Kafka S Jewish Languages

After Franz Kafka died in 1924, his novels and short stories were published in ways that downplayed both their author's roots in Prague and his engagement with Jewish tradition and language, so as to secure their place in the German literary canon. Now, nearly a century after Kafka began to create his fictions, Germany, Israel, and the Czech Republic lay claim to his legacy. Kafka's Jewish Languages brings Kafka's stature as a specifically Jewish writer into focus. David Suchoff explores the Yiddish and modern Hebrew that inspired Kafka's vision of tradition. Citing the Jewish sources crucial to the development of Kafka's style, the book demonstrates the intimate relationship between the author's Jewish modes of expression and the larger literary significance of his works. Suchoff shows how "The Judgment" evokes Yiddish as a language of comic curse and examines how Yiddish, African American, and culturally Zionist voices appear in the unfinished novel, Amerika. In his reading of The Trial, Suchoff highlights the black humor Kafka learned from the Yiddish theater, and he interprets The Castle in light of Kafka's involvement with the renewal of the Hebrew language. Finally, he uncovers the Yiddish and Hebrew meanings behind Kafka's "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse-Folk" and considers the recent legal case in Tel Aviv over the possession of Kafka's missing manuscripts as a parable of the transnational meanings of his writing.

The Animal in the Synagogue explores Franz Kafka’s sense of being a Jew in the modern world and its literary and linguistic ramifications. It falls into two parts. The first is organized around the theme of Kafka’s complex and often self-derogatory understanding and assessment of his own Jewishness and of the place the modern Jew occupies in “the abyss of the world” (Martin Buber). That part is based on a close reading of Kafka’s correspondence with his Czech lover, Milena Jesenska, and on a meticulous analysis, thematic, stylistic, and structural, of Kafka’s only short story touching openly and directly upon Jewish social and ritual issues, and known as “In Our Synagogue” (the title—not by the author). In both the letters and the short story images of small animals—repulsive, dirty, or otherwise objectionable—are used by Kafka as means of exploring his own manhood and the Jewish tradition at large as he understood it. The second part of the book focuses on Kafka’s place within the complex of Jewish writing of his time in all its three linguistic forms: Hebrew writing (essentially Zionist), Yiddish writing (essentially nationalistic but not committed to Zionism), and the writing, like his, in non-Jewish languages (mainly German) and within the non-Jewish religious and artistic traditions which inhered in them. The essay deals in detail with Kafka’s responses to contemporary Jewish literatures, and his pessimistic evaluation of those literatures’ potential. Essentially, Kafka doubted the sheer possibility of a genuine and culturally tenable compromise (let alone synthesis) between Jewishness and modernity. The book deals with topics and some texts that the flourishing, ever expanding Kafka scholarship has either neglected or misunderstood because most scholars had no real background in either Hebrew or Yiddish studies, and were unable to grasp the nuances and subtle intentions in Kafka’s attitudes toward modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature and their paragons, such as the major Zionist Hebrew poet H.N. Bialik or the Yiddish master Sholem Aleichem.

Monolingualism-the idea that having just one language is the norm is only a recent invention, dating to late-eighteenth-century Europe. Yet it has become a dominant, if overlooked, structuring principle of modernity. According to this monolingual paradigm, individuals are imagined to be able to think and feel properly only in one language, while multiple languages are seen as a threat to the cohesion of individuals and communities, institutions and disciplines. As a result of this view, writing in anything but one's "mother tongue" has come to be seen as an aberration.

Around the Point is a unique collection that brings to readers the works of almost thirty scholars dealing with Jewish literature in various Jewish and non-Jewish languages, such as Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, French, Italian, German, Hungarian, Serbian, Polish, and Russian. Although this volume does not cover all the languages of Jewish letters, it is a significant endeavor in establishing the realm of multilingual international study of Jewish literature and culture. Among the questions under discussion, are the problems of the definition of Jewish identity and literature, literary history, language choice and diglossy, lingual and cultural influences, intertextuality, Holocaust literature, Kabbala and Hassidism, Jewish poetics, theatre and art, and the problems of the acceptance of literature.

Taking as its starting point Franz Kafka's complex relationship to Jews and to communities in general, When Kafka Says We explores the ambivalent responses of major German-Jewish writers to self-enclosed social, religious, ethnic, and ideological groups. Vivian Liska shows that, for Kafka and others, this ambivalence inspired innovative modes of writing which, while unmasking the oppressive cohesion of communal groupings, also configured original and uncommon communities. Interlinked close readings of works by German-Jewish writers such as Kafka, Else Lasker-Schüler, Nelly Sachs, Paul Celan, Ilse Aichinger, and Robert Schindel illuminate the ways in which literature can subvert, extend, or reconfigure established visions of communities. Liska's rich and astute analysis uncovers provocative attitudes and insights on a subject of continuing controversy.

Franz Kafka is by far the Prague author most widely read and admired internationally. However, his reception in Czechoslovakia, launched by the Liblice conference in 1963, has been conflicted. While rescuing Kafka from years of censorship and neglect, Czech critics of the 1960s “overwrote” his German and Jewish literary and cultural contexts in order to focus on his Czech cultural connections. Seeking to rediscover Kafka’s multiple backgrounds, in Franz Kafka and His Prague Contexts Marek Nekula focuses on Kafka’s Jewish social and literary networks in Prague, his German and Czech bilingualism, and his knowledge of Yiddish and Hebrew. Kafka’s bilingualism is discussed in the context of contemporary essentialist views of a writer’s organic language and identity. Nekula also pays particular attention to Kafka’s education, examining his studies of Czech language and literature as well as its role in his intellectual life. The book concludes by asking how Kafka read his urban environment, looking at the readings of Prague encoded in his fictional and nonfictional texts. ‘Nekula’s work has had a major impact on our understanding of Kafka’s relation to the complex social, cultural and linguistic environment of early twentieth‑century Prague. While little of this work has been available in English until now, the present volume translates many of his most important studies, and includes revisions and expansions appearing now for the first time. Nekula challenges stubborn clichés and opens important new perspectives: readers interested in questions relating to Kafka and Prague will find this an essential and richly rewarding book.’ – Peter Zusi, University College London ‘Marek Nekula’s important book originally situates Franz Kafka within his Pragueand Czech contexts. It critically examines numerous distortions that accompanied the reception of Kafka, starting with the central issue of Kafka’s languages(Kafka’s Czech, Prague German), and the ideological discourse surrounding the author in communist Czechoslovakia. Astute and carefully argued, Franz Kafka and his Prague Contexts offers new perspectives on the writings of the Prague author. This book will benefit readers in German and Slavic Studies, in Comparative Literature, and History of Ideas.’ – Veronika Tuckerová, Harvard University Marek Nekula připravil soubor studií o tom, jak Praha formovala Kafkovu osobnost a dílo. Kniha začíná kritickou diskuzí o problematickém přijímání Franze Kafky v Československu, které začalo na konferenci v Liblici v roce 1963. Zde byl Kafka zachráněn před cenzurou za cenu "přepsání" jeho německého a židovského literárního a kulturního kontextu s cílem vyzdvihnout český vliv na jeho tvorbu. Studie se zaměřují na židovské sociální a literární prostředí v Praze, Kafkovu německo-českou dvojjazyčnost a jeho znalost jidiš a hebrejštiny. Kafkův bilingvismus je probírán v kontextu současných esencialistických názorů na spisovatelův jazyk a identitu. Nekula také věnuje zvláštní pozornost Kafkovu vzdělání, zkoumá jeho studia českého jazyka a literatury, jakož i jeho českou četbu a její roli v jeho intelektuálním životě. Knihu uzavírá otázkou, jak Kafka „četl“ své městské prostředí.

Pairing the two concepts of diaspora and modernism, Allison Schachter formulates a novel approach to modernist studies and diasporic cultural production. Diasporic Modernisms illuminates how the relationships between migrant writers and dispersed readers were registered in the innovative practices of modernist prose fiction. The Jewish writers discussed-including S. Y. Abramovitsh, Yosef Chaim Brenner, Dovid Bergelson, Leah Goldberg, Gabreil Preil, and Kadia Molodowsky--embraced diaspora as a formal literary strategy to reflect on the historical conditions of Jewish language culture. Spanning from 1894 to 1974, the book traces the development of this diasporic aesthetic in the shifting centers of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, including Odessa, Jerusalem, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York. Through an analysis of Jewish writing, Schachter theorizes how modernist literary networks operate outside national borders in minor and non-national languages. Offering the first comparative literary history of Hebrew and Yiddish modernist prose, Diasporic Modernisms argues that these two literary histories can no longer be separated by nationalist and monolingual histories. Instead, the book illuminates how these literary languages continue to animate each other, even after the creation of a Jewish state, with Hebrew as its national language.

This is the first book about Kafka that uses the writer's medical records. Gillman explores the relation of the body to cultural myths, and brings a unique and fascinating perspective to Kafka's life and writings.