Franz Kafka, the German author, was the son of a Jewish businessman who had been a peddler in southern Bohemia. The family was German-speaking. Kafka studied law at the German University of Prague and at Munich and became an official of a workers' accident insurance company. He began writing in 1907 but by his own choice published little. About that time he contracted tuberculosis and for some years lived in various sanatoriums. His two engagements ended unhappily. In 1923 he moved to Berlin, where, living with a girl who was in charge of a Jewish orphanage, he achieved what happiness he was to know. He died of a tubercular infection of the larynx in a nursing home at Kierling, near Vienna.

The central experience of Kafka's life, it seems, was a manifold alienation—as a speaker of German in a Czech city, as a Jew among...