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description of the statue an image that Holitscher used in portraying the island: “No Blake could have drawn or sung of the avenging angel who reigns over this island in a cloud of fear, whimpering, torture and blasphemy every single day that we spend in this free country.” 23 It would be entirely characteristic of Kafka’s magpielike ways if he had borrowed that Blakean angel from Holitscher, placing her instead on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and using the word “free,” which Holitscher imbues with heavy sarcasm, in a characteristically wry manner.
    Kafka playfully acknowledges his own prior readings about America when he has Karl compare his impressions of an ostensible Irishman called Robinson with a warning he read somewhere that newcomers should be wary of the Irish in America: Holitscher asserts that the Irish produced the most successful type of “political padrone, boss, slave-holder, and vote catcher” and even records a passenger in steerage asking hopefully: “How long do you have to live in America before becoming an Irishman?”
    Kafka himself had a number of American relatives, such as his uncle Otto Kafka, who may have been a partial model for Karl Rossmann’s American uncle, and a namesake cousin, Franz or Frank Kafka, who left for America at the same age as Karl. 24 Like the uncle in the novel, Otto Kafka was a self-made man who, after a series of colorful adventures in South Africa and South America, emigrated to the United States, where he eventually accumulated sufficient wealth to buy a home near the Rockefeller mansion at Tarrytown, New York. Yet we need to approach these tantalizing biographical items warily, since it is difficult to distinguish between biographical sources, Kafka’s readings about America, and his own inventions. And while the tone of a letter from Otto Kafka to the U.S. assistant attorney general (cited by Anthony Northey in his thoroughly researched 1991 study
Kafka’s Relatives
) is indeed comparable to the voice Kafka attributes to the fictional uncle, there is also something almost generic about such rags-to-riches stories. 25
    As the great Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges suggested 26 —and as critics such as Robert Alter have specifically shown in the case of
The Missing Person
27 —Kafka wove numerous religious, and in particular Old Testament, motifs into his portrayal of Karl’s American adventures, raising questions for us as readers. To what extent is a metropolis such as New York, with the hundred thousand “eyes” of its many Babel-like skyscrapers, at the mercy of those winds and of the “restlessness” wafting in from the sea? What, for instance, are we to make of the mysterious gales blowing through the vast mansion that Karl visits outside New York, especially near the chapel? How should we read images such as that of “a glass roof stretched over the street . . . being violently smashed into fragments at every moment”?
    However dark the plight of his heroes, Kafka himself never loses his sense of humor. In
The Missing Person
that humor is often hidden between the interstices of his sentences. The discrepancy between Karl’s relentlessly sober perceptions and the often-ludicrous events in which he is caught up make it difficult for us not to chuckle in spite of our increasing empathy with the hapless young hero. Take, for example, his exchanges with the ostensible Irishman Robinson, which are punctuated by precise descriptions of the latter’s messy eating habits, or the description of the bathing rituals of Brunelda, a grotesque character whose Wagnerian-sounding name turns out to be quite apt. Moreover, Karl’s lack of a strong sense of identity gives rise to a number of comic scenes, especially those featuring his dubious companions Delamarche and Robinson. Worth mentioning in passing—since the names of Kafka’s characters can be telling—is