**A son's poignant letter to his father--from the author of The
Metamorphosis and The Trial, and one of the most important writers of
the twentieth century. - "One of the great confessions of literature."
--The New York Times Book Review
**
Franz Kafka wrote this letter to his father, Hermann Kafka, in November
1919. Max Brod, Kafka's literary executor, relates that Kafka actually
gave the letter to his mother to hand to his father, hoping it might
renew a relationship that had lost itself in tension and frustration on
both sides. But Kafka's probing of the deep flaw in their relationship
spared neither his father nor himself. He could not help seeing the
failure of communication between father and son as another moment in the
larger existential predicament depicted in so much of his work. Probably
realizing the futility of her son's gesture, Julie Kafka did not deliver
the letter but instead returned it to its author.