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After seeing a Yiddish theatre troupe in October 1911 I immersed myself in Yiddish language and literature for six months. That learning became the inspiration for my first novel, The Man Who Disappeared.

At university in Prague I switched from chemistry to law, took German studies and art history on the side, read Plato and Flaubert in the original with Max Brod, and earned a Doctor of Law on 18 June 1906.

I read widely and critically — Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Gogol, Grillparzer and Kleist were my "true blood brothers" — and I judged even Goethe by what his work did to the German language of literature.

I use a German construction — subordinate clauses that push the verb to the end — to build long sentences that deliver their impact just before the full stop. It is a literary craft that makes my work hard to translate.

My literature combines exact, realistic detail with absurdity. I examine small, inconspicuous details with such precision that unforeseen things surface — strange, yet absolutely true.

From 1908 I worked at the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia, investigating compensation for workers injured by unguarded machinery, handling appeals and writing the institute's annual report.

In 1914 I began The Trial: a man is arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, and the nature of his crime is revealed neither to him nor to the reader. Its parable Before the Law was in print by 1915.