“The story that I’m writing, which, I must say, is laid out into the endless … is called The Missing One (Der Verschollene) and takes place exclusively in the United States of North America,” Franz Kafka wrote to his beloved, Felice Bauer. The story of the young Karl Rossmann, a sixteen-year-old whom his parents send to the New World from his Bohemian homeland, was indeed laid out without end. Of his three novels, this was the one on which the author spent the most time over the longest period of time, but like The Trial and The Castle it remained an unfinished torso. The Prague jurist and insurance official Franz Kafka only knew about America from flickering silent movies, from travelogues, and from the tales of a number of relatives from his widely branchedout family. The story of the lost Karl Rossmann is a different kind of immigration story, one of an innocent plunged suddenly into the world of deceitful adults. But like the Dickens-novel the author realized he was writing, was the story supposed to end happily in an Oklahoma of wonders?