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At one point in his diaries Franz Kafka noted an enormous debt to the English novelist, Charles Dickens. In technique and detail, his first novel, Amerika, was “a sheer imitation” of Dickens' Copperfield: “The story of the trunk, the boy who delights and charms everyone, the menial labor, his sweetheart in the country house, the dirty houses, et al., but above all the method. It was my intention, as I now see, to write a Dickens novel, but enhanced by the sharper lights I should have taken from the times and the duller ones I should have got from myself…”1 This passage was first explicated by E. W. Tedlock, Jr., in a splendid article called “Kafka's Imitation of David Copperfield.” 2 Tedlock concentrated here on the five specific parallels, and explained four of them as follows: “The story of the trunk” referred to David's loss of his trunk, by theft, on the way to Dover, and to Karl Rossmann's loss of his box, again by theft, on the road to Rameses; the “delightful boy” was Steerforth, for Dickens, and Mr. Mack for Kafka — two sophisticated, patronizing figures who attract and baffle their naïve admirers; “menial labor” referred to the warehouse chapters in Copperfield, and to the lift-boy chapters in Amerika; while “the dirty houses, et al.,” included the tenement where David finds the abandoned Emily and the apartment house where Karl is imprisoned by two vagabonds. As for “method,” Tedlock rightly pointed to the “moral and emotional ambiguity” in each author's work, and to their common use of “the technique of the grotesque.” His one difficulty was with the “country sweetheart” item, for which he attempted three different explanations, none of them quite adequate. My aim