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It does not seem that the exchange of letters between F. Kafka and Felice, extraordinary though it is (800 pages), was intended to bring these two people closer together. But it was of fundamental importance to Kafka, who refers to it as a “symptom”. The author shows how this “symptom”, which built up over time, allowed Kafka not only to start writing, but also to go on living.Moreover, where the Letter to my father demonstrates the failure of his father—in Kafka’s eyes—to transmit judaism to him, volume II of the Letters to Felice shows how Kafka thought up a way round—via Felice—to make the jewish question his own, to build himself a degree of filiation , and to approach the difficult question of transmission.