Beloved Kafka

I've always adored Kafka. If required I would have to cite him as my favorite author. It wasn't until I read an excellent biography of him by an Italian academic that I realised how very much his work is metaphysical and religious (I resist using the word "spiritual": it is so devalued now as to be meaningless). He was a very Jewish, very European writer, much like Primo Levi, whose experience in the death camps Kafka foresaw with "In The Penal Colony" and other of his works. The word "genius" demeans Kafka: he is not really liable to the claims of this world; only - if it exists - the next.