compulsory), “this sense of nothingness that often dominates me (a feeling that is in another respect, admittedly, also a noble and fruitful one) comes largely from your influence.” Brutally but “guiltlessly,” his father had created a perfect witness to the continual Fall of Man (as the junior Kafka described it). “What have I in common with Jews?” he wrote in his diary on January 8, 1914, at the age of thirty. “I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in the corner, content that I can breathe.” But of course he did no such thing, because it was precisely his “sense of nothingness”—which is to say, his Jewishness—that enabled him to “raise the world into the pure, the true, and the immutable.” 55 Another great poet of sublime loneliness and narcissism was Marcel Proust, the grandson of a successful Jewish foreign-exchange speculator and the baptized son of a woman who bore her liberal education and lost religion with an irony that Marcel seems to have found seductive. Seductive but not irresistible: elusive and protean as Proust’s characters appear to be, there existed, in his memory-induced world, two marginal “races” that circumscribed human fluidity even as they embodied it. Endowed with irreducible qualities that, once perceived, make persons and lives “intelligible” and “self-evident,” Jews and “inverts” are more proficient at wearing masks because they have more recognizable faces: Shunning one another, seeking out those who are most directly their opposite, who do not want their company, forgiving their rebuffs, enraptured by their condescensions; but also brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism to which they are subjected, the opprobrium into which they have fallen, having finally been invested . . . with the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often hideous, finding (in spite of all the mockery with which one who, more closely integrated with, better assimilated to the opposing race, is in appearance relatively less inverted, heaps upon one who has remained more so) a relief in frequenting the society of their kind, and even some support in their existence, so much so that, while steadfastly denying that they are a race (the name of which is the vilest of insults), they readily unmask those who succeed in concealing the fact that they belong to it. 56 Accordingly, when Swann approached death, his “sense of moral solidarity with the rest of the Jews, a solidarity which Swann seemed to have forgotten