Geoffrey Gorer remarked in his book The American People that for a boy to become a man in the United States in 1940 only one thing was required: namely, that he reject his father. He noticed, moreover, that American fathers expect to be rejected. Young men in Europe, by contrast, have traditionally imagined the father to be a demonic being whom they must wrestle with (and the son in Kafka’s “The Judgment” does wrestle his father to the death and loses). Many sons in the United States, however, visualize the father as a simple object of ridicule to be made fun of, as, in fact, he is so often in
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