the time comes to heal the wounds and rebuild Jewish life on new foundations in a new time.”

New foundations—or old ones.

Hah! Alt-neu-foundations. How’s that?

Is that when you began to re-think religion?

Well, I’d been re-thinking it for a long time, as the beginning and end of The Rise of David Levinsky makes clear. It never left me. It was gnawing at me the whole time. But freethinking is a kind of addiction of its own. What started the dam to break was Sholem Asch. He came in and plopped his novel about Jesus on my desk, and it just came out. He was suggesting that Jews treat Jesus the way Christians view Jesus, and I threw him out. I told him to burn the novel. And when he resisted, I banned him from the Forward. And I wrote a whole book attacking him, and in that book I insisted that I wasn’t religious. And then the illogic of my position began to eat at me, and that is how it happened, and I worked my way back to the Torah and to Talmud and I made peace with the boy in the yeshiva, and I consider it my greatest achievement.

Did it destroy all that came before in your life?

[After a pause.] I would have to say it validates it. Remember that as Levinsky stood at the rail of the ship as it prepared to deposit him on American soil, he said a prayer, and it was that God would not hide his face from him in the new land. It was a promise as much as a prayer, and I tend to see my return to religion as a redemption of that promise.

This is an imaginary interview. So, what are we to make of it?

Read the record. It will show you where I was going. My great deputy at the Forward, David Shub, wrote long after I had passed away that what I lived for above all else was Russian literature, and it is true. It was my greatest love. But literature itself is something that can’t be proved and is a matter of faith and speculation. It doesn’t make it wrong.

Seth Lipsky is the founding editor of the English-language Forward. He is writing a biography of Abraham Cahan for Nextbook Press.

In 1908, after two years of employment, Kafka left that firm to take up a more prestigious position with The Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague, a semigovernmental institution responsible for administering insurance in the province of Bohemia, but answerable to Vienna k.u.k.—kaiserlich und königlich, imperial and royal,” its autocratic description—crownseat of the Crownlands. Bohemia was just one of 18 provinces of an Empire that stretched from the German Reich to the Russian wilds, and Prague, Bohemia’s capital, Kafka’s home and birthplace, was only the third city of that Empire, after Vienna, capital of Cisleithania, and Budapest, capital of Transleithania, or the Kingdom of Hungary—dealings between provinces were complicated; the Empire’s fetish for organization led only to chaos.

A cylindrical safety shaft from the engineering works of Bohumil Voleský, Prague-Lieben.”

Prague, then, was half-metropolis, half-provincial, a dark, Gothic city where German-speakers lived alongside ethnic Czechs, while political allegiance was split between German-language fealty to Empire and Czech desires for self-determination, finally realized by T.G. Masaryk in 1918 with the founding of the first Czechoslovak Republic. These two factions were united by an envying mistrust of the Reich, and also by the mediating presence of Socialists and Jews—two minority designations that often applied to the same set of people. They could be found at solidarity meetings one day, then on the next night at the Altneu synagogue, in whose attic lives the Golem. Across the Vltava River, known in German as the Moldau, loomed The Castle”—Das Schloß, also known as the Hrad.

Workers’ Accident Insurance was first established in Europe due to a multitude of factors, not least this rise of socialism. The Germanic Socialist workers’ movements of the late 19th century—practical embodiments of Marxist thought, infused with French esprit as perfected in the insubordination of the 1871 Paris Commune—arose in response to the growth of industry, which demanded practical and fair relief from its efforts to effectuate Modernity. A balm had to be found in this newly technological Gilead to heal workers’ injuries incurred in the service of the Industrial Revolution. The Empire’s comprehensive workers’ accident insurance plan was based on that of the German Reich, which unified in the same year as the Commune appeared, 1871. Marx began his work in the 1840s in the Reich’s strongest territory: Prussia.

Unlike the multinational Empire, however, Germany was a nation-state: It was both a state responsible for practical administration, and a nation interested in preserving national character—a character defined by perceived mental and physical fitness, and even superiority, suffused with folk vestiges of the Romantic movement. Accordingly, the welfare of Germany’s workers was intimately bound up in ideas of commonweal, and common origins. The Empire, by contrast, was a multinational hodgepodge that had to create a social welfare state if not out of concern for its disparate workforce, then to maintain its fractious coalitions—to placate its competing nationalisms and political platforms, and to counteract the agitation of anarchist and secessionist groups (such as the one that spawned the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand early in the next century). It might follow, then, that workers’ insurance helped keep the Empire together at a time of divergent allegiances. It might follow, also, that Marx’s Socialist doctrine can be read as a pretext—truly, a pre-text —to legislation that provided insurance to workers helping to bring about a revolutionarily capitalist, consumer society.

In 1887, four years after Kafka’s birth, the Empire implemented its policy of workers’ accident insurance, and founded its Institutes. Unlike in the Reich, the Empire’s insurance was organized according to geographic territories, and not by types of trades. Whereas Germany established a Metalworkers’ Trade Association and a Textileworkers’ Trade Association, the Empire established Prague’s Bohemia branch, which covered all trades throughout Bohemia, and which accepted Kafka for employment after he was finished insuring the best boats, and wealthiest companies, of Trieste (Assicurazioni Generali’s was the oldest type of insurance: Modern commercial insurance was founded two centuries earlier in London to indemnify the first private firms interested in international maritime shipping).

Now, however, Kafka worked not for the mutual benefit of large industry and the Crown, but as a mediator between the concerns of the working class and its management, between that management class and the Institute, and, lastly, between the Institute and Kaiser Franz Joseph in Vienna. Initially, Kafka’s Institute job was as a deputy clerk, or assistant secretary, but he was eventually promoted to become Senior Legal Secretary—an Obersekretär —the indispensable righthand man, a sort of Court Jew, to the organization’s Director, Doctor Robert Marschner (a note about titles: in the office he was always addressed as “Herr Doktor Kafka”). As Obersekretär, Kafka’s responsibilities included risk classification (which involved evaluating the degree of danger of a certain job, and so setting the level of premium to be paid by business owners), and improving the Institute’s efforts at accident prevention. The latter duty required Kafka to dabble in public relations, writing informative bulletins and even popular newspaper articles—his chief outlet was the proletarisch, large-circulation Tetschen-Bodenbacher Zeitung—hoping to educate management, labor, and the general public in advances in workplace safety.

‘The blades of the square shaft are screwed directly to the shaft, and their exposed cutting edges spin at 3800-4000 revolutions per minute.’
“The blades of the square shaft are screwed directly to the shaft, and their exposed cutting edges spin at 3800–4000 revolutions per minute.”
While at night Kafka was writing stories about the infinite and eternal construction of The Great Wall of China, and about a Flying Dutchman set adrift on a deathship, floating forever amid ports of call, during the day he was writing interminable pages about the perils of wood-planing machines (“the introduction of the cylindrical safety shafts in wood-planing machines is finally progressing well”), the perils of chimney-sweeping, and brandy consumption in quarries, problems with automobile insurance (as the majority of cars were then driven by chauffeurs, the vehicles themselves had to be classified as businesses), and the risk classification quandaries posed by the recently electrified elevator (Where is the electrical generator stored? Who, exactly, has access to the elevator’s switches?).

To read these 18 examples of office writing without the context of Kafka’s other work, without knowing who, in fact, Kafka ever was, is essentially to go to work. Here is a sampling of their titles, some provided by the book’s three editors, and others by Kafka himself, or by his newspaper editors: “Fixed-Rate Insurance Premiums for Small Farms Using Machinery”; “On the Examination of Firms by Trade Inspectors”; “Petition of the Toy Producers’ Association in Katharinaberg, Erzgebirge”; and “Help Disabled Veterans! An Urgent Appeal to the Public.” Their style, even more so than the style of Kafka’s stories and novels, is neutral. Their subject matter is expectedly worse: specialist, abstruse, culled from the most humdrum and desiccated of corporate genizahs.

Then again, we should remember that nobody asked us to read them. Sigmund Freud’s laundry lists probably aren’t any better (though they might prove equally as revealing). Indeed, to read the office writings as one is supposed to, like a good student of the Kafkaesque, or a diligent K.-like worker, is instructive: it is to understand Kafka’s art anew, and to be reminded of the discreet, double-life of modern working man, whose true, pleasure-giving interests lie almost entirely outside of the workplace. The Office Writings are the Ur texts to Kafka’s extracurricular fiction, Kafka’s precursors as much as Talmud (which he did not know well), and Hasidic wonder stories, Hamsun and Kierkegaard and von Kleist and Flaubert, Dostoyevsky’s psychological murderers, and Dickens’ urban grotesquerie and grit.

‘The blades of these shafts are completely protected between the flap or between a wedge and the solid frame of the shaft.’
“The blades of these shafts are completely protected between the flap or between a wedge and the solid frame of the shaft.”
The examples of this connectivity are simple—of how the work-work influences the artwork—but the interpretations, and the ramifications, are not. In the aforementioned “Measures for Preventing Accidents from Wood-Planing Machines” of 1910, Kafka argued that the square shafts that supported the blades used to plane wood were responsible for a regrettable number of accidents and maimings, including the loss of parts of fingers, or, rarer, the severance of entire appendages. Because these shafts were square, gaps would appear between the blades screwed to a turning shaft and the lip of a worktable. A worker’s finger would become stuck in these gaps—four gaps for each single revolution of a square shaft, revolving 3800 to 4000 times per minute—resulting in debilitating injuries. Kafka’s solution was innovative, but seems elementary: He proposed to introduce a newly patented model of cylindrical shaft—a round shaft (with its blades hidden under flaps or between wedges) that obviously lacked sharp quadrilateral corners, and so lacked the gaps that would trap, and — in the days before plastic surgery—irreparably harm. Kafka describes how his solution would benefit workers and management (workers would be healthier, and so more productive; the cylinders were even more “cost-effective”), while emphasizing the carnage of such accidents with what, at the time, was a novelty: images, illustrative plates showing both injured hands, and multiple views of the cylindrical shaft. This commissioning was one of the first uses of illustrations in a business report—Franz Kafka, father of multimedia.
‘Even if fingers are caught in the slot, the resulting injuries are slight, consisting merely of lacerations that need not even interrupt work.’
“Even if fingers are caught in the slot, the resulting injuries are slight, consisting merely of lacerations that need not even interrupt work.”

This report can be convincingly linked to Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony.” In that story of inscription as incision, a convicted felon is punished by torture, and death. The vast, unwieldy apparatus that accomplishes this punishment inscribes on the body of this convict the exact nature of his transgression; the sin becomes internalized through the medium of the flesh, in a mark of Cain for the Machine Age. While no introduction of “cylindrical shafts” could overturn such a metaphysical damnation, there is no doubt that the image of a body inscribed by technology springs from Kafka’s arbitrating experience with traumatized workers. Kafka’s deskbound milieux of inscription and accountancy is also where we first hear about the first primitive computer, a variety of calculator known as the Hollerith machine, used for the processing of statistical data using the technology of the “punch card” (the machine’s process was inspired by the practice of punching a railway ticket, and so encoding it with information; the Hollerith’s best success was with the Nazis, in their use of it to schedule the train deportations of European Jewry). In Kafka’s fiction the human body is the Punch Card of Modernity. In modern life, the body has become the storage, “the muscle memory,” and so the casualty, of the workplace—both physiologically, and psychologically.

Another example of Kafka’s appropriation of insurance work is more direct. Often the attractions of philosophical influence, the wisps and correspondences of ideas, and complex technologies, obscure mundane inspirations and models. In 1914, the same year as he wrote “In the Penal Colony,” Kafka wrote a report editorially entitled “Accident Prevention in Quarries.” In it, he faulted quarry owners for paying wages in alcohol, and for allowing workers to work when drunk, and without the proper safety equipment such as goggles (“It is true that safety goggles are frequently issued to the workers, but the men find them impossible to use, or they are prejudiced against using them, so that the goggles are usually found in the workers’ pockets during the workday. Such a situation can exist because supervision of the operation is either inadequate or altogether lacking.”)

Kafka condemned the entire quarrying industry as under-regulated, and accused the sector’s inspectors of not reporting problems, and not recognizing the fundamental nature of the dangers that quarrying posed: “Quarries call for a kind of inspection that differs from that required by other operations. In this work, it is not a matter of safety devices that, once acquired, will last and be useful for long periods of time; what matters is efficient excavation, which has to be planned over and over so as to fit with the ever-changing soil conditions.” These inspectors comprised an inspectorate class emplaced in response to the legal prohibition against the Institute inspecting the premises of any business it insured, in order to protect the businesses’ trade secrets. These inspectorates would prove “independent” in other ways, too, often settling upon widely divergent meanings for workplace safety ratings of “satisfactory,” and “normal”—to Kafka’s displeasure, and the Institute’s incomplete evaluation. Here, in this report, Kafka also introduced photographs, now of delinquent quarries, noting depictions of unsafe conditions such as teetering boulders, and precarious piles of rock.

He writes, about Fig. IV:
“At the very top to the right in the debris, marked with ‘B,’ a loose stone block, 1 cubic meter in size, lies almost suspended above a projecting rock wall. At the center of the picture, marked ‘S,’ a man can be seen working at a dangerous spot, 4 meters above ground, without being attached to a rope. Debris is not removed, and quarrying work has been pushed forward almost to the edge of the walkways shown through the railing.”

With “a loose stone block, 1 cubic meter in size,” we are reminded, palpably, of the chilling last scene in “The Trial”—the execution of Joseph K. This is his sacrifice by two unknown men, his diabolical akeidah.

“Not to leave K. standing motionless, exposed to the night breeze, which was rather chilly, he took him by the arm and walked him up and down a little, while his partner investigated the quarry to find a suitable spot. When he had found it he beckoned, and K.’s companion led him over there. It was a spot near the cliffside where a loose boulder was lying. The two of them laid K. down on the ground, propped him against the boulder, and settled his head upon it.”

This quarry is the site of martyrdom, character’s and author’s—a wounding for the working cause.

This is where one held K.’s throat, “while the other thrust the knife deep into his heart and turned it there twice.”

Berkowitz, who still lives in the borough where he was born and raised, is pale, intense, and remarkably youthful looking. He has been passionately involved in the labor movement for most of his life. Immediately after the war, he followed his father, Harry, and his brother, Pinky, into the furriers’ union, but he soon took a job with the Progressive Party as a mimeograph machine operator and shipping room worker, and got caught up in the excitement of political activism. After becoming a professional printer and working at low-wage jobs for a few years, he organized the workers of a non-union shop and joined the Amalgamated Lithographers of America, Local 1. He worked as a union printer for thirty-three years until his retirement in 1988. He’s continued his activism in the years since, working mostly on issues (such as the fight against privatization) at Co-op City, the vast below-market housing complex in the Bronx where he resides. His partner of thirty-five years, Susan Joseph, is also a socially conscious citizen, and together they are members of Veterans for Peace. A lifelong socialist, he’s intensely critical of religion, and certain that God is a foolish and dangerous product of people’s imaginations. I wanted to know how he could be so sure.

You’re a son of immigrants. Can you tell me a little bit about your family?

My parents came from Romania around 1920. They had lived in Galatz, a small port city on the Black Sea, just a few miles from Russia. They were very poor; their life was the shtetl life.

My father’s father didn’t work regularly and was a bit of a drinker. My father was taken into the Romanian army at a very early age. Jews were not taken in as soldiers; they were taken in as servants, and in the army he was an apprentice tailor. My mother’s father was a decorative carriage painter. I don’t know if either my father or mother had much schooling.

Was your family religious back in Romania?

They weren’t religious so much as they were practicing. Which sounds a little strange, but they had the—how should I put it?—culture and tradition of Jewish religious living. But neither of my parents was ever interested in God. Practicing in the shtetl meant, I think, community life more than religious observance.

When you were a kid, were they still practicing?

Not at all. They left it behind completely. There’s a story in my family about my brother, sister, and me asking my father why he didn’t use his tefillin, the leather straps that the Orthodox Jews put on when they daven. He said, “In the old country I needed religion. Here I need the union.”

What do you think he meant?

Well, for shtetl Jews in the small towns of Eastern Europe—where anti-Semitism was very, very strong—religious life was the protection. Being together with other Jews, you had a group. You didn’t stand alone. And as a worker in the fur trade here in New York City, to my father it looked like his protection was the union. It’s sort of ironic, but in the fur industry in those days the religious Jews were the bosses, the employers. And the workers were more inspired by the warmth they got out of unionization. They didn’t have to stand up to the boss alone; they stood with a group.

When I worked there, New York’s fur industry was centered in hundreds of mostly small shops in tall buildings along Seventh Avenue between Twenty-fifth and Thirtieth Streets. Before going up to the shops to work at 8 a.m., workers—most were Jewish, almost all were union members—filled the Seventh Avenue sidewalks, gossiping about the trade and talking or arguing about the nation, or the world. After work many drifted to the Fur Workers Union Hall on Twenty-sixth and Eighth Avenue for more of the same or to see a business agent or get something taken care of in the union’s health clinic. Unionism provided shtetl-like community and protection. So my father’s transfer from religion to the union became my attitude. I was never bar mitzvahed; neither was my brother.

In my family we have a parallel story to yours about the tefillin: My great grandmother’s sister came over to visit from Russia. She went to the supermarket with my great grandmother, and was looking at the meat. She pointed at a piece and said, “What’s this mark?” It was a USDA stamp. When my great grandmother explained that the government had inspected it, her sister said, “Great! So you don’t have to keep kosher anymore.”

Do you believe in God?

I don’t. I think that all belief in God stems from prehistory, when man’s ancestors needed explanations for things that they didn’t have the equipment to explain. We have much more equipment for explaining how the body works, how nature works, even how space works, so we don’t have to invent gods. And not only do I think it’s not practical or sensible, but I think it’s harmful, because a belief in supernatural powers takes away from action in solving problems.

What’s an example of something going on today where you see people’s belief in God being harmful?

Certainly in the way in the last decade or two where there has been a marriage between religious organizations and political activity, much to the detriment of the nation.

Like the funding of “faith-based” charities?

Yeah, and the right-wing evangelical organizations that have intervened in politics and have helped reactionary political forces with things that have little to do with stopping wars or improving the economy. The so-called family values that disregard the destruction of families by war and by economic disparity.

What about the people who really do brave and good things in the name of religion? The priests and nuns who went down to El Salvador, Buddhist monks fighting for justice, even the scores of American rabbis who are activists? To me it seems that sometimes people actually get a kind of superhuman courage or strength from their faith.

All religions have significant ethical components. They’re a part of the teachings of any religion, and there are people who sincerely respond to that part of a religious practice. The people you mentioned, the Catholic liberation priests, are not exactly coddled by the Vatican.

Do you think that the ethics your parents taught you were connected in some way to Jewish ethics or Judaism?

Not really. Well, maybe I got it without knowing it. As they had. What I did get from them was the flavor of Jewish life. I like the language; my parents both loved the Yiddish language. And I connect to the tradition of struggle. The immigrants came over from poor communities and they had to struggle here. Humanism came easy. Socialism came easy. During the first part of the twentieth century, Jewish life in America was full of unionism and aspiration for social justice. I got those things from my parents, but I don’t know if it came from their Jewishness or if it came from the way they had to struggle to earn a living.

I like the progressive history of Jews in the world and in America, going back even to the 1800s, when the Jews were big in revolutionary movements in Europe. And in union movements here in the United States and into the 1900s. I don’t know, but I really do hope it’s a reflection of the ancient ethical component of Jewish tradition or Jewish religion.

Tell me more about your connection to Jewish culture, separate from the religious tradition.

Well, the Jews have a great literature. My mother loved the stories of Sholem Aleichem. She had a complete set of his works, which she read all her life, from volume one right through twenty-eight, and then all over again.

The music that was written in New York and other Jewish communities in the U.S.—operettas, songs—I love all of that! For about a decade in the fifties I was in this group called the Jewish Young Folk Singers, which I helped organize along with my brother. Eventually it was five choruses in different parts of New York City with a total of maybe 250 singers. It was very successful, very exciting. The emphasis was on Jewish music; we did a lot of labor music. Songs of poverty. And of joy: dance music came from the same labor writers from the twenties and thirties. Many of the composers of Jewish music were laborers, workers in shops, and they wrote music on the side.

You are so passionate about your political views. How do you define them?

What I see is that the organization of society under capitalism is not equitable, and that the inequities lead to a whole lot of wrong things. So my political belief is definitely socialism. I think that socialism is achievable not by, you know, capturing the post office here on Gun Hill Road, but through all the struggles that working people have to go through, and the education they pick up in those struggles. I believe they will push society that way eventually. Even here in America.

You said socialism is your “political belief.” Do you think there’s a danger of political movements or ideologies having the same problems that you see religions having?

Yes, there is a danger. Movements and organizations that are progressive, by the very nature of their struggle, become sometimes too guarded, too self-enclosed, and too tyrannical.

I’m also wondering about the people who follow a political movement in the way you might see people following religion: blindly and without questioning. Isn’t that dangerous?

Yes, definitely. It just one of the things that has to be faced. You know, when babies start teething, it’s painful. But they’ve got to do it. And political movements can be like infants. They go through things that they have to learn how to cope with. Like: how do you take power and not abuse power?

When you were growing up in the Bronx, did you have friends who were from more religious families?

No. I never went into a synagogue, in fact, until I was well into adulthood. I don’t remember what the occasion was—probably a funeral, or a bar mitzvah or something.

Have you ever had moments when you wished you believed in God?

Never.

As an atheist, how do you cope with the knowledge of your own mortality?

Well, I’ll tell you, I guess it’s just a belief in what’s nice about what is. What I have seen, the enjoyments I have, the things I approve of—that, to me, is something to lean on. I don’t need something invented.