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Rossmann.” See Politzer,
Parable,
p. 124.
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    18. While
The Missing Person
challenges notions of realism in a way those two more conventional portrayals of the robber-baron era do not, its dissection of the American dream can be as caustic as those of Dreiser and Wharton. If Karl Rossmann were a first-person narrator and more given to introspection, he might sound like Wharton’s Lily Bart toward the end: “I have tried hard—but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.” Of course, while there is some ambiguity in Wharton’s treatment of Lily Bart’s death, Kafka leaves the ultimate fate of Karl Rossmann entirely unsettled. See Edith Wharton,
The House of Mirth,
ed. Elizabeth Ammons (New York, 1990), p. 240.
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    19. For an exploration of Kafka’s interest in film, see Hanns Zischler,
Kafka Goes to the Movies,
trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Chicago, 2002).
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    20. Similarly if, as some critics have suggested, the fictional Occidental Hotel owes something to Holitscher’s description of the Atheneum Hotel at Chautauqua, New York, Kafka darkens Holitscher’s uncharacteristically euphoric account of an American grand hotel, where lowly elevator boys converse freely in the lobby with affluent guests. For instance, a graduate of Columbia University and medical student, who was working temporarily as a porter at the Atheneum and was described by Holitscher, may have metamorphosed into the overworked medical student known as “Black Coffee,” from whom Karl Rossmann learns a lesson about the pitfalls of such extreme absorption. Moreover, if there is an echo of Soukup’s caustic description of the ships transporting immigrants across the Atlantic (“a storehouse in which human beings are exported as wares to America”) in the description of the stoker’s quarters in the novel (“a bed, a closet, a chair, and the man were packed together, as if in storage”), Kafka can be said to introduce his own touch—a hint of humor—without thereby eliminating all traces of the social criticism that is far more emphatic in Holitscher and Soukup.
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    21. Kafka had read about the Taylor system of work measurement in Holitscher’s travelogue. See Holitscher,
Amerika Heute und Morgen,
12th ed. (Berlin, 1923), pp. 292ff.
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    22. Ibid., p. 367.
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    23. Ibid., p. 338.
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    24. As we know from his diaries, Kafka also had conversations in Prague with another American cousin, Emil Kafka (1881–1963), and listened attentively to his description of the Chicago mail-order firm Sears, Roebuck and Co., where he worked. Since he had a relative working at Sears, Kafka must have read with interest Holitscher’s description of the “metallic din” emitted by the Sears, Roebuck building, “which hovers above the coal dust and the Illinois fog like some uncanny music of the spheres, desolate and cold like the whole of the modern world and its civilization” (ibid., p. 308). It’s worth juxtaposing a photograph of the vast Sears typing pool in Holitscher’s travelogue with the description of the busy telegraph room in Uncle Jakob’s business in
The Missing Person
.
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    25. In late fall 1911, when Franz Kafka was working on a draft of his American novel, Otto Kafka took his new American wife, Alice Stickney (daughter of a then-prominent American family and a possible model for the fictional Klara Pollunder), to visit his relatives in Kolin, Bohemia. It’s likely that Kafka heard reports of his relatives’ impressions of these two American visitors. Otto Kafka was evidently fond of a saying one could easily imagine on the lips of Karl Rossmann’s