The only explicit Jewish tales in Kafka’s writings both concern a golem -a brief story about a rabbi’s attempt to make a clay man in a washtub and the tale of a strange creature that lives in a synagogue in northern Bohemia sixty kilometers from Prague.

Kafka lived in an adjacent building to the Tyn Church at 3 Celetná Steet and looked through his window, made by a previous pious tenant, into the church’s interior. In the cathedral scene in ''The Trial,'' Joseph K. says that ''the size of the cathedral struck him as bordering on the limits of what human beings could bear.'' Kafka looked into these limits every day.

From Max Brod’s biography of Kafka: “...on June 11, at four o’clock, Kafka was placed in the grave...When we got back to the house of mourning, in Franz’s home in the Old Town Square, we saw that the great clock on the Town Hall had stopped at four o’clock, and its hands were still pointed to that hour.”

Kafka is a Czech surname, which is an old spelling of the word "kavka", that means jackdaw, a European member of the crow family. Franz Kafka’s father Hermann had a sign in front of his shop with a jackdaw painted next to his name.