Kafka's Jewish Languages: The Hidden Openness of Tradition (Haney Foundation Series) 0812243714, 9780812243710

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Introduction: Kafka’s Jewish Voice
Chapter 1. Cold War Kafka and Beyond: The Return of Jewish Languages
Chapter 2. The Breakthrough to Jewish Languages: “The Judgment”
Chapter 3. Hebrews in New York: Amerika, or The Man Who Disappeared
Chapter 4. Kabbalah and Comedy: The Trial and the Heretic Tradition
Chapter 5. Open Boundaries: The Castle and the Origins of Modern Hebrew
Afterword: The Puzzle of National Traditions, or the Art of Nut-Cracking
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

Kafka’s Jewish Languages

Kafka’s Jewish Languages The Hidden Openness of Tradition

David Suchoff

University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

A volume in the Haney Foundation Series, established in 1961 with the generous support of Dr. John Louis Haney. Copyright © 2012 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-8122-4371-0

Contents

Introduction: Kafka’s Jewish Voice

1

Chapter 1. Cold War Kafka and Beyond: The Return of Jewish Languages

13

Chapter 2. The Breakthrough to Jewish Languages: “The Judgment”

63

Chapter 3. Hebrews in New York: Amerika, or The Man Who Disappeared

93

Chapter 4. Kabbalah and Comedy: The Trial and the Heretic Tradition

131

Chapter 5. Open Boundaries: The Castle and the Origins of Modern Hebrew

170

Afterword: The Puzzle of National Traditions, or the Art of Nut-Cracking

205

Notes

211

Index

261

Acknowledgments

267

Kafka’s Jewish Languages

Introduction

Kafka’s Jewish Voice

You never know what you’ll find in your own house. —Kafka, “A Country Doctor” (Ein Landarzt)

“Everything came to his aid during the construction,” the narrator of “The Building of the Temple” declares. “Foreign workers” (fremde Arbeiter), the authoritative figure soon tells us, not only were essential to a structure that suggests both Jewish and German culture but also evoke an openness to the outside within: “no building ever came into being as easily as this temple—or rather, this temple came into being the way a temple should.” At first the “clumsy scribblings of senseless children’s hands” (unbeholfene Gekritzel sinnloser Kinderhände) written on “every stone” (auf jedem Stein) of the edifice remind the narrator of “the entries of barbaric mountain dwellers” (Eintragungen barbarischer Gebirgsbewohner) engaged in an act of “spite” or “desecration,” though at this primitive level their writing also recalls an originating force. These forgotten builders create the enduring perspective in Kafka’s parable: their writing will remain for “an eternity outlasting the temple,” as a memory of the transactions between disparate nations that allowed the edifice to build and be built.1 The unknown source of the stones—“from what quarry [Bruche] had they come?”—thus points to a comic “break” (Bruch) with the notion of a singular tradition and to the blessing of those distant sources that give it continued strength. Kafka inscribes the Jewish voice in his parable in this same groundbreaking and future-oriented sense: as a reminder of the human differences that create the temple’s hidden beauty and suggest the power of its most redemptive text. I argue in this book that Kafka’s perspective on this hidden openness of tradition can be understood through the positive view of human difference that

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Jewish languages—specifically but not exclusively Yiddish and Hebrew—enabled him to develop in the period between 1911 and 1924. In a strict sense, my title thus refers to the Yiddish he began learning about in the Yiddish theater in 1911–12 and analyzed in a now-famous lecture, and to the modern ­Hebrew he began to acquire in earnest in 1917 and which culminated in his study with one of its first native speakers, Puah Ben-Tovim, who grew up near Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the putative father of the “new” tongue. Jewish languages will therefore be considered in the ways outlined in this introduction: as Kafka’s linguistic doorway to the transnational and multilinguistic constitution of national and religious traditions. Yiddish and Hebrew, in this specific sense that I develop in my reading of cold war approaches that first canonized his fiction—seeing the “temple” of his writing as either German or Jewish—enabled Kafka to transform nationalistic conceptions of Jewish and other languages and to arrive at the vision of tradition as open to difference that enriches his work. Kafka’s devotion to Yiddish and Hebrew and his responses to them—including Zionism, in which the “builders” of Kafka’s parable convey a border-crossing sense—provide the point of departure for my commentary on his three major novels in the following chapters, where the openness of Jewish and other national, religious, and literary traditions and their interpretations that were sparked by Kafka’s interest in Jewish languages are my concerns. Yiddish and Hebrew in the following pages shed light on these trans­ national currents in Kafka’s imagination. As doorways to Kafka, these languages also revise the critical tradition that has presented his relation to Judaism as conflicted at best. Rather than approaching his work as if its German and Jewish elements were discrete and opposed, I focus on Kafka’s Jewish linguistic interests as entryways to his fiction’s pleasurable and in this way multiple effects. This “postnational,” as I describe it in Chapter 1, might better be called “prenational” since my argument is that Jewish languages helped Kafka envision, to use Wittgenstein’s concept, the formative “family resemblances” between supposedly separate national and linguistic realms. Kafka’s Yiddish and modern Hebrew sources—languages undergoing their transnational formation in his period—served a quietly comic function: opening up the way German and other national languages are created and sustained by an implicit vaudeville of foreign sources that provide their verve and depth. Kafka’s German can thus be called morose or fatalistic in only a surface way. His engagement with Jewish languages—including a Yiddish-accented German—contributed to this ­silent humor that critics have long sensed within his fiction.2 National literatures for Kafka were like “German” or a renascent “Hebrew” themselves—monolithic



Introduction

3

entities comprised of foreign borrowings and secret translations, and sustained by their ever-youthful language games. The Jewish linguistic tradition thus provided him with his own model for what Gershom Scholem calls the “strong light of the canonical” in Kafka’s writing, though in a less serious form than this formulation suggests.3 The Yiddish and modern Hebrew explored in this book and outlined in this introduction were two of the keys that unlocked Kafka’s literary and social imagination. As “The Building of the Temple” suggests, Jewish languages and their traditions helped Kafka create a series of texts that became classic thanks to the openness to human difference they expressed.

Jews and Other Others: The Meaning of Jewish Languages Only two possibilities stood before me: the Zoo [Tiergarten] or the variety stage. . . . I said to myself: do your utmost to get onto the variety stage [Varieté]. That is the way out [Ausweg]. —Kafka, “Report to an Academy”

This sense of the hidden comedy behind national identity—its pleasurable creation by multiple strands—at the outset of his major period can be discovered in one of Kafka’s diary entries of 1911, in his signal reaction to the German Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz and his Geschichte der Juden: “Today, eagerly and happily, began to read the History of the Jews [Geschichte der Juden] by Graetz. Because my desire for it had far outrun the reading, it was at first stranger [fremder] to me than I had thought, and I had to stop here and there, resting to allow my Judaism [Judentum] to collect itself.”4 In this accounting of his own German and Jewish origins, “Judaism” (Judentum) is “stranger” (fremder) to Kafka than he had imagined before his simultaneous immersion in the Yiddish theater had begun. No longer caged by a singular sense of identity, Jewish history feels more liberating and open to other voices; here the national and familiar past makes an initial appearance as a gateway to Kafka’s conception of other traditions as well. Kafka’s reaction to Graetz’s fully titled Popular History of the Jews evokes the writer who, via the Yiddish theater in which he immersed himself, has begun to imagine his Judaism as an open Wesen (essence) in popular and national terms. A “fremder” Jewish history for Kafka means an acquaintance with the strange or the foreign as a pleasure, exemplified for him in the rich amalgam he rediscovered in ­Yiddish—a language that was fully Jewish, popular, and a boundary-crossing form of

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expression that would eventually lead him to begin learning modern Hebrew in 1917. This enlivening meaning of Yiddish and Hebrew is best expressed in ­Kafka’s “Report to an Academy” (1917), where his ape-narrator seeks and discovers a “way out” of the cages that define him. In similar fashion, Jewish ­languages enabled Kafka to evoke the multiple strands of seemingly singular literary and national traditions that confine the protagonists of his texts. In a moment of self-reference, Kafka’s German-speaking ape, captured in Africa and lecturing to a scholarly academy, thus refers to his “position on all the great variety stages of the civilized world” in a deadpan comic gesture.5 The talking animal represents Kafka the writer, an authorial surrogate who well earns his name of “Red Peter” in both the radical and humorously foundational senses of his voice. This latter-day “Peter” therefore stands for the “assimilated Jew” that Max Brod first discovered in the story, while quietly alluding to Moses Maimonides, the Jewish sage who, according to Graetz, consoled “secret Jews of Africa,” suggesting some of the many linguistic sources he performs.6 Kafka here follows the “thornbush in the road” principle of a later aphorism; the obstacles that would define Kafka as a German or Jewish writer instead become his means of illuminating the “varieté” of connections between apparently distinct national or religious traditions. This very “Jewish” Peter, in other words— Kafka first published his “Report” in Martin Buber’s Der Jude (The Jew) in 1917—can thus be reduced to a singular African, European, Maimonidean, and hence Jewish or Arabic tradition only by making him a straight man for multiple and often secret comic effects. Yiddish and Hebrew in this way became an Ausweg for Kafka’s imagination as both a German and a Jewish writer—part and parcel of the humorous perspective that used the barriers between national languages as material to illuminate the hidden connections between exclusive realms. “The thornbush,” as Kafka’s programmatic aphorism puts it, “is the old blocker of the path [der alte Wegversperrer]. It must catch fire if you want to go further.”7 Kafka’s talking ape represents this technique countering negative attitudes toward Jewish as well as other linguistic traditions. By evoking stereotypes he rarely names directly, Kafka was able to portray Jews and other “others” of his period as voices shaped by as well as shaping other traditions, and thus as Aristotle’s “talking animals” in the least prejudiced and most expansive sense. Female figures in Kafka provide striking instances of this quiet turning of the tables on anti-Jewish prejudice: for example, the “Jewish maiden” (jüdisches Mädchen) of his “I Was a Visitor among the Dead,” where this representative of the “rebirth” of Hebrew confronts a



Introduction

5

“French” master of the linguistic underworld who prefers to ignore her obvious forms of life.8 Such large-scale forgetting often sets the stage for the surprising self-assertion of Kafka’s female voices, whose Jewish linguistic significance critics have often underplayed. The same general effect obtains in Kafka’s overall style, where less specific allusions to Jewish source material constituted his more common practice, including when he chose to publish in Zionist and German Jewish venues.9 As in “I Was a Visitor among the Dead,” Kafka’s allusions to modern Hebrew remain subtle as well as overt. Like his “Jewish maiden” (jüdisches Mädchen), he passes through deadly notions of the Jewish linguistic voice by drawing strength from the power of the adversary—especially fatal conceptions of Jewish expression—as the female who represents the reemergence of modern Hebrew in his fiction shows that she has always been very much alive.10 Yiddish was central to these larger insights for Kafka, both as a model for national languages and the hidden life of their traditions in general and for the openness of modern Hebrew that occupied him from 1917 to 1924. The inspiration that Yiddish provided to Kafka thus aimed at something more than producing a “minor” literature—as my critique of Deleuze and Guattari in Chapter 1 suggests. Kafka’s humor about the boundary-crossing, small “animals” that represent minor voices in Western tradition was aimed at comically undermining notions of “small” or minority languages as less than fully human forms of expression, as the powerful voices of his animal speakers attest. In Kafka’s type of “varieté” humor, Yiddish was not a minor form of the talking animal in the bestiary of Western culture but rather “the youngest European language”—a model of the boundary-crossing openness required by all major traditions and religions in their most vibrant forms.11 In a situation in which Jews could be thought to possess defectively “animal” voices in Kafka’s period, or in the minor sense of Deleuze and Guattari after 1974, Yiddish and Hebrew enable Kafka’s texts to return the compliment by giving such “small” (klein) modes of literary expression—the term he actually used to describe the Yiddish and Hebrew literary traditions in his diary entry of December 25, 1911—a major and positive force. Kafka’s influence by Jewish languages in this way looked beyond the blind alleys imposed by German and Jewish national ideas, or shadow figures for them in the cold war period, and discovered the openness that allows languages and traditions to thrive. Felix Weltsch argued that Kafka’s “humor frees the path” (Humor macht den Weg frei) to such insights, with “humor” best understood not as “religion” but as a linguistic awareness of the full range of human difference that Yiddish and Hebrew helped Kafka conceptualize and express.12 Such is the expansive

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model of reading in a biblical key that Kafka once compressed into aphoristic form. “Only the Old Testament sees,” as he wrote in his diary in 1916; “say nothing of this yet” (nur das alte Testament sieht—nichts darüber noch sagen).13 Kafka’s novels offer his own broadest views of this recovery of “old” but surprisingly contemporary voices within canonical traditions; these biblical as well as modern explorations of Jewish and other religious and national situations are at the same time modeled with a carefully crafted beauty and “varieté” in his “Tiergeschichten” (Animal Stories) and other stories as well.14 To capture this linguistic multiplicity, I combine short readings of relevant short narratives in my chapters on his three novels when those stories sharpen themes in Kafka’s longer texts. “Report for an Academy” thus suggests a reading of “Jackals and Arabs”—the companion story Kafka published with it in Martin Buber’s Der Jude in 1917—in which mutually defining national stereotypes of Jews and other “others” create a comic form of cultural Zionism. Here the variety unlocked in seemingly isolating forms of national identity and expression uncovers a productive “way out” in the novels. Such vaudeville elements, in turn, open up those Jewish linguistic concerns that Kafka translated into Amerika, or The Man Who Disappeared, concerns that have disappeared in readings of Kafka’s most overtly comic work. This novel, as I argue in Chapter 3, is a text whose Yiddish, German, and Talmudic sources draw connections between African American culture, jazz, and the blackface performers (Ausstellungsneger) Kafka considers in his diary as an image of writing, while redeeming such debasing performances of the linguistic and social “other” in more authentically different and expressive forms.15 My analysis of how Kafka came to think about Yiddish and modern Hebrew appears in two sections of Chapter 1: “German Jewish Traditions: The Echoes of Yiddish”; and “Modern Hebrew: Language in a Transnational Key.” To capture the challenging significance of Kafka’s perspective, I base my sense of Jewish languages in sources that largely preceded the cold war reception of his work and thus look beyond binary and contained definitions of language and national identity that have governed readings of his texts. In contrast to these cold war views, Yiddish and Hebrew were languages that offered Kafka a broader view of national identity and its traditions, shaped by rich, boundary-crossing differences instead. As a “Jewish language,” Andreas Kilcher observes in an important essay, Kafka’s Yiddish represented “the unconscious and the forgotten of the established [geordnete] languages of the West European Jews”; that is, Yiddish was a reminder that “great” languages were also composed, as Kafka put it, of “Fremdwörter” (foreign words), making



Introduction

7

“Jargon” a model for the unheard forms of otherness that enrich every linguistic home.16 In this sense Yiddish became Kafka’s doorway to a more open view of language and tradition in Jewish as well as other national languages, with the modern Hebrew that Kafka learned from Puah Ben-Tovim, as I explore that process in Chapter 5, keeping a similar door open to foreign patterns and lexical material as it reemerged as a mother tongue. Traditional Jewish languages such as Yiddish, Hebrew, and Aramaic have therefore been defined as “diglottal,” as languages “that Jews use together with another common language”— that is, transnationally.17 Uzzi Ornan’s pleasurably comic title fits his own definition quite well: “Hebrew Is Not a Jewish Language” because it isolated the Jews, he suggests, but precisely because it was used in contact with Arabic and other tongues that enriched it, as the Franz Rosenzweig essay “Modern Hebrew?,” which I examine in Chapter 1, attests. Though often postnational in their import for reading Kafka—stressing the cross-border contacts between languages—these terms for the meaning of Yiddish and Hebrew were pioneered in a period closer to Kafka’s own by Shmuel Niger and Max Weinreich and were later transformed by Benjamin Harshav, who saw Jewish languages as shaped by multilinguistic strands.18 As the modern Hebrew he studied and Yiddish vied for preeminence, both gave Kafka rich material to examine the positive force of linguistic and cultural contact. It was this sense of an enlivening exchange between languages that shaped Kafka’s prose, allowing him to explore the multiple sources of Jewish and other identities that preceded the emergence of what later came to be known as a singular national voice. Thanks to this translinguistic spirit that Yiddish and Hebrew allowed him to rediscover, Kafka came to view his German writing not as a pure beginning or singular origin but as the interruption of a preexisting conversation, whose richness and complex sense of tradition he hoped to recapture in his literary work. “My life,” as he once observed, “is a hesitation before birth” (Zögern vor der Geburt).19

The Transmission of Kafka’s Texts and Linguistic Difference Piping is our people’s daily speech. —Kafka, “Josephine the Singer”

The fragmentary state of Kafka’s novels at his death in 1924 left an openness that Max Brod and other editors have been eager to fill, treating Kafka’s

8 i n t r o du c t i o n

concern with Jewish languages as a voice existing before the law of his critical construction as canonical writer. The power and beauty of multiple national origins that Yiddish and Hebrew helped bring to Kafka’s fiction are likewise often sensed by many of his readers, for reasons that are illuminated by the historical transmission of his texts. In a comic irony fully worthy of its author, we owe our possession of the three major novels, his recognized stories, and many of the notebooks and diaries containing other works and aphorisms to what is literary history’s most justified case of a betrayal, and in more than a single sense. Nearing death from tuberculosis, Kafka asked that Brod destroy his manuscripts after his death; he was posing his request to the person least likely to carry it out.20 While Brod preserved Kafka’s writings from destruction and strove to publish them, he did so in a way that downplayed the extent of Kafka’s Jewish linguistic concerns. Some works from Kafka’s literary remains were quickly published in German after Brod’s editing, beginning with The Trial in 1925. Works that made Kafka’s interest in Jewish tradition and its linguistic sources obvious—such as “The Animal in the Synagogue”— were often left without titles, however, and first appeared in German in his Gesammelte Werke (1953), which appeared in English translation in Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings in 1954. This volume contained Kafka’s “An Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language” of 1912 but framed these writings in the 1950s Freudian and Oedipal terms.21 By the time Brod arrived in Palestine in 1939, Kafka’s three novels had been published and the edition of Kafka’s Collected Works was well under way, a venture in which Schocken Books of New York would play a crucial role. Brod’s initial canonization of Kafka helped deify him, and his German was singled out for “perfection,” though subsequent idolaters often forgot the border-crossing effect of Yiddish and Hebrew on his style suggested in Brod’s fuller description of Kafka’s prose as “perfection on the move, on the road.”22 As Walter Benjamin observed as early as 1923, the German of Kafka’s period and afterward had a difficult time coming to terms with the strata that other national languages had contributed to its riches. To some extent Benjamin was proved correct in Kafka studies, and the stifling effect on the recovery of Jewish linguistic influences in Kafka’s novels and shorter writings has been felt ever since. This “prison-like solitary confinement of the German language,” as Benjamin predicted, “will gradually, if not bury alive its intellectual treasures, then make them rusty, difficult to move and to manipulate.”23 In the case of Kafka, Brod’s first German edition did its own part to realize that backward-facing prophecy. Taking his cue from Kafka’s diary entry of



Introduction

9

September 25, 1917, after Jewish themes in “A Country Doctor” (Ein Landarzt) helped produce writing that Kafka called “the pure, the true, and the immutable” (Reine, Wahre, Unveränderliche), Brod’s edition—ironically enough, given his work on it in Jerusalem, where modern Hebrew was being spoken—expurgated the sixty-plus pages of Hebrew vocabulary that Kafka recorded. This practice was continued by the Kritische Ausgabe (critical edition), giving “the hidden language of the Jews” an unintentionally comic sense.24 Kafka’s stylistic beauty was interpreted in both editions in terms of neat categories of national identity; because Kafka’s explicitly Jewish texts crossed those boundaries, they were hidden to the point of erasure in his editions even when Yiddish and Hebrew themes were openly portrayed. Much that is openly Jewish and part of the multilingual texture of his writings has been simply ignored by editors or, like his “missing” Golem text—because Kafka struck through the version in his diary, a comic gesture as it appears in retrospect—was actually eliminated from the critical edition. ­K afka’s Hebrew notes as well as explicitly Jewish texts were often “ignored by critics or underrepresented in editions of his work,” as Iris Bruce has observed.25 In the same spirit, Brod edited out the transnational elements of Prague German that were present in Kafka’s unpublished work. These “linguistic errors” (Sprachunrichtigkeiten), as he called them, were seen as the encroachments of “Czechisms” (Tschechismen) into Kafka’s German; the job of the editor was seen as erasing the cross-linguistic indications that were part of Kafka’s texts. This first German edition was quietly nationalistic in its assumption of the unity rather than translinguistic influences on Kafka’s style. Brod decided that Kafka would have performed this sort of foreign relations of the textual sort himself had he edited the novel texts. A Kafka who survived his bout with tuberculosis, Brod assumed, would have edited out these Prague expressions or deviations from the “Schriftsprache” of standard German—as Kafka did earlier—by asking his friend to “consult Grimm,” given his training in Germanistik; this suggestion also recalls Jacob Grimm’s Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, in which foreign elements of the language are said to be governed by the “law of hospitality” (Gastrecht) and where foreign influences experience “Einbürgerung,” or the equivalent “naturalization” in immigrant law.26 The fact that Kafka’s own literary practice opened up his German to Jewish sources—as well as to the concerns of Czech nationalism, breaking down the boundaries between them—was less important to Brod than realizing his ambition of establishing Kafka as a classic writer in what became the cold war’s terms. His caution was well considered: in that period the porous border between Jewish

10 i n t r o du c t i o n

and other national voices was considered a subversive and dangerous occasion for containment, rather than a sign of health. I prefer Brod’s early edition for his honesty about the process of canonical editing, no matter how many linguistic impurities his edition erased. In conformity with scholarly convention, I will therefore cite the Kritische Ausgabe, despite what Mark Anderson calls the “less than scholarly considerations” that sometimes shape its editorial principles.27 Nationalistic competition over Kafka, however, cannot help but produce a parable of his transnational perspective. A Tel Aviv family court case now under way centers on the ownership of unknown Kafka manuscripts possessed by the heirs of Max Brod’s secretary. Parties in the case include the National Library of the State of Israel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as well as the German National Archive for Literature at Marbach, with the bulk of Kafka’s known manuscripts residing at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.28 The Kritische Ausgabe carries out Kafka’s trial, as it were, in a similarly multiple way. While excluding Kafka’s Hebrew vocabulary, this Germanistik edition returns some of the multilingual variety to Kafka’s Prague German, leaving intact such words as “Litteratur” and other evidence of the Hapsburg city’s existence as a linguistic contact zone. The “Virtual Zion” of the Kritische Ausgabe, however, in Mark Anderson’s felicitous phrase, still engages in its own canonical rituals of “self-purification,” to borrow Wilhelm Grimm’s term, removing some of Kafka’s texts most explicitly concerned with the Jewish linguistic tradition.29 However regrettable the exclusion or downplaying of Kafka’s Jewish linguistic sources has been, the influence of Yiddish and Hebrew in Kafka’s writing is not always a matter that appears so obviously on the surface of the text. Even without explicit mention or what we could call a foreign “accent” to his German, Kafka’s concern with Jewish languages made him adept at portraying the sub-rosa history of the contact between national voices that gave a seemingly pure language such as High German its secret heft.

Parables of Tradition: The Themes of Kafka’s Novels Many people prowl around Mt. Sinai. —Kafka, “Parables”

Kafka’s tradition was therefore not a construct of the past whose “invention” forecloses the multiple voices in human culture, but rather a boundary construction,



Introduction

11

where the meaning of difference in its multiple forms comes to the fore. Moses Maimonides (1135–1205) was a crucial figure for Kafka in this regard. In Graetz, Kafka discovered Maimonides as such a canonizing figure of tradition in this broadest sense, as author of the Mishne Torah, a summary of the Law in classical Hebrew still regarded in rabbinic culture as authoritative, as well as Guide of the Perplexed, written in Judeo-Arabic, in which Maimonides brought the Jewish tradition in contact with the “Aristotelian philosophy” he received through the “Mahometan philosopher Ibn Sina.” According to Graetz, Maimonides’ encounter with Greek and Arabic difference allowed him to open his own hidden resources, as if the foreign voice allowed him to discover plural perspectives within his own tradition without ever having left home.30 Kafka received a more open version of the Maimonidean tradition in Jakob Fromer. Through him he learned that Jewish “orthodoxy” regarded Maimonides as a “Ketzer” (heretic) in certain respects, seeing him as “Hinken auf beiden Seiten” (limping to both sides)—Fromer quotes Elijah’s reproof to the people in Kings—of the boundary in his otherwise singular voice.31 Solomon Maimon’s autobiography— with its extensive summary of Maimonides—gave Kafka additional material to view tradition as open-ended, even kept alive by the positive force of cross-border influences that German as well as Jewish orthodoxy often decried.32 Kafka’s concern with Jewish linguistic sources, sparked by figures such as Maimonides, helped him imagine tradition through a continuum of approaches to cultural difference: from Graetz’s more closed, to Fromer’s more mixed, and to his own partially humorous, increasingly open, and transnational terms. “All such writing,” as Kafka described his fiction in 1922, “might have developed into a new secret doctrine [einer neuen Geheimlehre], a Kabbalah [einer Kabbala], if Zionism had not intervened.”33 Chapter 1 treats Kafka’s “Linguistic Turn” and shows how Yiddish, Hebrew, and his awareness of German as a German Jewish language began what is generally agreed to be the period of his emergence as a canonical writer in 1911– 12. Chapter 2, “The Breakthrough to Jewish Languages by ‘The Judgment,’” examines Kafka’s concern with Yiddish as a language of comic curse, allowing him to transform his sense of Jewish difference into the critical energy behind his writing and explore the questions raised by Hebrew and Zionism in a transnational sense. Chapter 3, “Hebrews in New York: Amerika, or The Man Who Disappeared,” explores how Hebrew and its traditions of interpretation, including Kabbalah, revealed to Kafka by his interest in Yiddish, portray the “Occidental” culture of New York, examining biblical, traditionally Hebrew, and African American and Jewish American forms of expression that model nationalism in

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an open form. Chapter 4 reinterprets The Trial, reading Kafka’s use of the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, as opening its multiple voices. Josef K.’s trial and persecution incorporate the black humor that Kafka learned from the Yiddish theater, satirizing Hebrew-centered and other ex ­cathedra attempts to control reading, and offer a portrayal of the “Shekhinah” (female emanation of the divine) as the multiplicity of interpretation. Chapter 5 reads The Castle in the context of Kafka’s interest in modern Hebrew and his extant, fluent Hebrew letter to his Hebrew teacher Puah Ben-Tovim, one of the first native speakers of the renascent language from Jerusalem. Kafka’s land surveyor allows Kafka to portray the enlivening process of contact with foreign sources that modern Hebrew was undergoing in Palestine, partially at the hands of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the “father” of modern Hebrew and the childhood neighbor of Ben-Tovim. The Castle also suggests the linguistic form of Zionism that influenced Kafka until his death in 1924, and which appears in his final narrative, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” with which I conclude.34 In its overall trajectory, this book thus reads Kafka’s rediscovery of Jewish languages in 1911–24 as a breakthrough—from “The Judgment” to “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” focusing on his three major novels—but also as a breaking away from the nationalism that forgets the many sources that create a people’s most powerful voice. At the same time Kafka’s quiet sense of comedy is explored as part of his importance as a theorist of a tradition and as a secretly humorous writer in his own right. “I can conceive,” as Kafka put it in one of his later parables on the first Hebrew of the Jewish tradition, “of a different Abraham [ein andrer Abraham] for myself.”35 Jewish languages enabled Kafka to develop an account of the multiple origins of traditions and their redemptive meaning for the future. Like his own animals in the synagogue, Yiddish and Hebrew enabled Kafka to shake the drowsy “temple” of German writing, to awaken the foreign voices that existed within his own national legacies, and to reflect on the principles that allow traditions to continue to flourish, in his own vision of the tree of life. The hidden openness of tradition he discovered makes this a book about a classic German as well as Jewish writer and an author who influenced the emerging canon of modern Hebrew literature at the same time.36

Chapter 1

Cold War Kafka and Beyond The Return of Jewish Languages

From those who have returned from a state of suspended animation [Scheintod] and from Moses, who returned, one can learn a great deal. —Kafka, “On Suspended Animation”

As the cold war came to a close, Kafka began to appear as a figure close to his own historical situation in Prague and central to the emerging critical scene. In a speech at the Hebrew University at Jerusalem in 1990, Czech president Vaclav Havel declared that in Prague’s “Kafka, I have found a large portion of my own experience in the world,” speaking as the leader of a newly independent republic and a writer.1 In an early recognition of this trend, Frederic Jameson called Kafka a writer of the “postcontemporary” in 1991, two years after the Berlin wall fell.2 Spurred by these shifting national and critical definitions, post­ containment cultural criticism began to look more closely at what Kafka called “small” literatures such as Yiddish and Czech, especially in the field of post­ colonial literary studies that followed in New Historicism’s wake. The limits of ­Deleuze and Guattari’s prophetic work of 1974—Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature—became apparent in this situation. As the first cold war theory of “minority” literatures, their Pour une littérature mineure became a universal stopping point, and thus quite French in a sense, viewing Kafka’s concern with Yiddish and Hebrew as multicultural flavor at best. As the door began to open to a more expansive vision of literature and the classic work, a move that would eventually contribute to the American “culture wars,” Deleuze and Guattari had pointed critics to Kafka’s early twentieth-century modernism, which con­ ceived of canonical writing as transnational—constructed of more than one

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Chapter 1

national voice, as the implicit comedy of Kafka’s concern with Jewish languages suggests.

Deleuze and Guattari: Small Literatures and Their Legacies The most influential document in this turn in Kafka studies was without doubt the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari entitled Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1974), published in the wake of the student protests of the late 1960s in the United States and France. As it reintroduced his identifica­ tion with Yiddish into Kafka studies, Toward a Minor Literature was also a manifesto of revolt: a harbinger of the emergence of postcolonial criticism and a brief against the high-cultural and assimilation biases of cold war mod­ ernism in the Western democracies. At the same time the events of the Prague Spring of 1968 also helped to link with the early emergence of post–cold war nationalisms. Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka became the bridge between the contemporary and noncontemporary. Kafka’s Bohemian, Hapsburg ques­ tions of language and politics, at least in the example of Yiddish they ex­ plored, allowed their slim volume to make Kafka a sign of renascent nationalism throughout Europe in the midst of the cold war and beyond. Stanley Corngold was therefore correct in his 1994 assessment that “when Central and Eastern European intellectuals address questions of their own ethnic or national identity, they are thinking willy-nilly about Kafka’s now famous five-page diary entry on the literatures of small nations”; the influence of Kafka’s December 25, 1911, diary entry, popularized by Deleuze and Guattari, sparked new interest in Kafka’s Jewish languages and their significance to the reemergence of the national question after 1989.3 The landmark status of Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature furthered this return of the national question to Kafka criticism. By reminding readers of Kafka’s attachment to Yiddish as a form of national and literary identifica­ tion, Deleuze and Guattari helped to break the iron grip of cold war modern­ ism, in which Kafka’s canonization in Paris and New York had been framed and in which the background of writers had to be contained. The vogue of “international modernism”—the literary forerunner of what later came to be called globalization—paradoxically defined writers such as Kafka, Joyce, and Eliot as hailing from a single national language, which consecration as mod­ ernists then allowed them to leave behind. As Pascale Casanova puts it, “Kafka’s entrance into the international literary world that anointed him after 1945 as



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one of the founders of literary modernity” came at a literary price for his sub­ sequent readers: “Kafka thereby lost all of his national and cultural character­ istics, now obscured by the process of universalization.”4 In the cold war literary landscape, Jewish figures—vide Leopold Bloom—were often read as types of a national identity that could be transcended, and Kafka was seen as the example of a writer whose transnational—and hence multilingual—­ attachments were dissolved by the alchemy of high culture. In the modernism articulated by Lionel Trilling, Kafka in the 1950s had become a kind of safe subversive whose radically disjunctive texts occupied a realm apart from questions of national culture, much less Jewish linguistic concerns.5 Likewise France, the country where Kafka first achieved canonical status, was also the cultural capital in which, as Marthe Robert notes, Kafka was hailed as an avatar of existentialist, postreligious thought.6 Deleuze and Guattari, by con­ trast, reread Kafka as a constitutively binational writer, looked at “how a Czech Jew writes in German,” and found his expressive identity in Yiddish— a Jewish language that was not his native tongue.7 Kafka’s minor or “minority” influences—as Yiddish was seen in cold war terms, as his fluent Hebrew went unmentioned—were thus given new promi­ nence in Toward a Minor Literature’s poststructuralist approach. The book was a reminder to cold war literary and cultural criticism that Kafka’s ties to Judaism had been both linguistic and political, though the fact that Kafka had published his writing in the same venues where Theodor Herzl, S. Y. Agnon, and Y. L. Peretz had appeared remained an absent presence—as the saying went—in Deleuze and Guattari’s work. Kafka’s Yiddish and Hebrew sources had already been given partial notice in Heinz Politzer’s Franz Kafka, Parable and Paradox (1962) and had been seen as the modernism of Freudian alienation in Walter Sokel’s Kafka: Tragic und Ironie (1976). In the post-1968 rhetoric of Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka’s concern with Yiddish became the gate through which this linguistic—that is, Jewish as well as Czech and ­German—history entered Kafka criticism, helping to spur a reevaluation of the nature of canonical writing in the period as a whole. The transnational emphasis of Toward a Minor Literature also found more traditional echoes: in the same year Christoph Stölzl’s Kafka’s Böses Böhmen: Zur Sozialgeschichte eines Prager Juden (1975) advanced a German variant of what became the New Historicist Kafka criticism in the United States, arguing for Kafka as a con­ tained subversive. As a German Jewish writer, Stölzl’s Kafka had done little more than internalize stereotypes of Jewish languages. In both cases Kafka was described as a canonical writer who represented suppressed national

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languages. Meanwhile the importance of Zionism to Kafka had been largely ignored, giving Walter Sokel’s prophetic critique of Toward a Minor Literature a special force. “What Deleuze and Guattari are really concerned with in their analysis of minority literature,” as Sokel put it, “is the task which a guiltridden majority literature faces.”8 The late cold war emergence of Kafka as a Jewish writer had begun.

The Twilight of Containment Jewish linguistic concerns suddenly seemed everywhere in Kafka criticism, filtered through the lens I have elsewhere called “containment,” the term used by George Kennan to describe the decentered strategy of the West in the U.S.-Soviet standoff in 1947.9 This paradigm shift in late cold war criticism can likewise be described as a slow broadening of vision where Kafka was concerned. Neither Toward a Minor Literature nor Stölzl’s Kafkas Böses ­Böhmen: Zur Sozialgeschichte eines Prager Judens (1974) (Kafka’s Evil Bohe­ mia: Toward the Social History of a Prague Jew) was seen as a marker of an emerging trend when published, and both drew on venerable critics who sensed Kafka’s significance for Jewish literary tradition, both before and after World War II. Kafka’s German, as Marthe Robert declared in 1979, para­ phrasing Max Brod’s classic appreciation, had managed to encompass “the great themes of Jewish thought and Jewish literature.”10 Transnational ques­ tions, in the 1970s spirit of “ethnic” recovery, made Kafka’s Jewish languages natural places to look. Evelyn Tornton Beck’s groundbreaking Kafka and the Yiddish Theater (1971), for instance, anticipated both Stölzl and Deleuze and Guattari, and other works soon began to crack the containment perspective as well. Robert’s Seule, Comme Franz Kafka (1979); Giuliano Baioni’s Franz Kafka: letteratura ed ebraismo (1984), translated into German as Kafka: Literatur und Judentum (1994); Ritchie Robertson’s Kafka: Judaism, Politics and Literature (1985); and most richly Karl Erich Grözinger’s Kafka und die Kabbala: das Jüdische im Werk und Denken von Franz Kafka (1992) each brought Kafka’s translinguistic identifications to the fore and were themselves built on sources highlighted in Klaus Wagenbach’s Franz Kafka: eine Biographie Seiner Jugend, 1883–1912 (1958) (Franz Kafka: A Biography of His Youth), Hartmut Binder’s works, and Max Brod’s biography, the latter of which had been available since the Weimar period. As Robert suggested in 1979, critics had long sensed Kafka’s Jewish concerns, echoing within what was still



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perceived as the hard shell of Kafka’s prose. The questions, given the cold war paradigm of “ethnic” literature, were whether the strong light of Kafka’s can­ onicity could be refracted and what the spectrum would reveal in national and Jewish linguistic terms. In the twilight of containment, Kafka instead came to be seen as a mi­ nority writer. As the cold war drew to a close, the most influential readings of Kafka in the academy treated the transnational themes in his writing as a kind of shadow discourse, particularly where Jewish linguistic themes were concerned. Sander Gilman’s Jewish Self-Hatred (1986), for instance, argued that Kafka’s writing was controlled by negative attitudes toward “the hidden language of the Jews,” as the subtitle of this influential book had it, giving Stölzl’s 1975 thesis a tightening of the linguistic screw. Gilman expanded this vision of linguistic containment in Franz Kafka, the Jewish Patient (1995), a work of New Historicism on German culture’s distorted views of the Jewish body. Mark Anderson’s Kafka’s Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg fin de Siècle (1992) provided Gilman and Stölzl’s earlier works with a late-century German context, seeing Kafka as high cultural writer in a seemingly fatal conflict with his own Jewish voice. Through both of these writers, Kafka’s Jewish sources and interest in Zionism gained new currency, just as the containment paradigm had run its course.11 In addition, while most approaches to Jewish language in Kafka would remain entrenched in bipolar conceptions of “cultural difference” or “race,” the depth of Kafka’s Jewish linguistic interests provided an antidote to what Frederic Jameson called the “post-contemporary malady” as the cold war came to an end.12 Scott Spector’s Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (2000), taking its terms from Deleuze and Guattari, in this respect marked the limit to the previous trend. In highlight­ ing Kafka’s “deterritorialized” sense of national language in reaction to Zion­ ism and Czech nationalism, Spector displaced the German center of Kafka criticism and the concept of self-hatred that anchored it, marking the creative role of Yiddish and Hebrew in Kafka’s canon and the growing field of Ger­ man Studies. While Mark Anderson lamented the Kafka boom as part of an ominous move to displace the “canon of German literature” with writers who “often have a Jewish background,” Spector worried instead that the influence of Deleuze and Guattari had been only to promote a “multi-culturalist agenda” at best.13 By the year 2000, in other words, Kafka had become the measure—for good or for ill, depending on the critic—of the more transnational canon that Kafka’s interest in Jewish languages had helped to create.

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Toward a Minor Literature had thus made Kafka a necessary stopping point in the canon wars and Kafka’s canonical place a field where the battle was to be waged. Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on Kafka’s multilingual influences freed him from narrow categorization as either a German or a Jewish writer and made his concern with Jewish languages a touchstone for the debate on the na­ ture of canonical writing as a whole. Ruth Wisse’s The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Language and Culture (2000) was a landmark in this regard. Staunchly opposed to Deleuze and Guattari’s “minor” reading of Kafka as jus­ tifying a “deterritorialized” Jewish culture, Wisse opposed their transformation of Kafka’s writing into an abstract and theoretical “political weapon,” correctly noting their “evaporation” of the specifics of Kafka’s Jewish national and lin­ guistic concerns. As a work committed to the notion of Kafka’s ethnic contain­ ment, The Modern Jewish Canon argued for a Kafka largely controlled by the prestige of the German canon. With that critique in place, Wisse goes on to decenter Kafka’s nationalism, making practical use of the transnational concept of literary traditions that Deleuze and Guattari had helped bring within view. Wisse thus reads Kafka’s “Judgment” in tandem with the writings of Sholem Aleichem, seeing both Kafka and the classic Yiddish humorist as reflecting the dual position of Jewish culture between East and West. Wisse’s Kafka was therefore no longer a Promethean figure bound by linguistic stereotypes—pace Gilman—nor Marthe Robert’s tragic and lonely Kafka, a writer torn between competing national and linguistic worlds. Kafka was instead seen as a writer who “knowingly straddled two cultures belonging to two literary traditions” and thus revised the notion of an author as representing the national culture of a people, which since Herder had been thought to find expression in a single linguistic voice. “Even when these cultures are as antithetical as Yiddish and German,” as Wisse observed, “the writer may find a way, as Kafka did, of telling the truth in both.”14 The Modern Jewish Canon’s inclusion of Kafka in both the German and Jewish national traditions explicitly recognized the transnational texture of his writing and was thus a resolutely post–cold war work. Spurred on by in­ creasing attention to Kafka’s actual sources in Yiddish and Hebrew, debate over the transnational themes in this linguistically German writer’s works became inevitable, given the lens of high modernism through which his works had been seen. In Robert Alter’s Canon and Creativity (2000), for in­ stance, Kafka’s canonicity becomes a means of identifying his transnational identifications and the boundary with popular culture that they expose. Al­ ter’s Kafka is therefore fully vested in different national and linguistic sources,



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rather than German or Jewish in any simple sense. As Canon and Creativity notes, the years when Kafka “produced his most compelling fiction” started with 1911, when he “began to read about Jewish history, Yiddish literature, Hasidism, and related topics in German” as well as French. Such influences produce the famed difficulty of Kafka’s writing and, for Alter, a guarantee of his high cultural pedigree.15 With the new Kafka that had already emerged, however, the Rubicon separating Jewish languages from what were now visible as his postmodern concerns had already been crossed.16 As David Damrosch argued, “universal” writers such as Kafka were exemplars of a canon with local and divergent national inflections. “More and more works of world lit­ erature are now favored for displaying specific ethnic identity or cultural dif­ ference,” he declared in World Literature.17 With the passing of the containment paradigm, Kafka’s canon could now be explored for the Jewish voices that had been part of its German from the start. Damrosch’s “Kafka Comes Home” appeared in the series “Translation/ Transnation” and signaled a shift in critical thought. Amid the twilight of con­ tainment, considerations of Kafka as a Jewish writer now began to identify the multiple national and linguistic influences that formed his work. At the same time criticism remained distant from the questions raised by Jewish languages and Kafka were concerned, since most critics did not examine the traditions of Yiddish and Hebrew that Kafka actually explored. In the move away from this linguistic nationalism, Kafka became a transitional figure for postmodern crit­ ics, marking a move from cold war cultural criticism and its unseen boundaries. Frederic Jameson’s influential Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), for instance, reminded readers shocked by the emergence of post1989 Europe that the “nightmare” of Kafka’s “Austro-Hungarian Empire” was also “the first multinational and multiethnic state” and thus an “intriguing model in our own post-national period, still riven by nationalisms,” with the transnational foundations of canonized traditions still hidden by the cold war “consensus” in the West.18 The second reason was postcolonial, in a new period that had been largely defined by decolonization, as Jacques Derrida was among the first to suggest.19 Critics were prepared to grant the importance of transcul­ tural contributions, but they were less aware of how such “foreign” material—as both Kafka’s German and Jewish sources were conceived in relation—had al­ ready decentered any singular conception of the nation and its linguistic home. Jameson’s allusion to Benjamin’s 1934 Jüdische Rundschau essay on Kafka was in this sense also a signal to the postmodern generation of Kafka readers that ways of reading his canon were about to undergo a radical change—not via

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postmodern theory but through a new look at the traditions of Jewish linguistic thought.20 Benjamin’s “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death” had been published in the United States in 1968 and was accompanied by a letter titled “Reflections on Kafka,” which had been sent to Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem in 1938. Appearing in the English volume entitled Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, the essay together with “The Task of the Transla­ tor” and “Reflections” pointed readers to the kind of intellectual sources from which new Kafka studies would emerge. The history of Illuminations was part of the story. Through discussions in Paris with Arendt that helped pro­ duce the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin had recommended Arendt’s book on German Jewry to Scholem before she escaped in 1940 to New York, where she helped to edit the Shocken editions of Kafka.21 By pub­ lishing Benjamin’s “Reflections” on “Halakha” and “Aggada,” Arendt brought Jewish language to the forefront of the critical discussion of Kafka’s texts. The translation-centered thought of Franz Rosenzweig that Benjamin cited also entered Kafka criticism in America, prefiguring the “transnation” per­ spective that emerged as a breakthrough at the cold war’s end. Kafka’s “Com­ ing Home” to Jewish languages was thus a short journey indeed, since these were the future-oriented concerns that the German Jewish tradition of read­ ing Kafka had already explored.

Toward a Postnational Kafka Walter Benjamin was the first to use Jewish linguistic terms to open up Kafka’s canon, establishing a tradition that stretched to cold war Kafka criticism and beyond. While Yiddish and Hebrew are not mentioned by name in his “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death” in Die Jüdische Rundschau in 1934, as if complying with the dictates of linguistic containment, the essay goes on to retell a parable from the Talmud, the classic Jewish commentary on the Law, in Hebrew and Aramaic and relates a Hasidic joke that carries a Zionist message while breaking any national frame. Kafka’s ability to use the languages of the past to sketch the shapes of an emerging future was, for Benjamin, per­ haps the essential distinction of his writing: “what is actually, and in a very lit­ eral sense wildly incredible in Kafka,” as he wrote in a letter to Gershom Scholem of 1938, “is that this most recent world of experience was conveyed to him precisely by this mystical tradition.”22 Benjamin’s letter to Scholem that



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contained this passage, thanks to its American canonization by Hannah Arendt in the volume Illuminations, brought the importance of Jewish languages in Kafka’s canon to a whole new set of readers, making it impossible to see him as a “modernist” or a German writer alone. Benjamin’s 1934 “Franz Kafka” and his 1938 “Reflections” to Scholem set the tone for post–cold war Kafka criticism in this respect, making Benjamin’s writings on Kafka Janus-faced documents: the foundational text of modern Kafka criticism and a founding document of post­ national Kafka criticism. To use Yuri Slezkine’s paradigm, cold war Kafka criticism assumed that languages were “Apollonian” entities and discounted the “Mercurian,” often hidden exchanges between national languages that built traditions through forms of linguistic and social exchange. In the containment period, any de­ scription of the foreign in Kafka’s writing was typically read as a sign of the spell cast by German letters on his imagination. As a result Kafka’s some­ times human, sometimes animal voices were reduced to a theme of “primeval guilt,” as Beatrice Hanssen puts it, when Benjamin understood the concept in “different, cultural/historical terms.”23 Nowhere was this more true than in the question of Jewish stereotypes. As Slezkine argues, “the concept of ‘selfhate’ assumes that the unrelenting worship of one’s ethnic kin is a natural human condition,” rather than a reflex of periods such as the cold war, when racial or ethnic terms for literary criticism reinforced the notion of national literatures as inherently separate and unequal spheres.24 Instead, Benjamin was theological and linguistic in his “ Kafka,” looking past the approach to German and Jewish culture that characterized Theodor Lessing’s Jewish SelfHatred (Der Jüdischer Selbsthass), which appeared that same year. In Benja­ min’s terms, Kafka’s tradition envisioned the now-forgotten translatability of one language into another, a fragment of its messianic unity that Benjamin’s linguistic theory called the “medial itself” (Mittelbarkeit schlechthin).25 Strange figures such as Kafka’s “Odradek” evoked for Benjamin the traces of this world of prenational contact, representing “the form which things as­ sume in oblivion.” An emblem for tradition, Odradek is the “container from which the inexhaustible intermediate world in Kafka’s stories presses toward the light.”26 Odradek first appeared in Kafka’s story “Die Sorge des Haus­ vaters,” or “Cares of a Family Man” or paterfamilias, a piece Kafka placed in the Prague Zionist journal Selbstwehr in its Chanukah issue of December 19, 1919.27 Odradek becomes an object of the father’s concern precisely because of what Benjamin calls his “bastard” linguistic nature, with a name that evokes the Czech word for “stranger,” “apostate,” Kafka’s own Jewish family history,

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and Kafka’s self-portrait of tradition.28 From the point of view of the “house father” in a Jewish sense, the question is whether the multilingual Odradek, “son” of the tradition, will permit the continuance of the House of Israel, or Beit Yisrael. Tradition, however, despite the “Hausvater’s” anxieties, is strong in Kafka’s parable precisely because composed of different strands. Some therefore say that the name Odradek “is of Slavonic origin” (stamme aus dem Slawischen), while others “believe it to be of German origin, only influenced by the Slavonic” (es stamme aus dem Deutschen, vom Slawischen sei es nur beinflusst). Like Central European Jewry, influenced by both the Slavic (­Ostjuden) and the German Jews who existed in what was regarded as greater Deutschland in the period, the Odradek who appears “broken” (zerbrochen) from the father’s perspective sustains his national character through all his travails. Tradition is in Kafka’s sense a “Spule” like Odradek; collecting various cultural and linguistic contributions along his travels, openness is crucial to the creation of national character in Kafka’s linguistic and national terms. Odradek’s center therefore takes the shape of a “Stern” (star) that gives off many “Ausstrahlungen” (emanations)” one of which—in the Zionist journal in which the parable appears—suggests the “House of David” in no uncertain national sense. At other points, however, Odradek as a model of tradition can seem to have passed into other nations, and therefore sometimes seems to have disap­ peared in the multiple sources of which he is comprised. Odradek is at times not to be seen for months, according to the Hausvater of Kafka’s parable, like a “Stern” moves or assimilates himself into other nations and homes for months at a time (“Manchmal ist er monatenlang nicht zu sehen; da ist er wohl in andere Häuser übersiedelt”). Such goings forth, in Kafka’s sense of the “Stern” at Odradek’s center, are part of the necessary opening of the origin—one that does not exclude national or linguistic identity but which allows it to blossom and grow. As an outgoing figure for tradition, Odradek always returns faith­ fully to the people he remembers: “still he always comes faithfully back to our house again” (doch kehrt er dann unweigerlich wieder in unser Haus zurück). In Kafka’s vision of Jewish as well as other traditions, the cultural fathers who constantly worry about its disappearance are subject to a redemptive Lachen (laughter). Odradek’s voice thus provides a gentile satire on the father’s concern for closure, since it is openness of this “spool” that keeps the new generation both moving and alive. Thus while the cultural fathers constantly worry about his disappearance—“Can he possibly die?” (Kann er denn Sterben?)—Odradek as tradition remains at the feet of future generations, of the house’s “children



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and its children’s ­children” in evocation of different Hebrew prayers (vor den Füssen meiner Kinder und Kindeskinder), trailing his glorious and different linguistic threads behind. The transnational import of Odradek’s tradition might have been obvious to Benjamin’s readers in Die Jüdische Rundschau of 1934, or even to Kafka’s in Prague’s Zionist journal where the story first appeared, since a controversy over street signs in Prague had appeared in 1912 bearing the title “Sorgen der Prager Stadtväter,” one close to the one Kafka chose.29 To evoke this theme of trans­ missibility in a German Jewish context, Benjamin titles this section of his essay “The Little Hunchback.” His notes list this “bucklicht Männlein” as a “motif” and define its corresponding “leitmotif” as “Das Jüdische” in Kafka’s work.30 Benjamin’s reference is not to Kafka’s “Jewish” essence as a writer but to this talismanic figure at “the core of the folk tradition, the German as well as the Jewish,” calling upon the reader to conceive of “tradition” as formed through transnational contact instead. The “little hunchback” makes two distinct allu­ sions in this context. One is to a fairy tale from Brentano’s folkloric collection Des Knabens Wunderhorns (1805), compiled with Achim von Arnim, whose per­ sonal significance Benjamin discusses in A Berlin Childhood Around 1900. The second refers to a historical memory that shaped Berlin: “little hunchback” was also the prejudicial name for Moses Mendelssohn, the philosopher and founder of the Jewish Enlightenment and a moving force behind the rebirth of Hebrew as a modern tongue. Benjamin’s “Kafka” thus established Mendelssohn as a predecessor fig­ ure for Kafka in the German Jewish literary tradition, building on Heine’s parable of cultural transmission. Providence had given Mendelssohn his fa­ mous hunchback (Buckel), Heine observed, “in order to teach the rabble not to judge him by his appearance, but by his inner worth”; the stigma of physi­ cal appearance, according to Heine, was legible as a sign of the wealth of Jew­ ish learning the scholar brought into German literary culture.31 Benjamin saw Mendelssohn more allegorically, as passing through a linguistic door that swung both ways. His encyclopedia entry “Juden in der Deutschen Kultur” (Jews in German Culture) recalls Mendelssohn’s groundbreaking translation of the Hebrew Bible into German, calling it “the gate through which Yid­ dish-speaking Jews entered the German linguistic realm.”32 As Benjamin’s doorway suggests, Mendelssohn’s apparent opposition to Yiddish passes through unmentioned here, as if it would be prejudicial—as does the wellknown story of Mendelssohn’s entry into Berlin through one of its many gates where, according to legend, he was charged entry as a piece of livestock,

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though Benjamin concludes his “Kafka” parable with a contemporary rejoin­ der: “whether it is a man or a horse is no longer so important, if only the burden is removed from the back.”33 Kafka’s own diary uses Mendelssohn to theorize this dialectical process, where a national language tries to interdict what is considered an “accent” marring a more pure linguistic form. While writing in German, promoting Hebrew, and opposing the Jewish vernacular, Mendelssohn had established the zig-zag process that helped bring Yiddish literature to life: “Haskalah [Jewish Enlightenment] movement introduced by Mendelssohn at the begin­ ning of the nineteenth century, adherents are called Maskilim, are opposed to the popular Yiddish, tend towards Hebrew and the European sciences. Before the pogroms of 1881 it was not nationalist, later strongly Zionist. Principle formulated by Gordon: ‘Be a Man on the street and a Jew at home.’ To spread its ideas the Haskalah must use Yiddish and, much as it hates the latter, lays the foundation of its literature.”34 Benjamin’s treatment of the figure of the hunchback is quite similar: rather than criticize the distaste for Yiddish, Kafka regards Mendelssohn and the Haskalah’s pro-Hebrew, pro-German position as a dialectical form of opposition, for while Mendelssohn argued that the state should permit the use of “pure German or pure Hebrew” only in the swearing of oaths, his movement’s effort to reach the masses sparked the creation of Yiddish literature, whose language had received its creative impetus through contact between these two separate tongues.35 The German and Jewish folk song that Benjamin quotes in his “Kafka” is in this sense a hymn of hope and a “prayer” for the kind of “hallowed growth of languages” that Benjamin envisioned, whose redemption the “bucklicht Männlein” rep­ resents: “my dear child, I beg of you / pray for the little hunchback too.”36 In the era of containment, these transnational meanings of Benjamin’s “little hunchback” went almost unnoticed in Kafka studies. “Jews and other nomads,” as Slezkine points out, performed vital but often forgotten functions. Jewish languages in Europe—especially Yiddish but also Hebrew, whose bibli­ cal translations helped build the European canons—had, despite helping to build the surrounding “Apollonian” nations, been seen as the traditional lan­ guages of a “gypsy literature which had stolen the German child out of the cra­ dle,” as Kafka called German Jewish literature in 1921.37 Like the Jews, the “gypsies” or Roma had performed crucial exchange functions, suffered stigma, and then been written out of modernity’s “sacred” scriptures—that is, national canons and cultures—that their own linguistic traditions helped to raise. As Moritz Goldstein declared of the German Jews and their literary traditions in



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1912, just as Kafka’s canon was about to unfold, “we Jews are administering the spiritual property of a nation that denies us the capability of doing so.” In quot­ ing Goldstein’s passage in her 1968 “Introduction,” Arendt gave this hidden ­tradition, as Scholem described it, a public yet still hermetic name: “The Hunch­ back,” in all its German Jewish significance.38 Arendt’s “Introduction” to Illuminations made no bones about Kafka’s stature as a canonical writer. At the same time Arendt refused to make any apology for Kafka’s love for the particularity of the Jewish voice and its im­ portance to his stature in German literature as a whole. “Such a demonstra­ tion,” as she put it, “apart from being in bad taste, would also be superfluous,” putting the question in forthright terms. Post-Holocaust considerations about Jews and Germans, such as Gershom Scholem’s famous reservations two years before, were irrelevant to Arendt in the Kafka context. 39 The point was to break through the implicit taboo on conceiving Kafka’s canon as in­ fluenced by Jewish languages, and hence transnationally: Kafka himself was so very aware of it: “If I indiscriminately write down a sentence,” as he once noted in his Diaries, “it is already ­perfect”—just as he was the only one to know that “Mauscheln” (speaking a Yiddishized German), though despised by all Germanspeaking people, Jews or non-Jews, did have a legitimate place in the German language, being nothing else but one of the numerous German dialects . . . since he rightly thought that “within the Ger­ man language, only the dialects, and besides them, the most per­ sonal High German are really alive.” 40 Here, Kafka is seen as the writer who understood that Yiddish’s historical contact with German was a normal process, that its Jewish accent was no dif­ ferent than “Alemmannisch,” and that only a language that accepted its hid­ den dialects and transnational contacts could hope to continue its canonical life. In this postcontainment perspective, Kafka was the canonical writer who “knew” that negotiations between different dialects had always shaped German, like all canonical languages: “mauscheln—in itself is even beautiful [schön],” he wrote, while taking the phenomenon “in its broadest sense.” As a Jewish émigré from Germany, Arendt had time to consider such accents in all their social and literary heft. Discussions with Benjamin and Scholem in Paris, before she escaped to New York, helped secure Kafka’s transnational traditions as a nexus for each writer’s thought.41

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It was in Paris, during World War II, in the winter of 1939–40 that Ar­ endt held long discussions with Benjamin on Kafka and on the manuscript of Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, which Scholem had sent in man­ uscript form to Benjamin from Palestine.42 Both Scholem and Arendt had shared a similar Zionism in this period—aptly named “counternationalism” by David Biale—that predisposed them to view Kafka similarly, despite their later break. Scholem, for instance, had been involved with the “nonnational­ ist nationalism” of Brit Shalom Zionism in mandatory Palestine in the 1920s, a “cause Arendt passionately embraced a decade later,” as Raluca Eddon notes.43 Kafka’s commitment to Jewish languages may well have influenced Arendt’s own effort at cultural redemption: from 1946 through 1948 Arendt published “A Tentative List of Jewish Cultural Treasures in Axis Occupied Countries” in the journal Jewish Social Studies, while working for the Com­ mission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction. The list contains works written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Yiddish, German, and a host of other national languages. During these same years Arendt worked for Schocken Books, producing the first English edition of Kafka’s Diaries, which would appear in New York.44 When Theodor Adorno edited and published the first postwar edition of Benjamin’s Schriften, which appeared in Frankfurt in 1955, Arendt had already been a conduit for Benjamin’s reading of Kafka as “­Haggada.” Scholem had sent Kafka’s unpublished “Letter on Kafka” of June 12, 1938, from Jerusalem to Arendt, who included it as “Some Reflections on Kafka” in Illuminations (1968), which she edited and introduced and which was published by Schocken in New York at the height of both the student revolt and the cold war in 1968.45 Arendt’s major role, however, flew under the cold war radar. Her mercu­ rian Kafka went against the grain of the “liberal imagination,” as well as the containment criticism that would follow in its wake, whose discontent was signaled by Robert Alter in “Jewish Dreams, Jewish Nightmares,” a landmark essay published in that same annus mirabilis of 1968. In retrospect, Alter’s intervention reads like a boundary definition of the postnational Kafka, dis­ counting any “Talmudic” influence on Kafka’s German writing—a point raised by Leslie Fiedler—despite Max Brod’s description of Kafka’s study of that subject at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, as well as Kafka’s reading of Fromer’s Organismus des Judentums (1909), which reprints Talmudic tractates in German translation.46 Arendt’s “Introduction,” by bringing this translinguistic context to the forefront, swam in powerful strokes against the consensus that treated Kafka’s Jewish linguistic concerns



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as “the onerous question of the writer’s background” instead.47 As a result Arendt had almost no influence over Kafka studies in the period. Ritchie Robertson’s Kafka: Judaism, Politics and Literature (1985), an important work of intellectual history, contains not a single reference to Arendt’s interpreta­ tion of Kafka, an accurate reflection of her apparent influence as the “new,” Jewish Kafka came home. Because the concept of Kafka’s canon she ad­ vanced was postnational, Arendt had become postcontemporary where the reception of Jewish languages was concerned. The contrast with Lionel Trilling was both stark and courageous, given his enormous influence in American cultural criticism at the time. In that same year of 1968 Trilling set the parameters of debate for the liberal and New Historical Kafka that followed him, suggesting that an “imagination so boldly autonomous” as Kafka’s was not only independent of any national canon but also “beyond culture,” as the title of his volume put it, and thus without any relation to Yiddish and Hebrew, their Jewish accents, or their transnational effects. The position of Jewish intellectuals in cold war America may certainly have been a factor: Trilling’s breakthrough in the American academy had occurred in the leftist era of the 1930s and later the Rosenberg Trial, which encouraged a downplaying of such “ethnic” themes. Arendt, by contrast, had through Benjamin discovered a hidden tradition in Kafka. A canonical writer of “the purest German prose of the century,” Arendt’s Kafka was fully aware of German literature’s creative exchanges with other voices, in which Jewish languages had a share.48

German Jewish Traditions: The Echoes of Yiddish One year after composing his “On Language as Such,” Benjamin received a present from Scholem that would point him in this direction. The birthday gift was a book by a police chief of Lübeck in the nineteenth century, Chris­ tian Bendedict Ave-Lallement, entitled Das Deutsche Gaunerthum in seiner sozial-politischen, literarischen und linguistischen Ausbildung in seinem heutigen Bestande (The German Underworld in Its Social-Political, Literary, and Lin­ guistic Development into Its Modern Form, 1858–62). As Scholem describes it, the book “contained an extensive discussion of the Jewish underworld in relation to the German one.” The more important principle it laid bare was the cross-boundary influence between languages; the linguistic connections between the Yiddish and German underworlds made the book a model of the

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kind of “folk tradition” Benjamin saw in Kafka’s work.49 “The German Brotherhood of Thieves,” as the title could be translated, was, on the one hand, an account of the Dickensian world in which gonifs—the Yiddish word for “thieves”—would use a foreign mélange of code words to keep their un­ derground activities hidden from the police. In a larger sense, on the other hand, this Gaunersprache, or “thieves’ cant,” referred to the slang exchanges that were both German and Jewish in essence, resembling the hidden “func­ tion of language” and allowing them to exchange and combine features, as this standard history of German explains: Below Umgangssprache lies the language known as Rotwelsch—per­ haps better called Ganovensprache or Gaunersprache—with a long history and a variety of forms composed of many different elements, including soldiers’ and students’ slang and elements of ­Hebrew/ Yiddish. Gaunersprache (= English ‘thieves cant’) also applies best to a function of language rather than any particular form: it is used by the anti- or asocial criminal fraternity as a secret language and changes rapidly to preserve its cryptic nature. In this respect it is like certain types of children’s language.50 Scholem’s gift pointed Benjamin’s idea of tradition toward the silent history of language change: the story of contact between German and Jewish speak­ ers that is far more difficult to perceive once the “adult” version of standard language has been defined. In the phenomenon that linguists call loan trans­ lation, this darkness becomes visible. The hidden importation of foreign lexi­ cal items appears as a form of thievery between nations that takes many forms. These types range from the extreme of identifiable “foreign words,” such as “cul de sac” in English, to less noticeable foreign contributions, such as the word Keller in German, which made its way from the Latin cellárium with a slight change of accent that enabled it to receive its German “citizen­ ship” (Bürgerrecht), as Friedrich Kluge, the founder of German etymology, points out.51 Loan translations in this respect remain secret forms of immigra­ tion to most native speakers, where the foreign origin of a word remains im­ perceptible to the “native” tongue. In this case a “completely new word [is] created to render [a] foreign word, e.g. correspondence/Briefwechsel,” a process of bringing new concepts or vocabulary items into the language that can be undertaken intentionally in the Hochsprache (high language), or as the other German expression has it, in the Volksmaul (people’s mouth).52



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In his “Talk on the Yiddish Language,” Kafka’s mention of Gaunersprache was thus both historical and rhetorically provocative. By connecting Yiddish to thieves’ cant, Kafka reminded his audience of the transnational process of language creation and the literal and figurative childhood that dif­ ferent languages can share. In studying children in Hawaii, for instance, twentieth-century linguistics have been able to watch such contact create lan­ guage in almost real time, when the multitude of different immigrant groups made communication in a single language impossible. When children were thrown together, they began to merge linguistic forms in what is known as a “pidgin.” The process observed, however, was discovered to be similar to the cross-linguistic additions, simplifications, and combinations of elements through which more recognizable “standard” languages have been formed.53 “Pidgin” languages are typically held in low esteem, and Kafka’s diary entry on “small” literatures explains why. Such developing tongues expose the pro­ cess of theft and agrammatical transformation that formed the most canoni­ cal languages, from the gradual acceptance of a form such as “can’t” in standard English usage to the ubiquitous and now mandatory High German form of kein, born of speakers running together the two separate words nicht and ein. These examples come from the colloquial pronunciation of standard English and German forms, where contraction produces a new and accept­ able word, with the “pidgin” stage soon forgotten, just as the origins of for­ eign words—once given their “citizenship” as standard grammar in standard language—are no longer apparent in standard usage at all. “What in great literature goes on down below,” constituting a “not indispensable cellar of the structure” in Kafka’s distinction between “large” and “small” languages, “here takes place in the full light of day.”54 Yiddish or “Jargon,” as Kafka reminded his Prague audience in the French usage, was “after all, for a long time a despised language” because it shed light on this Auerbach’s Keller of German linguistic history.55 According to Kluge, Hebrew and “Judendeutsch,” the term he shared with Goethe, together with “gypsy” (Zigeunerisch) were to be distinguished from “actual Rotwelsh” as having made their contributions to canonical German in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Together these echoes of German contact with Jewish and other voices went back to Luther’s Liber Vagatorum (1512) (Book of Thieves), which conceived of Yiddish and Hebrew as part of a hidden world of vernacular cross-fertilization, living beneath the tip of the monkish, High German tongue. Gaunersprache or “thieves’ cant,” as Kafka used the term, suggests the historic irony of these charges. Luther launched his attack on thieves from the Jewish

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underworld during the very same period when his translation from the Hebrew was bringing new idioms from the Jewish literary tradition into the Germans’ first canonical form. Hence the danger Kluge perceived in the world of linguis­ tic exchange: “The Rotwelsh that is just as old is no harmless literary amusement meant for literary entertainment, but a bitterly serious matter, and a great dan­ ger to public life. It is a spoken language: it spreads like a plant from mouth to mouth, from generation to generation [Geschlecht zu Geschlecht]. Parchment and Paper have nothing to do with its spread. In olden times, Rotwelsh was the secret language of people who did not know how to read or write.”56 Canoniza­ tion meant putting a stop to these cross-border transfers, or at least stabilizing their grammar in a national or religious form, instructing the people who “did not know how to read or write” in the acceptable limits of their national lan­ guage and putting a stop to the loose talk that constantly takes in forms from abroad. The “normal” function of Kafka’s Gaunersprache is therefore described as the tendency of every language to interact with foreign speakers and to change. The new dialects that develop can even lead to claims of a separate lin­ guistic and national identity, just as Portuguese acquired autonomy from the rule of Spain. To the nationalistically minded, Gaunersprache thus had to be forgotten since it could suggest a nation within the nation that, should it ever surface, might demand linguistic autonomy of its own. Though underground, this vision of tradition was radically open. The national language, or Unser Deutsch, as Kluge’s tract was called, faced a language that knew no Gesetzgebung, or legislation, flourishing through what Kafka called a “linguistic struc­ ture of capriciousness and law” (Sprachgebilde von Willkür und Gesetz).57 Benjamin’s interest in this “subterranean life of the German language,” as Irving Wohlfarth has called it, explains his affinity for Kafka’s vision of tradi­ tion, if not the sources from which it was derived.58 In the textbook Kafka was taught in Prague, the rigid enforcement of such a standard language—­ Gemeinsprache—is called “an arbitrary rule”; the effect was a version of what Benjamin would call the illusory continuity of tradition, since it tries to “bring linguistic movement to a standstill” (Stillstand) when the entry of dialectal ­material and a “mixture of languages” is going on all the time.59 Gaunersprache was an example of such hidden linguistic movement—a picture of the foreign exchanges that shape linguistic form and which flash up before a more classic understanding of the national inheritance forces it to disappear. The term “thieves’ language” used by Kafka was thus what Benjamin called a dialectical image, or what could be called an image of dialect in Kafka’s Yiddish terms; derived from the Hebrew l’ganev (to steal), the word came into German through



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the intermediary of the Yiddish infinitive ganeven, which in turn acquired its “en” infinitive ending via importation of the German form.60 At the literary level, the formation of the Hochsprache was no different. German had imported expressions such as Zeichen und Wunder (signs and wonders) directly from the Hebrew Bible, through Luther’s translation of Exodus, a phrase Kafka uses to describe the spell cast on the greenhorn Karl Rossman by the streets of New York.61 Gaunersprache was in this sense the tip of a linguistic iceberg, with the larger tradition of contacts between German and Jewish languages destined to remain unseen. “The crooks as God’s chosen people, that would be a move­ ment,” was Scholem’s quip at the time.62 Benjamin had connected his idea of tradition with the foreign from his earliest reflections. In “On Language as Such and On the Language of Man” (1916), in conjunction with Scholem, Benjamin begins to develop his theory of a creative Ursprache (God’s language) accessible in fragments such as a lost ver­ nacular accent beneath the secular power of the canonical form. Benjamin’s key perception in this and the “Translation” essay was that all language did not re­ flect the world as much as try to give its own translation of a more powerfully creative, original voice. Human speech was therefore seen as translingual from the start in having to imitate a preexisting, linguistically defined world. In radi­ cal fashion, Benjamin posited the idea that even physical reality was a transla­ tion of a previous code, bringing us into contact with “the unspoken nameless language of things.”63 Viewed from a sociological perspective, Benjamin’s lin­ guistic theory is a positive translation of the prejudicial notion that “medial” figures such as Hermes must be shifty practitioners of exchange, or the trans­ national stereotypes of “devious, greedy, pushy, and crude.” In canonical Ger­ man culture, these charges had encrusted themselves on Jewish languages with a peculiar fixity: Hebrew had been declared prematurely “dead,” as Rosenzweig noted in “Modern Hebrew?” (1925), and the Yiddish that was so intimately re­ lated to German in the recent linguistic past seemed as if it “did not fit the exist­ ing ‘families’” of language, however they were defined.64 In parallel with Kafka, Benjamin’s linguistic theory is thus both a redemp­ tive and a rescuing gesture: the copying of one language by another is redeemed of the charge that the foreign is a lesser, inferior version of a more prestigious canonical voice. For Benjamin, translation resembles vernacular voices in con­ tact, and makes human language a shadow of divine creation, in its need for the foreign in order to grow. As Rosenzweig states in his “Preface” to his German translation of the medieval Hebrew poems of Yehuda Ha-Levi, “the translator makes himself into a speech organ of a foreign voice, which he makes audible

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over the chasm of space or time. When this foreign voice has something to say, then the language has to look different afterward than it did before.”65 As Rosenzweig suggests, translation can be likened to the healthy process of a na­ tional language speaking with the voice of a foreigner, giving itself over to new forms, a different “heritage,” and even new linguistic constructions that deepen its linguistic reserves. The foreign voice figuratively gives language the breath of life, in this formulation, because the limited “native” tongue—rooted in the earth, as it were—is given a chance to move and grow; the translator “will be­ come a creator of language,” as Rosenzweig observes. The creative potential un­ leashed by bringing a foreign voice to a national language—as experienced in mercurian migrations—is only intensified in the formal act of translation, in which an entire body of foreign material is given a new linguistic home: “The language will experience rejuvenation, just as if a new speaker had arisen from within it. And more than this: for the foreign poet not only calls into the new language what he himself has to say, but he brings the heritage of the general spirit of his own language along with him to the new language, so that the reju­ venation that occurs here occurs not merely through a foreign individual, but through the general spirit of that foreign individual as well.”66 Benjamin simi­ larly views translation as a form of creation—in keeping with Scholem’s linguis­ tic theory, as David Biale concludes.67 The canonical growth that occurs through translinguistic contact likewise short-circuits any nationalist claim to native origins, or the once-and-for-all purity of a native speaker’s access to the mother tongue. If nature could speak, as Benjamin argues in his essay on lan­ guage, her voice would be the voice of “lament,” since even the most “natural” language available would be a translation of a more messianic voice.68 National­ ism for Benjamin is therefore nothing but a shadow language, overnaming a more original speech of translingual contact, producing not only a melancholy patriotism—longing for its lost origin—but also a more pleasurable, sometimes humorous quest for a national language enriched by its translations from more than one foreign voice.69 The Urwelt (primeval world) that Benjamin saw breathing through the crevices of Kafka’s fiction conveyed this insight: Kafka metaphorically evoked this forgotten world of translation and thievery, in the literal sense of ­über-tragen—transference or carrying over of foreign content—that typified this underground process of canonical creation. “The mimetic gift, which was once the foundation of occult practices, gained admittance to writing and lan­ guage,” as Benjamin wrote in 1933, the year before Kafka appeared in Die Jüdische Rundschau, helped produce “the archive of non-sensuous [nicht sinnlich]



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similarity” that language became. The “canon of language,” as Benjamin sug­ gests in “The Mimetic Faculty,” is full of similarities between the radically dif­ ferent elements that constitute it, “occult” connections that the “rapidity of writing and reading” allow to “flit past.”70 Here, Benjamin was invoking Herd­ er’s Fragmente über die neuere deutsche Litteratur (1766), which argued that the earliest stage of human language was sinnlich and accompanied by “mime and gesture.” Kafka’s “swamp world” allowed this prenational level of language cre­ ation to bubble to the surface, showing how these primitive depths and writing in its classic form were intertwined. German romanticism had been an attempt to exploit such foreignness and disguise its resource in the national canon. Ac­ cording to Benjamin, it would be this hidden “conquest” on which the birth of a forgetful German classicism would depend. “Next to the translation of Shake­ speare,” he wrote in his doctoral dissertation, “the permanent poetic achieve­ ment of Romanticism was the appropriation of Romance art forms for German poetry. In full consciousness, Romanticism strove toward the conquest [Erober­ ung], cultivation [Aus­bildung], and purification [Reinigung] of these forms.”71 Kafka, by contrast, was Benjamin’s way of revising Herder; his stories ex­ posed the “intermediate world,” that transnational space in which German and other national literatures had “cultivated” or “built out,” as his metaphor of 1919 suggests.72 Looking back to Herder’s Deutsche Litteratur, “Franz Kafka” evoked a canonical writing that emerged from an invisible force field, created in the space between repelling nationalistic poles. In Benjamin’s essay physical and often animal gestures, which he called the “gestus,” provided an involuntary memory of this translinguistic territory. “Because the most forgotten alien land is one’s body in Kafka,” the body became political ground, whose language al­ lowed the forgotten contact between domestic and foreign voices to be per­ ceived. Benjamin’s allusion here was to Wilhelm Grimm, whose Report on the German Dictionary of 1846 characterized the “in-mixture of the foreign” into the German language with a similar gesture: “open the first book that comes to hand, I say, not even a poor one, and a countless number of such vermin [Un­ geziefer] scatter [schwirrt] before our eyes.” Ungeziefer was the once unusual German word now famous from the first line of Kafka’s “The Metamorpho­ sis.” Benjamin uses it to highlight the trans­national territory that Kafka’s ani­ mal and human gestures bring to light. In Kafka, as Benjamin observes, “it can happen that a man awakes, and is transformed into a vermin [Ungeziefer]”; the gestures of that “insect” become Kafka’s exploration of the primitive and alien sources that are asleep in everyday speech.73 Kafka’s “gestures” were an at­ tempt to slow down the movement—or “­transformation”—of foreign content

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into the linguistic material of standard language—a “counter-metamorphosis,” or carrying over, as Stanley Corngold insightfully suggests.74 Kafka’s “gestures” gave new voice to those alien voices of tradition wait­ ing for creative release from their figurative enclosure beneath the cover of Grimm’s dusty German book. In an era of German nationalism, according to Benjamin, those sources remained largely secret. These were nonetheless the echoes of Yiddish, as Kafka told his Prague audience in 1912, that touched every German Jewish speaker, a reminder of the translinguistic contact from which the modern German had emerged. “It is, to say the least of it,” as Kafka began, “not so very long ago that the familiar colloquial [Verkeh­ rsprache] language of German Jews according to whether they lived in town or in the country, more in the East or in the West, seemed to be a remoter or closer approximation to Yiddish, and many nuances remain to this day. For this reason the historical development of Yiddish could have been followed just as well on the surface of the present day as in the depths of history.”75 Despite—or rather because of—this intimate linguistic kinship, once Jews spoke in public on such “matters of German concern,” as Benjamin observed, indirection and secrecy became an inevitable part of their voice. German na­ tionalism had taken “circumscribed national characteristics” (begrenzte Volkstümer), as Benjamin called them, and turned the process of creative exchange between them into something illicit instead. “Jews today,” as he put it, “endanger even the best matters of German concern [Deutsche Sache] on which they take a public stand, because their public German expression is necessarily venal [käuflich] (in the deeper sense).”76 Käuflich here means “up for sale” or “venal,” envisioning German Jews as pawns in a fight to the finish of nationalistic stereotypes. In the “deeper sense” to which Benjamin alludes, the word was “redemptive” in the German (as well as English) sense in which “redeem” means to repurchase or exchange. Such was the larger goal of Ben­ jamin’s Jüdische Rundschau essay of 1934 and its view of German Jewish his­ tory, looking forward to his “Reflections on Kafka” of 1938: to redeem the debased ideological coinage in which such traditions were imagined, a project in which Kafka and Hebrew would play a major role.

Modern Hebrew: Language in a Transnational Key Benjamin’s “Reflections on Kafka” sent to Gershom Scholem in 1938 did not bring Hebrew back with a vengeance into Kafka criticism as much as anticipate



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its later disappearance in the continuum of Kafka’s critical history, showing later readers where to brush his reception against the grain. Benjamin’s letter satirized the then-current theological criticism of Kafka for this very reason—its implicit extension of religious reverence to the concept of the nation—a form of idolatry, as he wrote in challenge to Max Brod, that “must be suspect to a Zionist before anyone else.” The reference to Zionism reminds us that Benjamin was defining his relation to modern Hebrew in this period, as part of his rethinking of the na­ ture of canonical works.77 Nationalism in Europe had meant that every people “transformed their mother tongues into Hebrew”—that is, translated the Bible and awarded a version of its spoken language the laurel of national speech. For Benjamin as for Kafka, Hebrew was not part of an impulse toward political na­ tionalism but a means of opening up a transnational perspective, as in Benjamin’s image of the “interlinear version of the Scriptures” as the “prototype or ideal” of all translation.78 The fact that the Bible had been translated so widely refuted the quasi-sacred claims of national languages. Whether in the King James Version or Luther’s production of the first canonical German, nations had always expanded their mother tongues with what Rosenzweig called the “alien” (fremd) resources of a different national voice.79 “Translation,” Benjamin declared in 1924, testing the idea of “transmissibility’ (Tradierbarkeit) he would discover in Kafka’s writ­ ing ten years later, “ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the central recipro­ cal relationships between languages,” not the deification of a single people’s canon, in whatever linguistic or national form it might be conceived.80 “This is true to the highest degree of sacred writings,” according to Ben­ jamin, and it was in this transnational spirit that Franz Rosenzweig com­ pared Kafka to the Hebrew Bible as well. “The people who wrote the Bible indeed thought like Kafka,” he wrote to Gertrude Oppenheim in 1927; “I have never read a book that reminded me as powerfully of the Bible as his novel, The Castle.”81 Rosenzweig’s comment, made while translating the He­ brew Bible into German with Martin Buber, was hardly traditional in the conventional sense, as its reference to the multiple authors of the Bible attests. “Revelation has only this function: to make the world unreligious again,” Rosenzweig wrote in his diary, and was more than a translation into the sphere of the profane.82 The “original” Hebrew was thus a reminder of the secular character of all canons and a critique of the idolatry of national ori­ gins that he and Kafka shared. The Star of Redemption that Benjamin cites conveys this critique of origin in its powerful image of Abraham as the first Hebrew of the canon. As he puts it, “the tribal father (Stammvater)of Israel had immigrated (ist zugewandert): his story begins, as the Holy Books

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recount it, with the divine command to go forth from the land of his birth.”83 In Kafka’s similar version of the biblical Abraham, the patriarch is “prepared to satisfy the demand for sacrifice immediately, with the promptness of a waiter” but is heroic in his failure to destroy the remnants that remained of his foreign origins: “having something to fall back on, he could not leave— this the Bible also realized, for it says: ‘he tended to his house.’”84 Where Kafka portrays the canonical origins of the Bible, he does so through the theme of “Friendship.” This term distances language from essence, separat­ ing Hebrew from the worship that would make its texts the foundation of an original culture, in a simple Zionist or any other nationalist sense. Kafka com­ posed this text in 1917, just a few months after beginning his serious acquisition of modern Hebrew. The “Five Friends” of this parable, Hillel Barzel more accu­ rately titles it, easily stand for the “Five Books of Moses.”85 Rather than portray the Hebrew Bible as a source of national authority, Kafka envisions the process of canon formation as a series of departures, or the settings forth from a com­ monly occupied house: “We are five friends, one day we came out of a house one after the other, first one came and placed himself beside the gate, then the second came, or rather he glided through the gate like a little ball of quicksilver, and placed himself near the first one, then came the third, then the fourth, then the fifth. Finally we all stood in a row. People began to notice us, they pointed at us, and said, ‘These five just came out of that house.’”86 The “five” who represent the “house” or figurative nation do not become “these five,” as Kafka suggests, until they have already left their origin behind—that is, departed from the illusion of native grounding that any home, national or otherwise, can suggest. Hebrew is therefore not the “original” language behind this parable but the silent figure for the more foundational departure of their own. For these “friends” to form the nascent identity of a nation—“people began to notice us”—they must depart from that origin, whatever its linguistic name, in order to discover who they are. These “people” (Leute) are therefore not a Volk, meaning people or nation, but a group whose identity is a journey under way. New “friends” who wish to enter are treated like a foreign intrusion, evidence that the arrivistes who formed the original group have never fully arrived: “it would be a peaceful life if it weren’t for a sixth one continually trying to interfere. . . . Why does he push his way in where he is not wanted?” As they stand by the “gate” from which they emerged, these Mosaic five have forgotten the original departures from the “House” that allowed their canonical group of five to be formed. Rosenzweig likewise saw the Hebrew Bible as a departure from the logic of European nationalism, envisioning a tradition of open boundaries instead. His



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idea of the “blood community,” as Leora Batnitsky points out, “is a philosophic idea, not meant literally or racially”: by arguing that a people’s “eternity” was the “blood flowing in its veins,” Rosenzweig revamps the old canard about Jewish blood thirst, using “blood” to signify a national identity created through healthy contact with other nations, rather than secured through idolatry of a particular territory or land.87 “Blood community” (Blutgeneimschaft) in this way was Rosenzweig’s critique of “homeland,” or Heimat, in German and Jew­ ish forms of nationalism: the “nations of the world” (Völker der Welt), as he put it, spilled the “blood of their sons” to protect the ground of the nation, running the risk of loving “the soil of the homeland [den Boden der Heimat] more than its own life.”88 Martin Buber, for instance, lectured in Prague in 1909–11 under the auspices of Bar Kochba, the same Zionist group in whose journal Kafka would publish, that the Jews were indeed a Blutgemeinschaft (blood commu­ nity) but required a fulfilling devotion to the land. In a letter of 1913 Kafka told Felice Bauer that this doctrine left him cold: “no matter what he says,” he wrote, “something is missing.”89 Politically, Buber would eventually fill that gap with his binational Zionism. Before that shift in Buber’s thought, Rosenzweig ar­ gued that language could found a lasting nation, but only by treating its voice and that of the stranger as what Dana Hollander calls “two kinds of foreign­ ness,” brought into productive contact by translation: “the Jewish people never identifies itself entirely with the language it speaks.”90 Two years after Kafka’s death in 1924, Walter Benjamin reflected on this creative potential of Hebrew in a letter to Scholem. Noting Siegfried Kra­ cauer’s critique of the Buber-Rosenzweig translation of the Bible, with its German imitation of the sound patterns of the ancient Hebrew text, Benja­ min noted this attempt to convey authenticity in their German, deploring the “völkisch” tone that seemed to carry fervent nationalism into the Zionist cul­ tural sphere. As Benjamin admits to Scholem, neither he nor Kracauer knew Hebrew. Rather than accept what he called the “decisive” judgment of Kra­ cauer uncritically, Benjamin uses the occasion to define the context that made this translation a political event.91 Hebrew and German, he observed, occupied precisely opposite historical positions, with German “stuck on the obsolete idioms found in Goethe,” as Kafka observed in his diary, and He­ brew undergoing renewal in its re-creation as a modern tongue:92 I have no idea what might be involved in, or who in the world could be legitimately concerned about, a translation of the Bible into Ger­ man at this time. Now of all times—when the potential of Hebrew

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is being newly realized; when German, for its part, is at a highly problematic stage [Stadium]; when above all, a productive relation­ ship between the two seem possible only secretly [latent] if at all— won’t this translation result in a dubious display of things that, once displayed, will immediately disavow themselves in light of this German itself?93 The “actualization”—the becoming contemporary—of Hebrew had, as Ben­ jamin suggests, shown by sheer force of contrast what was ailing a canonical German, whose linguistic and cultural boundaries had been almost com­ pletely closed. While Hebrew was acquiring a modern vocabulary—borrow­ ing words from Arabic, translating European words, and refunctioning ancient biblical terms—the “problematic stage” of German nationalism had deprived it of the “fruitful relations” that allowed it to blossom in the past.94 Benjamin thus called German’s wish to “disavow” its contact with Hebrew its historical Stadium, a Greek word that can signify a “period of development” but also the site where a healthy, competitive agon between nations can occur. Like Benjamin, Kafka noticed how “a literature rich in talents like German” had become a victim of its own national narcissism, “where the worst writers limit their imitation to what they find at home [an das Inland halten].”95 Kafka’s interest in Hebrew literature, by contrast, was deep and transling­ uistic. Modern Hebrew connected him not only to the Jewish past—his “In­ land,” both personal and national—but also to the emergent national centers of his period where decentered forms of literary modernism were being shaped. The effect of this “small literature” on Kafka was transnational, helping him to refuse the nationalist bravado that Scholem called “demonic propaganda” and prompting him to search for a literary rejuvenation of German through crossborder contact instead.96 Rather than the style of Melitsah, which created lin­ guistic depth through allusions to traditional sources, Kafka, as Chana Kronfeld observes, turned to the trans-European resources of Hebrew modernism, where a precedent for his austere and minimal style can be found: Even if Kafka, like many of the Hebrew and Yiddish modernists of his time, did choose to resist the ornate allusive pastiche of biblical and liturgical phrases, to reject the “oneiric,” symbolic mode of premodernist engagement with Jewish literary sources, this should not be mistaken for a total rejection of Hebrew as a literary and cultural affiliation. On the contrary: this move might be precisely what



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draws Kafka so much closer to the minimalist project in the He­ brew and Yiddish modernisms that emerge in Vienna and Berlin (but also in the Moscow, Warsaw, Kiev, Tel Aviv, and New York) of Kafka’s time.97 Kafka therefore observed in 1911 that a literature “poor in component parts” such as modern Hebrew, lacking words for “telephone” or “tractor,” could “create a literary history of the record of its dead writers”—a tradition of Haskalah Hebrew to which Kronfeld refers—while turning away from “das Inland” to renew the language with lexical components from abroad. Kaf­ ka’s handwritten sixty-four-page Hebrew vocabulary list, for instance, lists the word “meltzar”—modern Hebrew for “waiter,” a new usage for a word first encountered by Daniel in Babylonia—which is a humorous entry given Kafka’s conception of Abraham as a “waiter” or servant to the orders of a foreign voice.98 When “dead writers” were not enough and modern Hebrew could not “actualize its contents,” to borrow Benjamin’s phrase, the linguis­ tic doors to other languages were indeed thrown wide open. When Kafka spoke Hebrew in an elevator in Prague, as Jìri Langer reports, its passengers were astonished that the language was alive but more surprised that a word such as matosim (airplanes), from the biblical verb “to fly,” had entered the Hebrew of the twentieth century and had already become part of its fluent, vernacular form.99 “Modern Hebrew?” (1925), Rosenzweig’s review of Klatzkin’s Hebrew translation of Spinoza, depicts the language in this same spirit of Kafkaesque life. This case of linguistic “rebirth” was therefore not described as a dead language coming back to life but rather the opposite: like Kafka’s “Hunter Gracchus,” Hebrew for Rosenzweig had never been “dead” because it had never ceased being alive. The disappearance of liturgical Hebrew as a spoken language had in this case been a blessing in disguise: without national au­ thorities to purge its vernacular form of foreign influences, such as the Acadé­ mie française, the language had been able to avoid what Rosenzweig calls the “catastrophic self-purification” (katastrophale Selbstreinigung) that the “ex­ perimental laboratories of European nationalism” had tried.100 Hebrew had “stayed alive” because it had borrowed so freely from other nations’ speech. While spoken Spanish and Arabic were flourishing over the ages, ancient He­ brew became a language into which the foreign works that blossomed from them were translated. As a result the “holy language” of the Jews had never “stiffened into something rigid and monumental,” a linguistic back door

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through which it had “always drawn strength for renewal from the spoken language, from the spoken languages of man.” In this vision modern Hebrew was not a sleeping beauty who had awakened but rather a living garment un­ dergoing constant alteration, as “numerous tongues contributed . . . to the fabric” of its voice.101 Rosenzweig here parallels Bialik’s “Halakha v’Aggada,” where Hebrew is described as sustained by translations, from “the four cap­ tives bringing the Talmud to Spain,” to “Rambam’s [Maimonides’] work,” all the way back to “the family of translators, the Tibbonites, in haste to trans­ late books of great value to the people from the foreign languages into the Hebrew tongue.”102 Walter Benjamin became the first canonical critic of Kafka to compare his narrative to this form of Hebrew, specifically the form of canonical exem­ pla known as Aggadah. In terms that have become a classic of Kafka criti­ cism, Benjamin argued that Kafka’s writings could be read as if they were Aggadic animals, or the narrative sections of the Talmud that were suppos­ edly supine before the canonical Law. These apparently docile voices sud­ denly rise up in Kafka’s texts, as Benjamin evoked them, and comically unseat the canonical standard with a different gesture and sound. “Aggadah” means “legend” or “parable” in its traditional sense, but Benjamin extends the notion in Kafka to encompass a transnational folk tradition that—unlike the idea of a national essence—refuses to lie down before any idolatrous, sin­ gular “truth” and its vision of the Law: “Kafka’s real genius was that he tried something entirely new: he sacrificed truth for the sake of clinging to its transmissibility, its haggadic element. Kafka’s writings are by their nature parables. But it is their misery, and their beauty that they had to become more than parables. They do not lie modestly at the feet of the Law, as the Hagga­ dah lies at the feet of the Halakha. Though apparently reduced to submission, they unexpectedly raise a mighty paw against it.”103 Benjamin’s introduction of Hebrew to Kafka criticism here parallels his Leskov essay, where the beauty of the Russian writer is imagined as deceptively passive as well: “the story­ teller is the man who would let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story.”104 For Benjamin, the fire of this tradition of beauty crosses boundaries and begs to be translated, like a story that cannot live in a single folklore or be stolen for the benefit of a single national “trea­ sury” alone. This “Hebrew” concept of tradition in Kafka was thus also an echo of Moses Mendelssohn, whose translation of the Hebrew Bible had been a doorway between German and Jewish linguistic forms. “True perfection,” as Mendelssohn had written, is expansive in precisely this metaphorical sense:



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“a living flame, constantly fanning out and becoming stronger and stronger the more it is able to do so.”105 According to Benjamin, it was this dynamic of the “transmissibility” of canonical truth—through elements foreign to the tradition—that the “paw” of Kafka’s texts brought into view. Derived from Bialik’s same “Halakha und Aggada,” Benjamin’s Kafka essay took its terms from Gershom Scholem’s translation from the Hebrew that appeared in Der Jude in 1919, where Kafka had published his “Two Ani­ mal Stories” two years before.106 According to Bialik’s essay, the idea of a de­ termining “Law” could never be separated from “aggada,” or narrative exempla and legends, making the “halakha” itself a source of Jewish litera­ ture. Bialik emphasizes the well-crossed boundary between law and legend by pointing to the presence of non-Hebrew languages in that figurative temple, the house of study. His example is a classic debate on which texts should be saved from the temple on the Sabbath, when the synagogue begins to burn: “Yet it often happens that one Halakic detail reveals to us a world of Aggada that is hidden within it . . . [as in] the following Halakha. ‘All books of the Holy Scriptures may be rescued from the fire on the Sabbath; if they are writ­ ten Aramaic, or any other language—Coptic, Median, or Greek—they may also be rescued; Rabbi Jose says they may not be rescued.’”107 Bialik here com­ plies with the definition of Jewish comedy that a contemporary philosopher has proposed. Jewish humor, writes Ted Cohen, “(1) . . . is the humor of out­ siders [and] (2) . . . exploits a deep and lasting concern and fascination with logic and language.”108 The debate that Bialik cites is quietly humorous be­ cause both of these conditions are met: the Talmud exposes the fact that “outsiders,” in the form of non-Jewish languages, are already present in the Temple and have become what Kafka would later call the “animal in the Synagogue.” The Halakha itself, Bialik points out, exposes the comic pres­ ence of other languages in the canon, leading to a strikingly modern form of debate. Bialik’s Jewish humor is a kind of candid camera in this passage, catching “aggadah” where it is least expected, at the center of “the teaching” (Lehre), as Benjamin calls it, and offers a snapshot of its central question: how important is the foreign to the logic of the canon as a whole? Bialik’s Zionism answers the question of the transnational with another set of questions, which expose the hidden openness of the canon that is so much like Kafka’s own. The doctrine of the Talmud, Bialik points out, does more than hide secret parables in its “judgments,” to use Kafka’s own term for the paternalistic self-image of the Law. Those parables themselves are par­ ables of the transnational conflicts that have already formed the tradition,

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and from which the apparent fixity and authoring permanence of the canon has been formed. Rather than declaim this form of hidden tradition apodicti­ cally, Bialik’s Hebrew text exposes this transnational and secular formation of religious tradition by posing a humorous, rhetorically Yiddish question within a question about the “petty, insignificant detail” of this buried, trans­ national debate: A petty detail of Halakha this, an unimportant detail, is it not so? Yet who will fail to recognize at once that this unimportant Hal­ akha presents, in extreme concision but potential fullness, a com­ plete artistic formulation of the historical and psychological relations of the various national groups to two of the most impor­ tant of the people’s possessions—its language and its literature? Who does not see that the difference of opinion in this Mishna is again the well-known “Sprachenfrage” [sic] which has continued with us from the remotest past to the present day?109 The question form in which Bialik connects national groups to the canonical nature of “language and literature” is just as important as his citation in Ger­ man of the “Sprachenfrage,” or language question, in the middle of his He­ brew essay. Bialik’s Hebrew term was “Riv Ha-Leshonot,” or the “language war,” a reference to what the national language should be in Palestine—a question Kafka was reading about in 1912 himself—but also an acknowledg­ ment of the multilingual capacities of Jews throughout the ages.110 Both refer­ ences allude to transnational voices of the tradition, connect them to the presence of a hidden “legend” inscribed in canonical writing, and thus ex­ plain why Benjamin took such care to name such “aggada” as the distin­ guishing stylistic feature of Kafka’s own texts. Like a “typical Yiddish speaker”—which he was to a large extent—Bialik “asks questions about ask­ ing questions, and shifts the questioning to the central existential question: ‘Who am I? Who are We?’” It should therefore come as no surprise that this description of his style just quoted comes not from Bialik but from Kafka criticism, when Benjamin Harshav exemplifies the semiotics of Yiddish com­ munication in this questioning mode with citations from a late Kafka text.111 As Benjamin’s “paw” of Aggadah suggests, Kafka’s style manages a sys­ tematic exposure of canonical sources that are deemed primitive, performing a kind of “déja vu all over again,” to borrow Yogi Berra’s phrase. The foreign dialogues that help create a national language can be exposed in the Law, as



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Bialik suggests, but also can be brought to life by such vernacular speakers, who—not having learned to mask them—bring the unnoticed riches of the national language to light. “Before the Law” performs a parable of such trans­ national influence, first in the figure of its “man from the country”—trans­ lated from “am-ha-aretz” in Kafka’s source and meaning a rustic unfamiliar with the ritual practices of the Temple in ancient Jerusalem; in the Yiddish that Kafka used in his diary, it meant an ignoramus or fool.112 This trans­ national effect is also signaled in the figure of the doorkeeper, who guards the entrance to the canonical Law while wearing a “tartar beard.” The doorway to Kafka’s canon here is not the tragic, money-changing Temple of Christianity, but a mockery of the textual ignorance behind such a charge.113 Engaging in Talmudic dialectic or pilpul in a cathedral, the priest speaks with a symboli­ cally Jewish accent, of which he remains blissfully unaware. Kafka’s doorway is in this way the boundary zone of commentary—an “allegory of textual production,” as Henry Sussman calls the parable—where one language comes into contact with another. Like the “Tatar” invaders St. Louis of France vowed to send to “Tartarus” in 1270, Kafka’s gatekeeper is a reminder of the outsiders who came “before the Law” and were incorporated into the Western tradition under different names.114 Kafka’s Zionist circle in Prague reflected this same Jewish, antinational­ ist perspective. “Before the Law” was first published in Selbstwehr, the Zion­ ist weekly in Prague edited by his friends, many of whom would go on to found the Brit Shalom movement in Palestine. Supported by the active jour­ nalistic work of Gershom Scholem, Brit Shalom was a Zionist movement in existence until 1933 that argued for a “nonnationalist nationalism” and for a binational state in Palestine. Walter Benjamin considered its positions the only “waterproof corner of Zionism,” as he wrote Scholem in 1931.115 The movement was supported by Hugo Bergmann, Kafka’s close friend from Prague and a founder of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and by Hans Kohn, his ­fellow Gymnasium classmate. The political program Brit Shalom was also cultural—“carrying the banner of Ahad Ha-Am,” as Scholem wrote ­Benjamin—and came to represent the Zionist movement’s extreme left wing. Brit Shalom argued for coexistence in Palestine and regarded “Jewish-Arab cooperation as an alternative to the European model of national sover­ eignty.”116 As a result the group drew the fire of mainstream Zionists, and in the hurly-burly of Palestinian politics, Scholem’s circle had been subjected to definitions “in accordance with which we would, strictly speaking, automa­ tically no longer appear as ‘Zionists’” at all. “We are reproaching them with

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reactionary policy toward the Arabs,” as Scholem wrote to Benjamin. The result most feared by Scholem in 1931 was that an increasingly strident Zion­ ism would destroy the “legitimate concealment” in which transnational con­ tact takes place, and thus the space where the “procreation” of a national culture occurs.117 Kafka was—aside from his plans to go to Palestine—a Zionist avant la lettre in these terms. “There can be no doubt,” as Ritchie Robertson puts it, “that by 1916 Kafka had developed powerful Zionist sympathies, though his attitude toward the movement was an unorthodox and individualistic one,” an accurate description of the figures in Brit Shalom in all but name.118 Scho­ lem therefore referred to Kafka as a “Zionist” in his 1931 letter to Benjamin, a reference whose full political and cultural ramifications are better understood if Brit Shalom is recalled as a forerunner of the later Israeli movement Peace Now. As a theorist of open tradition, Scholem told Benjamin that “Kafka’s position was not in the continuum of German literature,” in a gesture in­ tended to rescue Kafka from the rising tide of German nationalism of 1938 but also to distinguish his definition from the more doctrinaire versions of Zionism that surged in response. Scholem had thus deemed Kafka a Zionist in the same intellectual spirit in which he “regarded Jewish history as an or­ ganic process of confrontation between the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds.”119 Brit Shalom’s program of cosovereignty with the Arabic-speaking population, however, had put it at the left-wing fringe of the Zionist movement, making “Kafka’s linguistic world” decisive for Scholem, for it represented a tradition in fiction that could no longer be achieved in the political realm.120 Kafka thus became his emblem of the Zionism that had “triumphed in Berlin,” where Kafka died in 1924, when it could “no longer be victorious in Jerusa­ lem,” where by 1938 only hostile “propaganda” prevailed. Kafka’s letters of 1913 express an awareness of the Brit Shalom position yet to come, especially where such transnational contact was concerned. After attending the eleventh Zionist convention in Vienna in 1913, Kafka wrote to Felice Bauer of the “German speeches without any result” and the “much Hebrew” that was spoken.121 The issue discussed that day was what the lan­ guage of instruction would be at the new university, the Technion, then being planned for Haifa. Kafka’s attention was immediately drawn to the “former director of the Gymnasium in Jaffa,” as he tells Felice; this refers to the Her­ zeliya Gymnasium, where the question of the proper national language for instruction was first debated in what came to be known as the “Language



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War” in Palestine. The convention turned on this question of language, and for Kafka, the most relevant content emerged from the Ahad-Ha-Amist or cultural Zionist position, especially his support for Hebrew as the language of instruction in the Jaffa schools that the convention discussed. When he met Felice Bauer in 1912, Kafka had been carrying a copy of Ha-Am’s “Die Lehre der Tatsachen” in his volume of Palästina, where the issue had been defined. The opposite position was represented by Morris Rosenfeld, the “sweatshop poet” from New York, whose poetry Kafka introduced in his lecture on Yiddish delivered in Prague in February 1912.122 Between these Hebrew and Yiddish poles, Kafka’s comments to Felice show his discontent with linguistic nation­ alism: “I sat in the Zionist Congress as if it were an event totally alien to me, felt myself cramped and distracted by much that went on.”123 These com­ ments well reflect Kafka’s politics and linguistics at once; the word Kafka uses for “cramped” is “beengt,” or “made too narrow,” as if the positions of both the pro- and anti-Hebrew factions were too confining for the reality of transnational forms of expression that enlivened the hall. This Jewish comedy appears in Kafka’s letter, which mentions spitballs being shot from the balcony. A more subtle laughter emerges when the dele­ gate Stapolsky identifies multilingual European Jewry as a barrier that the nation in Palestine had to overcome: “We find this sad phenomenon [Erschei­ nung] in many Palestinian schools as well: a Babel-like confusion of lan­ guages [babylonische Sprachenverwirrung], in which our young charges [Zöglinge] don’t understand each other at all.”124 Such serious arguments im­ mediately undercut their own linguistic nationalism in the form in which they had to be advanced, since all speeches at the convention required trans­ lation from the opening gavel. The convention thus began in German, with a motion by the Palestinian delegation that all speeches should be immediately translated into Hebrew. The idea was immediately challenged with the counter­ motion that “all speech also be translated into Yiddish as well,” a proposal that was met with “unrest” and “intermittent cries.”125 In this situation lin­ guistic nationalism became the straight man; the punch line came with the mention of the “Babylonian confusion” that filled the hall. As in Kafka’s later aphorism—“We are digging the pit of Babel”—the curse that Hebrew na­ tionalism saw in European languages had been reversed.126 In the uninten­ tional comedy of the convention, Zionism exposed Kafka to transnational contact as a mine of the nation’s literary wealth, preparing him for reflection on its lively traces in German’s most prestigious literary voice.

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German’s Hidden Accents: Goethe’s Jewish Voices I am beginning to write the lecture [on Yiddish] for Löwy’s perfor­ mance. It is on Sunday the 18th . . . I read sentences of Goethe’s as though my whole body were running down the stresses. —Kafka, diary entry, February 13, 1912

Zionism provided Kafka with one of the keys he needed to unlock the hidden openness of canonical writing in his own terms, and so to define the place of a German Jewish writer such as himself within German canon. Thus when Kafka wrote to Max Brod in 1921 that what German Jewish writers had produced was “not really German literature” and was the product of their “despair,” he did not mean that Jewish writers were not German but the opposite, driving Jewish writers such as Moritz Goldstein and Jakob Wasserman meshugge (crazy), as Kafka used the word in his unsent letter to his father; the administrators of its canon had a hard time ever admitting the debt of their language to the Yiddish, Hebrew, and other national traditions that gave Goethe’s language a hidden force.127 German Jewish writing thus became what Kafka called a “literature impossible in all respects” when viewed with a fixation on the national present in mind. The great achievement of German Jewish writers, by contrast, was for Kafka their ability to remind canonical German of its coformation by other national traditions, by recalling its hidden “foreign” accent, as it were. To Brod, Kafka symbolizes this restorative dimension as the critical, “gypsy” function that their best writing could produce: “A literature impossible in all respects, gypsy literature which had stolen the German child out of its cradle and in great haste put it through some kind of training, for someone has to dance on the tightrope. (But it wasn’t even a German child, it was nothing; people merely said that somebody was dancing) [breaks off].”128 German Jewish writing for Kafka denationalizes German linguistic identity—“it wasn’t even a German child, it was nothing”—by pointing out the relational “essence” of identity it­ self. The “German” child is symbolically taught that writing is a tightrope per­ formance, dependent on the resources of many different “people” (Leute), as in the Hebrew parable of “Five Friends,” and not a single “Volk.” The “German” language is being figuratively retrained in this passage not to “look down,” as it were, from its tightrope; the German Jewish writer’s task, for Kafka, was to take the “German child” from the false cradle of his singular national Heimat and allow it to explore its transnational depths just below. “Each piece of my story,” he wrote in 1911, “runs about without a homeland and drives me in an



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opposed direction: I can be happy, if this formulation is correct” (so aber lauft jedes Stückchen der Geschichte heimatlos herum und treibt mich in die entge­ gengesetzte Richtung.—Dabei kann ich noch froh sein, wenn diese Erklärung richtig ist).129 Kafka’s obsessive reading of Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit during the composition of his “Talk on the Yiddish Language” is thus no accident. In Yid­ dish, Kafka found a canonical language in formation—without as yet any regu­ larized spelling or pronunciation—where the national boundary construction modeled on a standard author was still very much in process. As a result Yiddish still breathed with the openness of the different vocabularies and syntax that had formed it, an openness that was not yet hidden by the canonical shame at foreign origins that becomes the bane of high culture. Sholem Aleichem, for instance, had argued in 1888 for a limited kind of Jewish incorporation of the “foreign” words that Yiddish needed from languages of established, high cul­ tural status. “We believe that it is not superfluous to introduce foreign words into Yiddish, but only such words which are indispensable for the literature, e.g. ‘poezye,’ ‘kritik,’ ‘yubileum,’ ‘beletristic,’ ‘ortografye,’ ‘fanatizm,’ ‘komizm,’ etc. Never mind, we may not be ashamed of it: nicer languages have more than hundreds and thousands of foreign words in their vocabularies.”130 We do not know if Kafka was aware of this passage, though his diary does link Sholem Aleichem’s name with the practice of feting the anniversaries of famous writers in Yiddish culture, and it uses the word “Jubiläum,” which Aleichem helped bring into the Yiddish tongue.131 The normal situation of such assimilation of a foreign word, of course, is a kind of forgetting of its origin in a different lan­ guage, as with the English word “restaurant,” for instance, which—much to the disadvantage of many English-speaking cultures—no longer carries any cul­ tural memory of French cuisine. In Yiddish this process of assimilating words from different languages was still unhidden by the canonical wet blanket of a standard grammar. For Kafka, the only difference between Yiddish and other European languages was that Yiddish words retained a flavorful, “zaftig” memory of the national borders they had crossed in order to enter the emerging language of their own: “It consists solely of foreign words [Fremdwörter]. But these words do not remain at rest within it [ruhen in ihm nicht], they retain the speed and liveliness with which they were adopted. Great Migrations move through Yiddish, from one end to the other. All this German, Hebrew, French, ­English, Slavonic, Dutch, Rumanian, and even Latin, is seized with curiosity and frivolity once it is contained within Yiddish, and it takes a good deal of

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strength to hold all of these languages together in this state.”132 Every word was “foreign” in Yiddish, in other words, because no written standard had yet been established that could separate the Yiddish from the external implant. This was a period of formation that Kafka admired as a healthy state of devel­ opment: “It has no grammars,” as he puts it; “Devotees try to write them, but Yiddish [Jargon] remains a spoken language in continuous flux [er kommt nicht zur Ruhe].” Yiddish’s “Kraft,” or power, was symbolized by this lack of consensus. The absence of an official, standardized form of Yiddish, compa­ rable in some way to “new High German,” created a boundary zone of lin­ guistic creation, where popular usage, marked by regional variation and personal taste, could create a dialogue between an emerging, official standard and the multilingual experience of Yiddish speakers, who were almost by def­ inition speakers of other languages as well. “The people,” as he put it, “will not leave it to the grammarians.”133 Yiddish helped Kafka reconceive the canonized Goethe, whom he loved, as a false boundary construction that impoverished the German language of its own transnational origins. Kafka’s planned essay of January 1912, entitled “Goethes entsetzliches Wesen,” or “Goethe’s Repulsive Essence,” was most likely an attack on the idea of an organic national language. An older “German” tradition of Hebrew and Yiddish provided Kafka with one example: on his bookshelf stood the volume Der junge Goethe, which contained not only the young Goethe’s handwritten Hebrew exercises but also his version of a Yiddish “sermon,” a comic performance piece from his Leipzig days known as the “­Judenpredigt.”134 Likewise the Dichtung und Wahrheit, which Kafka read so carefully, recounts Goethe’s trips to the Judengasse, his Yiddish lessons, and Goethe’s composition, now lost, of a Yiddish section in a five-language episto­ lary novel he wrote as a child. Hence Kafka’s pointed reference to Goethe’s “entsetzliches Wesen”: the establishment of a canonical writer, as the “essence” of his people, as Goethe was called early on, necessarily requires a repulsion— more literally, the attempt to “set” or “setzt” one part of one’s linguistic “es­ sence” against the other—rather than enjoyment of the transnational voices that formed the canonical style. Thus when Kafka interprets Goethe’s silhou­ ette, during his composition of his “Talk on the Yiddish Language,” he discov­ ers a kind of shadow figure, “put together” (zusammengesetzt) with a “side impression of something repulsive” (Nebeneindruck des Widerlichen). The sil­ houette of a bewigged Goethe is repulsive for Kafka in his diary in both the lit­ eral and figurative senses of the word—a canonical shadow figure that overwrites the writer’s German Jewish voice, formed in his other Yiddish compositions,



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Yiddish and Hebrew lessons, and frequent trips to the Judengasse in Frankfurt as a boy. In the Dichtung und Wahrheit Goethe describes himself as seeking out chances to converse with the Jewish residents, though he was at other times car­ rying out errands for his Uncle Textor, who had business of his own in the Yid­ dish-speaking streets.135 In his 1846 lecture on the Deutsches Wörterbuch, Wilhelm Grimm recalled Goethe describing the “animal” sound of his own accent: “the growl of the bear always keeps the sound of the lair where he was born” (der Bär brummt nach der Höhle, in der er geboren ist).136 Grimm’s anecdote was an overwriting of Hein­ rich Heine’s Ludwig Börne (1840), which described Goethe’s Frankfurt German as “mauscheln,” or speaking German with “a remnant of Jewish idioms and Jewish intonations,” as Max Weinreich defines the term.137 In an example of Walter Benjamin’s insight that tradition is always discontinuous, the Deutsches Wörterbuch uses Heine’s description of Goethe’s Frankfurt accent as a proof text but edits the passage in a way that leaves out Goethe’s name. Kafka, un­ like many German Jews of his generation, loved Heine—enough, in fact, to read his poems at work with the door closed with his “Direktor,” while those with the “most urgent affairs” waited outside.138 If he did peruse the entry on “mauscheln” in the Grimm Dictionary, Kafka was well positioned to appreciate the comedy behind the cult that declared Goethe to be the “blossom and fruit of the German essence [Wesen]” in the year of his death, creating what Benja­ min called “the canon that corresponds to the life of a demigod,” albeit one who knew how to turn a Jewish phrase.139 The sound of Yiddish that Goethe called the “Akzent einer unerfreulichen Sprache” in Dichtung und Wahrheit was a precursor to Kafka’s own analysis of “mauscheln,” which he offered in a letter on German Jewish writing to Max Brod.140 Kafka’s subject was a play by Karl Kraus, but his comment that follows answers equally well to Goethe’s “Judenpredigt,” whose jaunty refrain asks in a Jewish accent the question: “Nu, so what do you think about that?” (’No was sogt ehr dozu?): “This is not to say anything against mauscheln—in itself it is even beautiful [schön]. It is an organic compound of bookish German with pantomime—(How expressive this is: ‘So he’s got talent? Who says?’ Or this, jerking the arm out of its socket and tossing up the chin: You think so? Or this, scraping the knees together: ‘He writes? Who about?’). What we have here is the product of a sensitive feeling for language which has recognized that in German, only the dialects are really alive.”141 The real humor of this passage ex­ tends beyond Kraus, whose German Kafka admires, and even beyond Yiddish, whose intonations Kraus has comically brought into theatrical performance.

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Here, Kafka refers to the saturation of standard language by dialect, foreign material, and gesture as the hidden secret that enlivens the most canonical prose. “Literature, or, We’ll Have to See about That” (1921), the title of the Kraus play in question, in this way questions the distinction of literary language, to which Kafka’s letter to Brod is the reply. “Only the most individual High Ger­ man [Hochsprache] is alive,” Kafka responds, when it learns to embody and enjoy the “dialectical” expressivity and the gestures of other nations, on which a less fluent High German looks down. As Goethe put it in his “Deutsche Sprache,” an essay that explains Kafka’s appreciation of “mauscheln” well, “it follows from the previous, that the German remains true to himself, and that, only when he speaks with foreign tongues.”142 Kafka had worked out this transnational theory of canonical language much earlier. His “Talk on the Yiddish Language” of 1912 gives examples of the ties between German and Yiddish that challenged his audience’s notion of lan­ guage as a self-contained national affair. Kafka uses material liberally from Charles Andler’s “Preface” to Meyer Pines’s recently published history of the Yiddish language and its literature. We know of Kafka’s excitement at having discovered such a source, since he recorded it in his diary just before writing his lecture: “read, and indeed, greedily, Pines’s Histoire de la littérature JudéoAllemande, 500 pages, with such thoroughness, haste, and joy as I have never yet shown in the case of similar books,” a comment that suggests Kafka’s back­ ground in the other sources.143 The word “Hochsprache” used by Kafka, for in­ stance, had been “coined by German philologists” and was a term for the standard form of a language that signified its accepted, grammatical form in writing as well as speech: “not only the written language but also the spoken, everyday language of the educated classes.”144 From Andler’s discussion of Mor­ ris Rosenfeld, Kafka learned that standard German and Yiddish had once shared the same linguistic forms. His examples in the “Preface” to Histoire de la littérature Judéo-Allemande allowed Kafka to open up this concept of the “Hoch­ sprache” and rethink the isolated self-understanding in transnational terms: “One is surprised to find in Rosenfeld diminutives such as Lippelach, Ægelach, Vœgelach, Bæumlach, Bœttlach, Bettlach, Wolkenlach. And in the ghettos of the Alsace, one hears forms such as Knœpflisch, Gænslich, Tüchlisch. More than one German speaks derisively of these word forms. He believes he has defined them sufficiently by detesting them as a Mauscheln that is detestable and vulgar as well.”145 Andler’s vision of standard German uses “mauscheln” as a kind of invol­ untary form of linguistic memory, underlying Kafka’s own sense of the term. In hearing phonetic forms that German and Yiddish shared, the German speaker is



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figuratively transported back in time to the boundary zone of historical linguis­ tics, when Middle High German included what would later be seen as either Jewish or German linguistic forms.146 Both German and Yiddish had emerged from this same linguistic space and had shared the same “foreign” accent, which Yiddish still preserved in its contemporary vernacular form.147 Kafka’s 1921 ac­ count is therefore making fun not of the Jewish voice in German—though Karl Kraus can be hilarious—but of the snobbery that views such mutual exchange as a tragedy, rather than the activity that keeps the “Hochsprache” fresh and expressive: “all the rest, the linguistic middle ground, is nothing but embers, which can only be brought to a semblance of life when excessively lively Jewish hands rummage through them. That is a fact, funny or terrible as you like.”148 According to Kafka, this “mauscheln,” when “taken in the broadest sense [in weitesten Sinne]—and that is the only sense in which it should be taken”— represents the trade-offs between German and Jewish voices that make a mock­ ery of stale and overly monumental prose. In German as in other standard languages, “only the dialects are really alive” for Kafka, because the standard form of the language has become afraid of the “other” within the linguistic self and ceased to import new material from other national tongues. The back­ ground text to Kafka’s theory of healthy literary language is thus the full pas­ sage from Heine, quoted partially in the Grimm Dictionary entry, where the exchange between German and Jewish traders in the Frankfurt marketplace becomes an extended metaphor for the treasure of Goethe’s literary voice: here the noble class of businessmen assembles, and engages in wheeling and dealing [schachert] with its mosaic [mauscheln] ac­ cent. What those of us from Northern Germany actually call Mauscheln is nothing other than the actual spoken language of the Frankfurt region, and it is spoken splendidly by the uncircumcised and circumcised alike. Börne spoke this jargon rather poorly, al­ though he, like Goethe, could never fully disown this native dia­ lect. I have noticed that people from Frankfurt who have kept their distance from any sort of business concerns [Handelsinteressen], were in the end able to unlearn this Frankfurt accent that we in Northern Germany, as I’ve said, call Mauscheln.149 The many-faceted pleasures of this passage work by way of shifting levels of linguistic identification, enacting the exchange of Jewish and German language that the Frankfurt market so richly represents. The “dialect” that Goethe can

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“never fully disown” is thus both more and less than Yiddish: far less than a flu­ ent mastery of the language and far more than any denunciation of Jewish lan­ guage, as “mauscheln” here represents the fact that “only the dialects are really alive,” as Kafka says of German, in any form of the national voice. Trade in Heine’s passage in this sense effects “the circumcised and uncircumcised por­ tion of the population alike,“ in the broadest sense, robbing, as it were, Goethe’s classical voice of false distinction, since “languages have constantly been adopt­ ing words, sounds and sentence structures from neighboring dialects of other languages,” as the linguist John McWhorter notes.150 The liberating humor conveyed by circumcision in Heine likewise suggests that Goethe, like any writer who sets the national standard, is more or less marked by such linguistic “hondel”—the Yiddish word for “bargaining” and “negotiation”—whether that acumen echoes in the standard pronunciation or not. Kafka’s letter to Brod defines more and less pronounced versions of this transnational exchange. In the “broadest sense,” as he writes, “mauscheln con­ sists of a bumptious, tacit, or self-pitying appropriation of someone else’s prop­ erty, something not earned, but stolen by means of a relatively casual gesture. Yet it remains someone else’s property, even though there is no evidence of a single solecism.” Kafka thus describes the most audible form of accented Ger­ man as open borrowing, which leads to a specific kind of shoplifting of the liter­ ary voice. Here we can recognize the Commedia dell’arte style that imitates different national accents—a process of “stealing someone else’s property” that the young Goethe saw as part of his hope for the German language. In his Urmeister, for instance, the draft for Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship that was dis­ covered in 1910 and advertised in a volume in Kafka’s library, Goethe describes a theatrical style that would now be called “ethnic humor,” in which the actors are indeed “bumptious” in their use of “gesture” to capture national inflections and “self-pitying” in the romance style they effect: it occurred to them to imitate the characters of various types and ev­ eryone picked out something special for himself. The one presented an inebriate, the second, a Pomeranian nobleman, one a Lower Saxon boatman, the other a Jew, and when Wilhelm and Mme. Melina could find nothing for themselves because they were not very prac­ ticed in imitation, Mme. De Retti said in jest, “You can simply play enamored lovers, for this is surely a universal talent” . . . [the] lovers were to speak high German, and to come from upper Saxony.151



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“What German writer,” the directress of this theater declares, “has thanked us for our efforts to this very day,” since the accents of every “homeland and language” (Heimat und Sprache) found their way into their literary treasury through similar forms of exchange. In this particular mise-en-scène, the postal carriage is symbolic of national language as a traveling discourse, cre­ ating an ensemble of different social accents voiced through imitative theft. In Kafka’s terms, this formative theater trades in a German that is “some­ thing not earned, but stolen, by means of a casual gesture,” with the charac­ ters’ accents present even when “not the slightest linguistic error can be noticed,” as the “High German” (Hochdeutsch) of Goethe’s lovers has al­ ready announced. The German of Goethe’s Urmeister appears in its original form as what Kafka’s letter to Brod would describe as a “stolen” or at least imitated set of accents, raised to the level of an art. Kafka’s humor about Goethe revises this ideal of art as embodying a na­ tion’s essence, especially the implicit one in which he had been schooled. When he was a student, “On the Essence of Fairy Tales” (Über das Wesen der Märchen) had been given special attention in Kafka’s gymnasium class.152 There the Brothers Grimm define their folkloric collection as follows: “it knows neither [place] names or specific regions, nor any particular homeland [Heimat], but rather the common possession of the Fatherland as a whole” (1819).153 Confronting this idea that literature expresses the inheritance of a single nation or people allowed Kafka to take his place in what Ruth Wisse accurately calls “the Jewish canon” in her book by the same name, not by turning his back on German literature but by grasping the linguistic bound­ ary zone where the most eloquent forms of canonical writing are formed. Kafka thus wrote to Oskar Pollak in 1902 that the adjective “national,” when applied to Goethe, is not so much tasteless as deeply ironic: what you write about the Goethe National Museum seems to me totally twisted and wrong. You went there filled with conceits and schoolboy ideas, and began right off by griping about the name. Now I think the name “museum” is good, but “national” seems to me even better, not at all tasteless or sacrilegious or anything of the sort, as you write, but the subtlest, most marvelously subtle irony. For what you write about the study, your holy of holies, is again nothing more than a conceit and a schoolboy idea [Schulgedanke] with a dash of German lit. [Germanistik]—may it roast in hell.154

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The idea of Goethe’s study and desk as a monument to Goethe in a “national museum” should be funny, Kafka suggests, given the “marvelous irony” of Goethe’s Yiddish compositions, outlined in Dichtung und Wahrheit and thus in the most canonical sense. Like accents, such humor is often hidden by the worship that turns the author into a national shrine. For a comically inclined Kafka, the better Goethe “monument” would be the “footprints of his soli­ tary walks through the countryside,” since crossing the landscape for Goethe also meant engaging in the vaudeville or “Cabaret” imitations of the different national accents he enjoyed on his jaunts.155 This is the “vortrefflicher Witz,” Kafka tells Pollak, that makes “the Lord God cry with bitterness, and Hell itself laugh until its sides bursts: that we can never have the holy of holies of a foreigner [eines Fremden], only the one that is our own.”

Kafka’s Linguistic Turn The Jewish mother is no “Mutter”; to call her “Mutter” makes her a little comic, but not to herself (because we are in Deutschland). —Kafka, diary entry, October 24, 1911

Kafka’s Austrian concept of “greater Germany” is therefore best described as a refusal or inability to laugh, and a failure of what we could call Jewish humor, given his later definition of Yiddish as a language with “great migrations” mov­ ing through it: the ability to enjoy the foreign as a living presence in one’s mother tongue.156 This silent humor in Kafka is part of the hidden effect of his fiction, its ability to expose other languages as present within the apparently solemn reverence of a German that seems, to most readers, to speak without any regional or national accent at all. Kafka’s “Prague German,” as it has come to be known, was a language inflected by the “Three Peoples” who had populated the city since the Middle Ages.157 That verbal richness had been driven beneath the surface. The metaphor used by one of Kafka’s contemporaries, the philosopher Fritz Mauthner, was that of speaking a language without a “Muttersprache,” or mother tongue, as he called it: “my linguistic conscience, my linguistic critique was sharpened,” as he put it, “that I could regard not only German, but also Czech and Hebrew as the language of ‘forefathers,’ and that I had the corpses of these three languages to carry around with me in the words that I used.”158 Mauthner’s definition of a German inhabited by the linguistic ghosts—the liv­ ing dead—of other nations has been taken to suggest that Prague German was



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impoverished. It would be more accurate to say that it was far too serious in the way that the nationalism of the ruling German minority—exercised against the Czech and Jewish linguistic communities—silenced the comic and liberating influences of other languages on the High German tongue. The German of Prague could be said to be rich with other accents prematurely buried, though they had not perished in Mauthner’s terms. Kafka’s Prague German was full of dead metaphors, as it were, waiting to be brought back to life. In keeping with Mauthner’s black humor, the theories of Prague German that derive from it oscillate between two comically estranged alternatives. At one extreme, the German of Kafka’s Prague was conceived as a chatty, bastard­ ized mixture of languages, in which Kucheldeutsch (kitchen German) was mixed by a Czech-speaking servant class into German together with Yiddish into a kind of Mrs. Malaprop speech of transnational dimensions.159 The oppo­ site extreme considered Prague German a tote Sprache (dead language), a con­ cept that Mauthner helped bring into Kafka criticism. Here the same German was seen to be an official language—an Amtsdeutsch or the official German of the Austrian Empire—isolated from surrounding dialects and languages in its attempt to sustain a national purity. Hence Mauthner’s feeling that he had grown up without a Mundart (vernacular voice). Prague German was either felt to be a “language island,” or Sprachinsel, of a dry, “paper German”—a phrase that Mauthner gave currency—or a mixture of Czech, German, and the inheri­ tance of Yiddish that was present at home. The study of German literature that Kafka undertook at the University of Prague, in turn, promoted a “greater Ger­ many” sense of nationalism preached by August Sauer, whose “intellectualized racism” must have seemed humorous to the Kafka who wrote Oskar Pollak that such Germanistik should “roast in hell.” “I was positively living,” as Kafka described his university German studies, “in an intellectual sense, on sawdust, which had, moreover, already been chewed for me in thousands of other people’s mouths” (geistig förmlich von Holzmehl nährte, das mir überdies schon von tausenden Mäulern vorgekaut war).160 The linguistics of Jacob Grimm had downplayed the foreign contributions that had enlivened German, and turned them into a predigested literary screen. Karl Kraus’s ironic comment that “origin is the goal” in this sense well describes Grimm’s search for an original German essence that would suppress the reality of transnational linguistic exchange. In describing the emergence of German from the welter of European linguistic contact, Grimm classically imagined the sound of the language not only as replacing “the Roman Empire” in the linguis­ tic register but also as paralleling its political advance across Europe: “The

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Roman Empire had decisively lost its strength after the end of the first cen­ tury . . . and the invincible German race [Volk] was becoming ever more viv­ idly aware of its unstoppable advance into all parts of Europe . . . how could such a forceful mobilization of the race [Volk] have failed to stir up its language at the same time, jolting it out of its traditional rut and exalting it? Does there not lie a certain courage and pride in the strengthening of the voiceless stop and voiceless stop in fricative?”161 Kafka’s linguistic training was opposed to this dour nationalism, projected back onto the Germanic tribes. In Hermann Paul’s text that Kafka was taught in his Gymnasium years, the “Volk” or race was more than such a humorless abstraction; it was a bar to understanding how the individual speaker was already saturated by transnational influences in his every­day exchanges, especially in the periods of colonial advance that Grimm describes here. Such linguistic mixture occurred in the contact between the dif­ ferent idiolects carried by every single speaker, as well as in the dialects and languages supported by larger linguistic groups. “If we start by assuming that individual languages are the only ones which have any real existence,” as Paul puts it in his chapter entitled “On Mixture in Language” (Sprachmischung), in perhaps the most neglected source in Kafka studies as a whole, “we are justified in asserting that as soon as any two individuals converse, a mixture in language is the result.”162 Kafka’s humorous claim to Brod that “in German, only the dialects are re­ ally alive” is thus more than a throwaway remark. It implies a comic theory of canonical language that takes an accurate measure of language mixture and individual idiolect and extends them into the domain of literary and cultural criticism as a whole. Kafka’s “Jewish hands” who find life in German’s canoni­ cal “embers” are “dialectical” thinkers and comedians in just this sense: comic rediscoverers of the Sprachmischung (linguistic mixture) that, though often hid­ den, always results from speakers who transit between different dialectal and national forms. Kafka saw the German Jewish writers as performers existen­ tially aware of this phenomenon, as his portrait of the artist as a family animal suggests: “Most young Jews who began to write German wanted to leave Juda­ ism [Judentum] behind them, and their fathers approved of this, but vaguely (this vagueness was what was outrageous to them). But with their little back legs they were still glued to their fathers’ Judaism, and with their front legs they found no new ground. The ensuing despair became their inspiration.”163 This incomplete leap from the “Judaism of the fathers” to standard German, reached for with the paws of assimilation, is funnier than Benjamin’s “criticism of the concept of progress,” though equally committed to the alien content of the



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past.164 The jump away from origins, this miniparable suggests, is at the same time an unsuccessful leap into forgetfulness. The Jewish writer’s tiger spring is in this sense only a version of the acrobatics that every standard language se­ cretly performs, leaping away from its multiple origins in a way that resembles a vaudeville show. The “despair” of these Jewish performers is to not be recog­ nized as canonical culture, and thus denied any “new ground.” Their glory, as Kafka suggests, is the “inspiration” with which writers of his generation drew strength from their own “animal” voices. Kafka’s beautiful image portrays these silently comic performers as an­ chored in the Jewish linguistic sources and thus reaching beyond them, a vi­ sion to be more fully depicted in “Researches of a Dog,” Kafka’s investigation of his own German style. In The Meaning of Yiddish, Benjamin Harshav rightfully calls this story a “cleverly veiled allegory of the Jewish condition.”165 In it a researcher-artist figure discovers a group of “music-dogs” who conjure their performance out of thin air, much like the German Jewish vaudeville animals depicted in Kafka’s letter to Brod: They did not speak, they did not sing, they remained generally si­ lent, almost determinedly silent: but from the empty air they con­ jured music. Everything was music: the lifting and setting down of their feet, certain turns of the head, their running and their stand­ ing still, the positions they took in relation to one another, the sym­ metrical patterns which they produced by one dog setting his front paws on the back of another of the other six and the rest following suit until the first bore the weight of the other six . . . I was pro­ foundly confused by the sounds that accompanied them, yet they were dogs nevertheless, dogs like you and me.166 The hilarious description of these animals “like us” is an excellent example of how Kafka’s linguistics, with its Jewish theological substrate, comes together in the “animal vigor” beneath the surface of canonical speech. The “music” these primitive animals produce acts out the process of creation in bodily language, given life by performers who number seven and whose production is also a kind of rest: a gesture is taken by one animal, given support by an­ other, and thus a symbolically different inflection, and so becomes part of the communal “act.” Hence the accurate critical perception that these music dogs represent Kafka’s encounter with the Yiddish—Kafka’s window on the pro­ cess of a language in creation, and the stimulus for his evocation of German’s

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hidden, transnational “sounds.” After starving himself as a hunger artist, Kafka’s narrator experiences the canine music of the story as the ongoing process of linguistic creation, taking place in the “air” before him, indepen­ dent of any essential, single homeland or ground. We can see this humor at work in Kafka’s otherwise puzzling comment to Milena Jensenska, his Czech translator and lover, that Max Brod “had no homeland [Heimat].” Kafka wrote her on June 12, 1920, “Yes, you too don’t understand me, the ‘Jewish question’ was just a dumb joke.”167 Kafka makes fun of the German expression here and sheds light on some of his harsh statements toward his own people in some of these letters. Kafka’s technique, as he explains it to Milena here, has been misunderstood. Rather than condemning the Jews, he has been making fun of the Judenfrage that places Jews beyond the pale of German language and literature, or even a nation of their own. The real stupid­ ity for Kafka belongs to the refusal to grasp a nation’s transnational sources, and thus to disavow the witty dialects and humorous voices of which they are com­ posed. This is what Kafka means about Milena having a Heimat in the Czech nationalism she supports: “You have your homeland,” he writes her with biting humor, “and thus you can give it up; perhaps that’s the best thing one can do with a homeland, especially since one can never really give up the part of the homeland that cannot be done without.”168 Kafka’s longing ironically plays on Nietzsche’s verse on Germany, with its well-known image of crows, the mean­ ing of Kavka in Czech—“woe to him who has no homeland [Heimat]”169—by redefining the notion of homeland. What is to be “done without” is this very “German” notion of national and linguistic exclusivity that denies the different dialects and nations of which “home” is actually composed. What should be given up, Kafka wittily notes, is not the concept of Heimat—and its indispens­ able feeling of belonging—but the concept of homeland as national and lin­ guistic entity whose borders have been irrevocably closed. Kafka’s comic definition of the Heimat (linguistic homeland), was in this way very much like the distinction between language and dialect given by the most famous Yiddish linguist of the twentieth century, Max Weinreich: “A lan­ guage is a dialect with an army and a navy” (A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot).170 In Kafka’s similar paradigm, a language began to feel “dead” precisely when it acquired this national status as language, as an entity capable of policing its linguistic boundaries and preventing the open immigration policy of a language such as Yiddish to enliven a language by opening its doors. “It is com­ prised,” Kafka declared of Yiddish in 1912, using exaggeration before his Ger­ man Jewish audience to make his point stronger, “only of foreign words



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[Fremdwörter].”171 Kafka’s “Talk” was at this point only anticipating the insight of later twentieth-century linguistics—that the standard form of a language is simply a dialect elevated to determining status over the other dialect forms spo­ ken within a geographic area, some of which may be comprehensible and some far less so to speakers of the “standard” tongue. There is, for instance, only a gradual shift in German dialects as one moves from the German Heimat to Hol­ land, for example. At some indistinguishable point, the dialects of German shade off into more Dutch-sounding expressions. Only the national boundary and the imposition—often by force—of a particular dialect as the “national” standard keep the endless linguistic traffic, or “unendlicher Verkehr,” as the final two words of “The Judgment” call it, from coming through.172 Kafka developed this notion of canonical language as a boundary zone in his February 1912 lecture, reminding his audience that Yiddish was “the youngest European language.” Not until the mid-1920s would YIVO, the Yiddish equivalent of the Académie française, be founded simultaneously in Vilna and Berlin and undertake the task of giving Yiddish a standardized, written form. The Yiddish language was then in the period when the art of linguistic incorporation, which had already been performed with Latin and French on German, was being perfected, acquiring a scientific and larger cul­ tural vocabulary from more established and widespread European tongues. Kafka’s comment to his audience that “der Jargon,” as contemporaries called it, had “not yet developed any linguistic forms of a lucidity [Deuttlichkeit] such as we need” was his recognition of the process by which a growing lan­ guage is quick to borrow what it needs, especially conceptual terms from other literatures; “its mode of expression is quick and rash.” The quickness of Yiddish speech was a sign of its health, as it played linguistic catch-up after centuries of Jewish exclusion. Where other languages had already assumed what linguists call high-level literacy functions, Yiddish in 1912 was wide open to new idioms and conceptual terms, in a process that resembled a kind of linguistic shoplifting. “Whatever happened to enter the ghetto,” as Kafka puts it with deadpan humor, “was not so quick to leave.”173 The fact that Yid­ dish was not Kafka’s “mother tongue” was more than ironic, freeing him from the native speaker’s tendency to push the foreign origins of many of its words beneath the surface of conscious speech. Hence the presence in Kafka’s fiction of so many figures who live under­ ground—such as the “giant mole,” or “Maulwurf,” whom his “village school­ teacher” discovers emerging to the surface despite scholarly disbelief. As a figure that appears in two of Kafka’s sources—in Bin Gorion’s Saying of the Jews,

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translated from Yiddish, Aramaic, and Hebrew, as well as in the dialect poet Jo­ hann Peter Hebbel’s German story—the giant mole is supposed to remain under the threshold of awareness, like the 99 percent of words in the Oxford English Dictionary that were “taken from other languages.”174 Comically enough, no one believes the village schoolteacher when he discovers the giant mole of language’s transnational underground, and the linguistic authority of the country, like the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, who worked as a schoolteacher in rural Austria, even­ tually comes to doubt his own truth. Much of the humor of the story turns on the way that the discoverer of the giant mole and the village schoolteacher who published on the topic before him are influenced by the equivalent of literary nationalism. Though both have seen the giant mole with their own eyes, both eventually deny the presence of this huge, underground foreign presence, just as linguists restrict their vision to the surface of “native” creations, missing the for­ eign creatures that tunnel beneath the surface of standard linguistic form. In the Sayings of the Jews on Kafka’s shelf, no “being [Wesen]” is said to be able to con­ tinue to exist (bestehen) once the “Maulwurf” sees the “light of day.”175 In the “Preface” (Vorwort) to the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the Grimms de­ scribe “foreign words” as lending just such a powerful presence to their lan­ guage. Among their examples is Maulwurf, the word for “mole,” an “authentic German” expression but one that shares the same process of acquired citizen­ ship (Einbürgerung) that foreign words undergo: As soon as a foreign word falls into the spring of a language, it is swirled about in its currents, until it takes on a different color, and de­ spite its foreign manner, looks like a native to the naked eye. This phe­ nomenon finds excellent illustration in a great number of place-names, but also in other vocabulary items: abenteuer [adventure], armbrust [cross-bowman], and eichhorn [squirrel] sound completely German [vollkomen Deutsch], although they have nothing whatever to do with the concepts “precious evening” [abend-teuer], “arm breast” [armbrust], and “oak-horn” [eich-horn]. These literal compounds never occur to us as the meaning of these words: everyone knows what they actually express, and our own language’s normal sound patterns are not disturbed by them at all. Even authentic German [echtdeutsche] expression such as Maulwurf, which have become obscure, must par­ ticipate in a similar process, though losing some of their sense, just as Moltwurf, once misunderstood, was made into Maulwurf. 176



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Kafka’s narrator in “The Giant Mole” has likewise discovered a form of those forgotten linguistic creatures, whose meanings enrich every language and whose own Klänge (sounds) flow beneath the surface of the new pronuncia­ tion they have acquired. In nationalist fashion, the schoolteacher of the story eventually turns against his own insight, just as the brothers Grimm empha­ size what is “vollkommen Deutsch” and soon pass over the foreign and sub­ terranean creatures that enrich its native ground. As in Kafka’s neglected “Tombwatcher” (Gruft-wächter), the guardian of canonical history is sup­ posed to guard the Gruft (crypt) of the “blessed ancestors” (seligen Vorfahren) located in the “Castle” and its tomb. He fights them with the “power of his breath” (Atemkraft), as if proper pronunciation were a weapon of its own. “Moles [Maulwürfe] like him,” however, as the Chamberlain says, “build long passages before they emerge.”177 The name of the “Warden [Wächter] of the Tomb” thus suggests wachen, or the ability to awaken lost, underground voices as a powerful effect of Kafka’s larger work. Kafka expresses the liberating effect of this linguistic turn in one of his later “Fragments,” as Max Brod called them. Here a voice that lives in the past, present, and future in all its forms overtakes the narrator—challenging the authority of the state. The voice of Kafka’s poem feels as if it has been prematurely laid in its “coffin” by its guardians, who erect their watch house on “the street,” where ver­ nacular language allows different forms of language, some arriving from other nations, to engage in their different forms of exchange. Like Benjamin’s “agga­ dah,” or legend, that “rises up” to level a “mighty blow” at the “Halakha,” or Law, so Kafka’s speaker has the power to rise up and break down the national and ulti­ mately temporal boundaries that limit the full range of human expression: My longing was for the ancient times, my longing was for the present, my longing was for the future, and with all this I am dying in a watchman’s hut     at the edge of the street, an upright coffin [aufrechten Sarg] that has always been a piece of State property [Besitztstück des Staates]. I have spent my life restraining myself from smashing it to pieces. I have spent my life resisting the desire to end it.178

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“Upright” (aufrecht) has the same connotation in German that it does in ­English; the moral sense of standard goes along, in Kafka’s canonical vision, with the idea of a living funeral. The “upright coffin” is in this regard the ca­ nonical style, sanctioned by the “State” that prematurely buries those dialectal, transnational contents that give language its broadest and most expressive style. Insofar as the writer wishes to renew the canonical standard as inherited, the desire to “smash” it in Kafka’s late parable must be resisted, in favor of lying down with the popular legends and voices “at the edge of the street,” for these preserve its past and present and will nurture the state of the language in its ­future forms. Kafka here imagines the task of the writer as assisting in this Prozess of bringing those vibrant, “dialectical” voices prematurely buried in the tomb of high cultural writing back to canonical life. By making Kafka aware of the forgotten, Jewish languages helped him rediscover those now distant foreign sounds, awaken their hidden meanings, and so create his own—that is, ­K afkaesque—idiom of the Jewish literary voice. “Climbing. Senait. It was a squirrel,” Kafka wrote in a late aphorism, quoting the Hebrew word for the wandering creature: “her bushy tail was famous in the woods.” Or as Kafka described the messianic accent of his writing in a more famous formulation, “I am a memory come alive.”179

Chapter 2

The Breakthrough to Jewish Languages “The Judgment”

Ten waters will not cleanse you of Jewish talk. (Fun yídishe reyd ken men zikh nit ópvashn in tsen vasern.) —Yiddish proverb

Hailed as Kafka’s “breakthrough” text, “The Judgment,” composed on the now-famous night of September 22, 1912, was new only as an act of trans­ national consolidation, sparked by his encounter with the life of Jewish languages.1 Kafka’s conviction that he had risen above the “shameful lowlands of writing” (schändlichen Niederungen) after completing the text suggests just how this story of father, son, and the missing mother and mother tongue built upon his existing sense of foreignness as central to his literary creation, constructing the platform from which his later works would spring.2 “My money is in the hands of strangers [fremde Leute],” he had written in “The Tradesman,” a self-conscious exploration of his own “small business” and his small share of literary capital, which was published in the periodical Hyperion in 1908.3 By 1912 Kafka had experienced the Yiddish theater in Prague, been an impresario for its performances in Bohemia with Zionist organizations throughout the Austro-Hungarian province, and steeped himself, via Yitzhak Löwy, in what his diary entry of December 25, 1911, called “contemporary Jewish literature in Warsaw,” meaning both Yiddish and Hebrew, as well as “contemporary Czech literature, partially through my own insight.”4 Kafka’s “Judgment” was a breakthrough only in its coded but humorous grasp of Kafka’s dilemma as a German and Jewish writer. While Jewish linguistic sources and the related question of Czech literary and political nationalism

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had begun to motivate his deepest creative impulses, his desire to “raise the world” to the level of the “pure, the true, and the immutable” called for precisely the kind of sojourn through the “Niederungen” of foreign and Jewish literary voices that his alter ego—the “friend” in “Russia”—had already begun to explore.5 New in “The Judgment” was Kafka’s ability to interrelate these two exclusive alternatives and to do so with hidden humor. In this story a “pure” literature shorn of its “national and cultural characteristics” at the same time evokes the exchanges between Jewish and other voices that were “memories come alive” for his generation of German Jewish writers.6 The point that Kafka made in his now-famous diary entry of December 25, 1911, on “small literatures” and the challenge to the conception of a “German” or “Jewish” linguistic identity was brilliantly clear and consistent with his later animal imagery in his fiction and literary correspondence. Just as “young Jews who began to write German” are described in his 1921 letter to Brod as a kind of acrobatic performer on a “tightrope,” “stealing the German child from the cradle,” and rethinking the symbolic accession to literary language, so Kafka in his diary entry sees the “small” languages of “Jewish Warsaw” as a window on the process by which literary traditions are formed.7 Whether part of a “small” or “great” literature themselves, the most powerful writings drew from the present-day Volk, by enabling the people to recover the sources of their own linguistic past: “A small nation’s memory [Gedächtnis] is not smaller than the memory of a large one and so can digest the existing material more thoroughly. There are, to be sure, fewer experts in literary history employed, but literary history is less a concern of literary history than of the people [des Volkes].”8 Astounding in this passage is not its Jewish populism— Kafka had recently read of Sholem Aleichem as the “Mark Twain of the ghetto” and in the prestigious language of French—but the notion of literary process it evokes, in which Jewish and other small languages are viewed as preemergent forms of literary wealth.9 The number of speakers of Yiddish or modern Hebrew, as Kafka suggests, creates a more intensive integration of what is “past,” enabling a recovery of the full range of the nation’s literary tradition and voice. Already in 1911 Kafka saw Hochdeutsch as impoverished, because its writers had forgotten to mine the forgotten sources of their national forms of expression, which once entered the language from abroad. “This is plain, for example,” Kafka writes, “in a literature rich in great talents, such as German is, where the worst writers limit their imitation to what they find at home.”10



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Kafka’s new definition of Gedächtnis, or memory, comes from Yiddish and Hebrew as well as Czech, an interest of Franz Blei, his publisher of Hyperion, that Kafka praised in 1909 as he withdrew from the art-for-art’s-sake cultural sphere.11 A “small” literature, like a “great” one that wishes to remain vital, as Kafka wrote in his diary reflections, must constantly “create literary history of the records of its dead writers,” because while “poor in component parts,” its memory is also fresh with the instances where national boundaries were crossed to acquire new content from abroad. In a developing language and literature such as modern Hebrew, for instance, “the old writings receive new interpretations,” sometimes to provide a justification for acquiring foreign material. The concern with memory and tradition in a “small literature” is a forward-looking move. The writers in Hebrew and Yiddish as well as Czech whom Kafka admired thus claimed national autonomy while making daring aesthetic choices: “the independence of the individual writer, naturally only within the national boundaries, is better preserved.” A recovery of national sources went hand in hand with the boundary crossing that took place in the politicized present, where “everyone must always be prepared to know that part of the literature that has come down to him, to support it, to defend it—to defend it even if he does not know it and support it.” This overtly political stance could then become the screen for the expansion of “small literatures,” where writing could be “accepting of what is foreign only in reflection” (Aufnahme des Fremden nur in der Spiegelung)—an act that takes place critically, not in the “basement” (Keller) of canonical literary history but in “the full light of day” (in vollem Licht).12 Kafka scholars have long seen his meeting Felice Bauer, his fiancée-tobe, on September 20, 1912, as his inspiration for “The Judgment.” This insight makes full sense in terms of this translinguistic inspiration, exemplified in the periodical on Palestine and Hebrew that Kafka shared with her.13 Georg’s telling the “friend in Petersburg” about his engagement sparks the action of “The Judgment” in a text that begins with Kafka’s writer surrogate sitting at his “Schreibtisch” (writing table).14 Three days before composing these lines, Kafka met Felice Bauer at Max Brod’s house, where among other subjects discussed were the ordering of stories for Kafka’s first book, Meditationen, and the latest issue of Palästina, which Kafka had with him and which he discussed with Felice after learning “in passing that she had been devoting a lot of time to learning the Hebrew language.”15 In the text by Ahad Ha-Am, the leading cultural Zionist of the period, who was then involved in a polemic with Yosef Haim Brenner—the Hebrew writer Kafka would be reading in

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the original at his death in 1924—several terms emerge that will appear at the center of “The Judgment.” At the center of Kafka’s text stands the friend who lives in a foreign land (Ausland) so far from his “Heimat” (homeland), that Georg worries he may not understand its “situation.” At the same time he has “no proper [rechte] connection with the ‘colony’ [Kolonie] of his countrymen [Landsleute] there.”16 In Ahad Ha-Am’s text, a German translation of “Sakh Ha-Kol,” meaning “Summation” but given the title “Die Lehre der Tatsachen” (What the Facts Teach Us) in the journal Kafka possessed, Ahad Ha-Am gives a critical account of his visit to Palestine, describing his visits to the “jüdische Kolonien,” the colonies and farms where modern Hebrew has begun its renewal as a spoken tongue.17 Kafka’s other immediate reference for the “Kolonie” of “countrymen” from which the “friend” in “Russia” remains distant is Yiddish and transnational in its effect. In German, Landsleute means “countrymen” from the land of one’s birth. In the Yiddish that concerned Kafka as he composed “Das Urteil,” the word “landsleyt” carries a similar meaning: —the echo of Kafka’s German evokes a linguistic crossroads, summoning the hidden historical legacy of two different tongues. “For instance,” Kafka told his audience of German speakers in Prague, “Yiddish originated in the period when Middle High German was undergoing its transition into Modern High German” (der Jargon stammt zum Beispiel in seinen Anfängen aus der Zeit, als das Mittelhochdeutsche ins Neuhochdeutsche überging), and the term “Landsleute,” which introduced his “friend” in Russia in “Das Urteil,” was a case in point.18 The word that describes the “Kolonie” of his “countrymen” in Yiddish means fellow Jews who hail from the same region, usually in Eastern Europe, just as the larger meaning in this period in which “Russia” includes Poland and other linguistic groups. At the same time the “friend” sustains “almost no social exchange” (fast keinen gesellschaftlichen Verkehr) with the “native families” (einheimischen Familien) of this Russian world, where he carries out his “Geschäft” (business), similar to the “kleines Geschäft” of Kafka’s “Kaufmann,” who quietly trades with “fremde Leute” or foreign people living on the boundary between nations in order to thrive.19 Kafka enlarged his German to include such Jewish and other national resonances in his early fiction, sparked by this model of the “Kolonie” as a zone of linguistic exchange. Ahad Ha-Am’s Hebrew speakers in Palestine and Yiddish literature developing in Europe fired his imagination. Thus the other prominent usage of “Kolonie” in Kafka’s reading of early 1912 concerns the “Occidental” status of Yiddish-speaking Jews, as elaborated in M. Pines’s Histoire de la



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littérature Judéo-Allemande, a book of “500 pages” that Kafka reports reading “with such thoroughness, haste and joy as I have never yet shown in the case of similar books.”20 The danger of the “Jewish colonies of Russia,” according to the Pines work that Kafka devoured with pleasure, was of a native culture that might turn inward rather than sustain nourishing contacts with what he calls “l’Occident”: “Unquestionably, the relations to be hoped for between the Jewish colonies of Russia [les colonies juives de Russie] and the Occident would be made closer and fuller through a significant introduction of Western [de’l Occident] culture, while Chassidic solidarity, even if transformed by an infusion of Tolstoyan ideas, would run the risk of turning the Jewish community inward on itself, or fracturing it into competing sects: friendly to one another, but powerless.”21 Today a “Kolonie” or “colony” is normally seen as an outpost of “Western” culture, violently imposed on the speakers of a different people and their language. Western influences are therefore something to be left behind, as the term “postcolonial” tends to suggest. Instead, Kafka read Yiddish as a “colony” in “Russia” in which the introduction of Western notions—through enlightenment Hebrew as well as the German of Moses Mendelssohn—had long since been infused in translinguistic forms. Yiddish—known as mama-loshon, or “the mother tongue”—was at the same time considered an imposition on its native land, even as it opened itself up to the influence of Russian, Polish, and other Eastern European tongues. In Kafka’s sense of national languages, this Yiddish situation of “Occidental” contact obtained in a more general sense. Just as the “colonies” of Russia needed “Western” notions of identity to avoid fracturing into competing “sects,” so the Einheimischen, or those “at home” in their language, need to import the notion of a singular national identity, in order to hide those travels and transactions with foreign voices that live within the “native” tongue. Samuel Beckett was Kafka’s successor in this regard, designating this hidden transit within the apparently stationary and rooted identity of language with the phrase “coming and going” in his works. “Miss Lousse,” or “Loy” in his Molloy is the figure for this hidden difference within the voice of the nation, a movement that “Loy” represents; “Loy” means “Law” in old French and “shovel” in the Irish-inflected English of Playboy of the Western World, by John Millington Synge, a dialect writer whom Beckett loved.22 “For had she not said she desired above all to see me, both coming and going and rooted to the spot,” Molloy reminds himself in the Trilogy, defining this hidden comedy that underlies singular literary desire.23 This excavation of translinguistic movement within the pure and stationary form of language

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provides some of the comedy in Beckett, where “Loy” in French can also represent the text’s excavation of Irish origins, just as “Landsleute” in Kafka’s German evokes a zone of “landsleyt,” or national compatriots in a secret but audible realm of German Jewish exchange. Kafka’s exploration of this theoretically Yiddish—which is to say trans­ national—movement within other mother tongues was not lost on the modernist tradition. A similar form of insight enabled Beckett and his most important Irish predecessor to open up their most comic vein. In Ulysses, James Joyce uses Leopold Bloom to expose this vaudeville of national identity, in a scene where Irish nationalists engage in a form of Irish-Jewish repartee. When Bloom is asked, “do you know what a nation means?” by a supporter of the Irish Renaissance known as John Wyse in the novel, the laughter that is directed at Bloom quietly turns against the static notion of the nation instead: —What is it? Says John Wyse. —A nation? Says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place. —By God, then, says Ned laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the same place for the past five years. So of course everyone had the laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck out of it: —Or also living in different places. —That covers my case, says Joe.24 In this satiric depiction of Joe Wyse as the Irish wiseacre, “covering his case” also means a Jewish turning of the tables as far as the humor of national identity goes. Since the “case” of every nation is that “different places,” as Bloom reminds him, contribute to the formation of its now-native tongue, the nation must figure out how to cover its multiple, figurative “behind” in just this serious way. “This is at the heart of Kafka as an artist,” as Max Brod praised him, in a statement that bears repeating in this broader modernist sense: “he is perfection on the move, on the road.”25 Kafka’s concern with Jewish languages was in this way the humorous, if sometimes secret predecessor for Joyce and Beckett as modernists concerned with the multiple sources of national languages in foreign tongues. To borrow terms from Beckett and Joyce, Kafka’s German used Jewish linguistic sources to explore how much different material was always “coming” into every national language, and then seen as “going”



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as multiple sources are forgotten or stigmatized, though their presence has helped the national language to “Bloom.” Kafka’s breakthrough was in this way prepared by his “Talk on the Yiddish Language,” which theorized such transit and mobility as an incipient principle of his own literary voice. There, Kafka for the first time introduces the New York of Morris Rosenfeld, the Yiddish poet, as a place where “Jewish emigrants” (Jüdische Auswanderer) with their “dirty luggage” (schmutziges Gepäck) were “laughed at” (folgt ihnen und lacht) by the “public” (Publikum), while uncovering the significance of traveling voices, both to “Jewry” (Judentum) and to “humanity” (Menschheit) as a whole. In this universal sense Menschheit is a word that rarely appears in Kafka’s texts. The “friend” in Russia of “The Judgment,” with his business in St. Petersburg, can indeed be identified with Yitzhak Löwy, the Yiddish actor whom Kafka befriended in Prague. The same laughter that brings the “group of emigrants” to a “stop” (stockt) as would-be outsiders also signifies their linguistic autonomy for the poet, leaving a legacy of silent strength behind (und ihn nicht hören kann).26 Kafka’s inspiration by Yiddish can be felt in this passage, and his hidden humor was quick to follow in “The Judgment,” perhaps his most serious text. This canonical separation between an emerging, canonical voice of Yiddish—­ figured in Morris Rosenfeld—and the more Americanized Yiddish speakers of New York portrays the disavowed comic potential of the scene. The “public” that laughs at the “Jewish immigrants” in Rosenfeld’s poem prefigures the dismissive vaudeville father of “The Judgment,” as well as Kafka’s continuing acquisition of the father’s linguistic energy for use in his prose. In “Letter to the Father” (Brief an den Vater), Kafka identifies his father’s cursing as a source, citing his “Schimpfen” with deadpan humor to evoke the Yiddish and Czech his father actually spoke before learning German.27 The family business, or “Geschäft,” is portrayed as a multilingual theater, where Hermann Kafka would banter with German and Czech-speaking customers and bellow at the workforce, especially in Zizkov, where Kafka supervised the family asbestos factory for a time. “The suburbs of our native city,” Kafka wrote in his diary on November 19, 1911, “are also foreign [fremd] to us,” using the term “Vaterstadt” or literally “father city” to designate this translinguistic aspect of his native realm.28 In “Letter to the Father,” Kafka therefore pays special attention to the father’s “Schimpfen” (cursing), using a foreign word of Hebrew origin explicitly to suggest a source of pleasure in the text. Since “your opinion was correct,” Kafka writes, “every other was mad, wild, ­meschugge, not normal,” including the Yiddish word for “crazy” at precisely the point where the pleasure of the father’s multiple voices is hijacked as a source of

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creative energy from the multilingual curse: “you were capable, for instance, of cursing the Czechs, and then the Germans, and then the Jews [auf die Tschechen schimpfen, dann auf die Deutschen, dann auf die Juden] and what is more, not only selectively, but in every respect.”29 As in Beckett’s writing, blockage becomes the liberating motive and device of Kafka’s fiction, The internalization of the obstacle—the scorn of different national languages—is precisely what sets Kafka’s literary creativity to work in 1912. The parallel with Kafka’s modernist successors is quite instructive: coming to terms with the foreign within the language of the nation concerned Joyce as well as Beckett, as each writer faced an Irish form of a national and linguistic dilemma to which comedy became a response. A native speaker of English, Joyce was made to feel doubly foreign, as his Irish accent was treated as alien—a funnel or “tundish,” as Portrait of the Artist puts it, siphoning his talents into a British English that felt just as alien and estranged.30 By re-creating such ­English in his writing, Joyce made fun of the imperial language that suffocated him, producing a comic feast of meaning, while refusing the limiting Irish or Gaelic national banner of an original mother tongue. Instead, as Pascale Casanova notes, Joyce’s art turned literary English into an increasingly foreign language, sending its formative borrowings and associations into overdrive, giving it a comic “burial” in Finnegan’s Wake. Beckett would eventually turn to French in order to transform the block that Irish nationalism and London-centered ­English placed before his literary imagination; speaking French with a strong Irish lilt, Beckett “failed better,” writing in French to assault the notion of literature as emerging from any controlling linguistic source. Beckett thus overcame the Scylla of Irish nationalism and the Charybdis of becoming Joyce’s “­English” successor, using a third language to unsettle claims to singular origin. The choice of French set free the back-and-forth between different national languages that comprises his writing’s comic and literary power.31 By writing a German that evoked Jewish linguistic sources, Kafka thus proved to be a daunting predecessor figure for Beckett. When Kafka wrote that the “Jewish mother” is no “Mutter” in his diary, he pointed to this openness within the mother tongue. The idea of such a linguistic homeland was one that Kafka left behind, in favor of a concept of national languages that could grasp their own “komisch und fremd” sources—“comic” and at the same time “­foreign”—in a more authentic and enjoyable form.32 Where Beckett refused Joyce’s path of doing English in different voices—opening up its origins through wordplay and Ulysses’ multiple narrators—Kafka’s German modeled an apparently neutral style that reveals Jewish and other national depths. Beckett’s turn to French thus resembled Kafka’s “Hochdeutsch” (High German) as a porous



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voice that satirized the singular notion of a mother tongue. Irish and English concerns enter Beckett’s “pure” French, a language riddled with passageways that model the translinguistic sources of “native” languages in general, allowing Beckett to begin The Trilogy, his magnum opus, with its famous opening salvo: “Je suis dans la chambre de ma mère” (I am in my mother’s room).33 Calling French a needed “weakening effect” on his writing, Beckett proceeded to explore the differing national voices that explode the fictions of national origin and linguistic enclosure, envying the Kafka who had already rediscovered the trans­ national contact between the German and Jewish elements of his voice.34 Kafka thus regarded hypercorrect worship of the mother tongue as essentially false and un-German to the core. When Max Brod translated Frantisek Janacek’s opera Jenufa from Czech into German, for instance, Kafka criticized Brod’s language for its Teutonic purism in just these terms. “Is that not the German,” he wrote Brod, “that we have heard from the lips of our un-German mothers? [von unsern undeutschen Müttern].”35 Our “un-German mothers” were not false Germans because of their Jewish linguistic origins, but out of an excess desire for linguistic assimilation that perversely produced the reverse. By canceling every trace of Jewish tongues, Mrs. Brod and Mrs. Kafka had failed to become truly German, since it was precisely Hebrew, Yiddish, and other languages such as French that had formed modern “Hochdeutsch” and produced its authentic sound. The translation of a Czech opera became far too “Hoch” (high) by avoiding these sources; Brod had written hyperbolic German by failing to be Jewish enough. “There were, in the old Jewish communities of Bohemia and Moravia,” as Ruth Kestenberg-Gladstein observes, “any number of young girls and maiden ladies, and probably also men of all ages, who ‘worshipped the German classics over hard bread-crusts,’” in the same provinces where Kafka’s generation of Jewish mothers as well as fathers—including Sigmund Freud’s— had emerged to acquire German speech.36 Underneath such “worship,” Jewish mouths tasted a German that had never been truly distinct from their own Hebrew and Yiddish sources—a world of translinguistic contact tapped into by “The Judgment,” as Kafka uses the curse of the father to capture his mother tongue’s multiple and comic force.37

The Pleasures of the Angry Father: The Meaning of Yiddish Our literature cries out. A true outcry—it feels—is, to some extent a liberation. —Yosef Haim Brenner, “Self-Criticism” (1914)

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Hermann Kafka’s meschugge attack on transnational Prague in this way also provided Kafka with his inspiration: what the father sought to negate spurred the son to recover the multiple powers of his voice. Beyond this “crazy” diatribe that Kafka recorded, we do not know what other Yiddish words Kafka’s father used in damning the transnational content of everyday life in Prague, with its Czech majority, German-run government, and the Yiddish inheritance of assimilated Jewish speakers of German like himself. We do know, however, that he belonged to the “German Club” of Prague, though he spoke Czech better than German, and was competent enough in the Jewish liturgy— “amazed me by being able to show me in the prayer book the passage that was being said at the moment”—to produce anger, if not a secret envy in his son.38 Given Kafka’s careful transcription of the Yiddish word meschugge to describe the curse that Hermann Kafka placed on “the Czechs, the German, and the Jews,” it is worth examining the linguistic tradition of Yiddish cursing itself to grasp the meaning of this talismanic expression. In the Yiddish linguistic sphere, the curse was an honored and highly ironic tradition all its own. James A. Matishoff’s Blessings, Curses, Hopes, and Fears: Psycho-Ostensive Expressions in Yiddish reminds us that much cursing in the Yiddish tradition— whether meshugge or not—is “apotropaic” in nature—that is, designed to ward off what is perceived as a threat or evil. Thus the “phrase me zol nit visn, ‘one should not know [of such evil things]’” works on a principle of inoculation: naming the threatening object of knowledge takes in enough of its energy to redirect its damning power.39 Kafka thus learned a great deal from his father’s “Schimpfen.” Yiddish provided him with an object lesson in neutralizing a threat, then extracting from its verbal excess the emotive pleasure that Jewish cursing suggests. One aspect of this process is conveyed through humor, and a fair description of Kafka’s mature style, as he developed it from “The Judgment” of 1912 forward, would be to say that Kafka integrated the apotropaic principle of the Yiddish “curse” into his writing and turned it “against” his father in this opening sense. I say “against” only in the sense of contact with paternal energy, because Kafka understood such cursing as an already creative force: “schimpfen” against “Tschechen,” and then “Deutschen,” and of course “Juden” and recollecting this power of the father was also a way of summoning the verbal resources that formed his early awareness and would allow his writing to thrive. While a curse in the Yiddish tradition is almost always a negation—naming what you should avoid, that is, “may you not know”—it also became a not-so-secret pleasure, a doorway for allowing the forbidden to enter the linguistic consciousness, often in the face of



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its doorkeeper, in ways that can be safely enjoyed. Thus in mobilizing his own writing to explore what the “Letter to the Father” calls the “puzzling,” or “­Rätselfhafte,” quality possessed by “alle Tyrannen” (tyrants)—the “Letter” here the Greek word tellingly—Kafka discovered the comedy that turns negation into a password for plural linguistic pleasures instead.40 What the paternal “tyrant” does not declare explicitly—though Kafka’s father clearly pronounced it, given the Yiddish invective he brought to bear—is that he enjoys the execration of the languages in contact he discovered in Prague. That is, the linguistically Greek “tyrant,” as Kafka describes in “Letter to the Father,” voices a meschugge form of humor after all. With this Yiddish background in mind, the covert enjoyment of foreign voices in Kafka’s “Judgment” becomes much easier to grasp. Karl thus redefines his father as a “Komödiant” at the apex of the narrative, a suggestive description of the father with roots in the Yiddish theater that Kafka learned so much from and whose sources helped his best writing come alive. While remaining a serious and threatening figure, the renamed father is thereby connected by the Georg who wishes to marry with the figure of the badchen (wedding jester), a central figure in Jacob Gordin’s God, Man and the Devil, which Kafka saw performed in Prague.41 Like the “friend” in “Russia,” humor in the story becomes the name of a transnational dimension of expression, one that signifies Georg’s final removal from the complacent position he occupies as a writer at the beginning of the text. Thus when the father claims to control the “letters” from the “friend” in Russia as his “Vertreter” (representative), Kafka’s writer figure both names and enacts a kind of vaudeville performance: “You comedian! [Komödiant] Georg could not resist the retort, realized at once the harm done and, his eyes starting in his head, bit his tongue back, only too late, till the pain made his knees give.”42 Georg’s “pain” in this scene is palpable, combined with the pleasure of a “Zunge” (tongue), like a language that can no longer hold itself back (sich nicht enthält). The famous Yiddish proverb that is literalized in this expressive posture—dem Yidns simkhe iz mit a bisl shrek (A Jew’s joy has a little fear in it)—has thus already been summoned by Georg, when he considers his father as a “bogey” or “Schreckbild” version of tradition, and thus as only a partial vision of the “Komödiant” at his best.43 While critics since Beck have seen this “Komödie” as outsourced to Kafka’s absorption of the Yiddish theater—in a kind of inshore form of the offshore production of meaning—Kafka’s larger resonance in this passage is to German linguistic history as a whole. Walter Sokel, for instance, perceptively notes the “homecoming” (Heimkehr) and “reconciliation” (Versöhnung) with

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the father and with “origin” (Ursprung) in this passage of “The Judgment,” as this return to a “Heimat,” to borrow the term from the text, represents a comic and pleasurable view of the multiple sources of the linguistic home.44 The sources of the father’s “Komödie”—he calls it a “gutes Wort,” or a “good word,” for his farcical gestures—were known in Kafka’s period as Shund, a term of reproach in the aesthetics of the Yiddish theater of the time. As Nahma Sandrow observes, “High Shund” plays “took place in exotic lands: ancient Judea, fifteenth century Spain, the courts of sultans or emperors,” citing works such as Gordin’s Elishe ben Avuye and Zygmund Faynman’s The Vice-King, which Kafka saw in over-the-top versions he worked with the ­Zionist society of Bohemia to promote.45 In the lowest form of such productions, “the plots wandered on and on, providing twists and thrills; comedians turned somersaults and made vulgar puns.”46 Such Shund effects and their guilty pleasures were noted by Kafka in his diaries: to appreciate a Gordin play such as Der wilde Mensch, he notes, “you must stretch in order to see the play over the heads of the Jewish theater audience of New York.”47 Comedy is in this way Kafka’s name for a larger desire: to connect with these ribald pleasures signified in Kafka’s diary by the New York audience for the Yiddish theater, and thus to recapture and enjoy the “Komödie” the father offers as a name for the effect of his own German voice. “Komödie,” as Mr. Bendemann says, is a “gutes Wort,” a “good word” for both Yiddish and German aesthetic questions in “The Judgment.” In keeping with this insight, the father figure of Kafka’s “breakthrough” story evokes pleasures that both he and the German tradition fail to enjoy to the fullest extent. In the history of the Germanistik that Kafka studied for half a year at the University of Prague, “Komödie” became a way to discuss the self-impoverishment of a German theater that felt dependent on imports instead: “the circles which have produced a language suitable for refined comedy,” as the eighteenth-­ century Viennese critic Joseph Sonnenfels put it, “speak French!”48 The father’s exclamation of “Komödie” in “The Judgment” pronounces a form of this unfulfilled desire for a more common, and in a theoretical sense more Yiddish, form of the national voice. “How far in this respect are we Germans behind the French,” G. E. Lessing thus declared in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1769): “to say it right out, compared with them we are true barbarians! Barbarians more barbaric than our oldest ancestors, who deemed a minstrel a man of worth.”49 Esteem of the comic player, in Lessing’s eyes, could be an ancient German pleasure. To be “barbaric” was to rule out French and Hebrew as well as Arabic sources that had contributed to European culture—an openness



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his Nathan der Weise (1779) gave dramatic form. The famous “banishment of Harlequin” as a foreign influence would prove a lasting handicap to German theater, though the Yiddish texture of “The Judgment” suggests the presence of “Komödie” in a number of national forms.50 The central problem with the Germans’ assimilation of French and other foreign sources was, as the figure of Mr. Bendemann also suggests, its national inability to savor the tones of the robust linguistic filiations that ensued. Against this history of German as a national language, “Komödiant” recalls this linguistic history in German Jewish terms. As a “comedian,” Mr. Bendemann exposes the predicament that Kafka theorized in his “Talk on the Yiddish Language,” that of a language that is composed of a potentially enjoyable series of different national strands. The father’s emphasis on “Komödie” is significant given Kafka’s reflections on Yiddish, especially its rich tradition of invective and the paternal outburst on which “The Judgment” turns. Yiddish was therefore impossible to translate directly into German for Kafka, not because he denied Walter Benjamin’s notion that “translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages [der Fremdheit der Sprachen],” but because the German idea of a Muttersprache had not yet accepted the “Komödie” of its borrowings from French as well as Jewish sources, and thus became hostile when this linguistic overlap made itself heard.51 “The ties between Yiddish [Jargon] and German [Deutsch],” Kafka told his audience in Prague, using the French term to good effect, are too delicate and significant not to be torn to shreds the instant Yiddish is transformed back into German, that is to say, it is no longer Yiddish that is transformed, but something that has utterly lost its essential character. If it is translated into French, for instance, Yiddish can be conveyed to the French, but if it is translated into German it is destroyed. Toit, for instance is not the same thing as tot [dead], and blüt is far from being blut [blood].52 (zwischen Jargon und Deutsch sind zu zart und bedeutend, als daß sie nicht sofort zerreißen müßten, wenn Jargon ins Deutsche zurückgeführt wird, daß heißt es wird kein Jargon mehr zurückgeführt, sondern etwas Wesenloses. Durch Übersetzung ins Französich zum Beispiel kann Jargon den Franzosen vermittelt werden, durch Übersetzung ins Deutsche wird er vernichtet. “Toit” zum Beispiel ist eben nicht “tot,” und “Blüt” is keinesfalls “Blut.”)

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This account of Yiddish and German fits Moses Mendelssohn’s definition of comedy, a relation that Kafka, as we have seen in Chapter 1, rooted in the “Haskalah movement” that Mendelssohn represented at the end of the eighteenth century. For Mendelssohn, “laughter” (Lachen) was founded on “crying” (Weinen) and was produced by a pleasurable contrast between the “complete” (Volkommenheit) and the “incomplete” (Unvolkommenheit). Comedy thus ensues when the claim to perfect expression suddenly reveals its need for a supplement required to complete it—where a painful aesthetic dependence on the vernacular is experienced as the opening up of the “Vollkommen” to its pleasurable, constituent voices instead.53 In “The Judgment” the father’s staging of these affective sources is ultimately more theatrically histrionic than sad. “Death by drowning,” his famous “Urteil,” or sentence, cast upon Georg, represents a tragic “Weinen” whose multiple and fluid elements could also be enjoyed as forms of pleasure, as Mendelssohn’s definition suggests. Not surprisingly critics have connected the father’s famous sentence of “death by drowning”—“Tod des Ertrinkens!”—with the High Holy Day Prayer Book, read at the Jewish New Year, or Rosh Hashanna, as well as Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The father’s curse alludes to the inscription in the Book of Life that—according to tradition—is written by the Divine Hand, determining the future year to come; among the determinations are “who shall perish by fire and who by water.”54 Kafka’s positioning of this prayer as a father “Urteil” is far less reverential; the quasi-divine imprecation is pronounced instead by a vaudeville patriarch, satirically dressed in “underwear that is not exactly clean” (der nicht besonders reinen Wäsche).55 As this dirty laundry of a Jewish family quickly passes over the stage, Mr. Bendemann represents the “meschugge” in a more empowering sense: the curse of the father suggests a voice both powerful and less than pristine, with constituent layers of “clothing” that expose its multiple layers of linguistic depth. “Tod des ­Ertrinkens” was likely Kafka’s translation of the Hebrew prayer book from its German version in Prague, as Arnold Band has observed, in Kafka’s likely source; the “judgment” in this way represents a hidden accent—that of Hebrew passing silently into German form—without the underlying structure of Yiddish ever having to be named.56 Kafka’s sense of the Jewish father’s expressive potential opened up his German immensely, whether readers are aware of the Jewish vernacular tradition of comic abuse or not. Kafka’s reincorporation of the father’s invective thus represents some of the amazing force behind “The Judgment,” a feat he prefigured in his December 25, 1911, diary entry on the Jewish literature of



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Warsaw and the small literature that was Czech in Prague. In a threatened language—as Czech was by Russian and Polish, and Yiddish and Hebrew were by the more established European tongues—revilement was an everyday feeling that could not help being played out in the family, even when a social and linguistic transition to German-speaking status had occurred. What was “decisive,” Kafka noted, especially for middle-class, assimilated families like his own, was “the general method of treating sons in the Jewish middle class” (der für Dich maßgebenden allgemeinen Söhnebehandlung des jüdischen Mittelstandes), where in linguistic terms this same excess of emotional expression cried out to be heard.57 Kafka’s emotional challenge can thus be framed as a question of his loyalty to the affirmative energy of the Jewish voice: how to represent the father-son conflict in German—that staple of German expressionist drama—with its life-giving, humorous pleasure in its constituent levels of expression still intact. Kafka’s task, as his diary suggests, was to “dignify” and render “discussable” the “conflict between fathers and sons” (die Veredlung und Besprechungsmöglichkeit des Gegensatzes zwischen Vätern und Söhnen), as he described Yiddish and Hebrew writing in Warsaw, by presenting “national faults,” such as excessive self-blame. Kafka’s theory here dovetails with the insight that “The Judgment” dramatically portrays: that much of the power of his prose was a transformation of these linguistic “fathers” and the diversity of their mother tongue into the multifaceted voices of his fiction—in a manner that is “painful, to be sure” but also “liberating” and “deserving of forgiveness” (die Darbietung der nationalen Fehler und in einer zwar besonders schmerzlichen, aber verzeihungswürdigen und befreienden Weise), and thus in an ultimately creative way.58 As “I Sentence You to Death [Tode] by Drowning” captures the father’s hostility, in this sense it also recaptures the energy of Yiddish and its life-giving meaning in Kafka’s text. As his “Talk on the Yiddish Language” explained in linguistic detail, toit in Yiddish, or “dead,” does not mean tot, or “dead,” in German—a statement that is especially true of “The Judgment,” a work that “is about the way the metaphor of judgment is read . . . an enactment of the stakes in judging metaphor as such.”59 In curses of “Calling Down Death,” as classified by James Matishoff in his Psycho-Extensive Expressions in Yiddish, the point is not destruction—“God forbid!” we might say—but to use the death wish as a productive form, as a means of increasing rather than censoring the human voice and thus as a way of opening up new channels of expression in a Yiddish way. “What we are concerned with here,” in “Calling Down Death,” according to Matishoff, “is the ritualized curse, or klole (Heb.): petitive expressions that

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call down misfortune, disease, or death on their intended victims. Needless to say, the malo-petitioner would often be appalled if the dire eventuality actually came to pass. We English speakers would not like it if people obligingly expired every time we said Drop dead! to them. Kloles are rather to be viewed as the overt linguistic manifestation of a momentary psychic state: hostility.”60 The legal echo of this “death by drowning,” a phrase echoing the Hebrew and Germanlanguage Jewish prayer books, makes the phrase a rich crossroads of meaning. The Amstdeutch, or Kafka’s legal German from his occupation as a specialist at the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, along with the divine “judgment” of the German Hebrew Siddur, or prayer book, appears to overwrite—in an almost literal sense—the figurative dimension of the Yiddish that Kafka outlined. “Toit,” as he declared, “does not mean ‘Tot.’” This difference between “toit”—and the joy of Yiddish in its sheer expression—and the dour dimensions of a more “German” or Hebrew sense creates the “Tod des Ertrinkens,” or the “death” from surplus fluidity that remains richly alive in the expressiveness of Kafka’s German and its inflections. The father’s “sentence,” in this respect, sends Georg to a “Tod” that is far from final—Kafka was a vigorous and successful swimmer by routine—and which suggests Kafka’s immersion in the increasingly open legacy of German and Jewish languages to one another as the continuing project of his literary career.61 The father’s “Judgment” runs beyond the story in this respect, especially in the dialogue with the Yiddish and Hebrew sources it evokes. The “Ertrinken” of the father’s sentence suggests a fluid expressiveness that enables expression, enlarging Kafka’s narrative voice as it transforms the energy of the curse into a translinguistic vision of his own.

Kafka’s Perspective: The Jewish Son as Talking Animal “The Stoker,” “The Metamorphosis,” and “The Judgment” belong together outwardly and inwardly . . . I would not like to abandon the idea of making this connection clear by gathering them together in a book titled, let us say, The Sons. —Kafka, letter to Kurt Wolff, April 11, 1913

Through his ape protagonist in “Report for an Academy”—one of the tales he would publish as “Zwei Tiergeschichten,” or “Two Animal Stories” in Martin Buber’s periodical Der Jude in 1917—Kafka would later provide his own, transnational definition for such comedy. The “cabaret act” his ape chooses as his



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“way out” of the cage of assimilation thus recalls Ahad Ha-Am’s famous cultural Zionist essay “Imitation and Assimilation,” using a multiple form of black humor.62 Transforming the worst aspects of his imprisonment in Africa into an account of his acquisition of German by mimicking his German captors at the schnapps bottle, “Red Peter,” with his off-color Christian name, claims the “­Varieté” he is offered as his own alternative to the “Tiergarten” (zoo). Kafka’s talking animals remain figures of filial loyalty in just this comic sense: the “cabaret” aspect of Red Peter’s performance in the “Animal Story” peeks through as a satire of serious discourse, telling the story of the process of assimilation in transformative terms.63 Stretched between the higher, “human” language they speak so matter of factly and the foreign, “animal” voices that break through the monolingual surface of their German tongue, Kafka’s animals resemble Peter in the way their “Varieté” humor responds to the founding father figures of his generation of assimilated German-speaking Jews. Together they speak to the “Academy” in linguistically skeptical, satirically loyal, and ultimately independent and multiple tones. Kafka’s sources for his speaking-animal position were therefore European but German and Jewish in the biographical sense of Jewish self-fashioning that characterized German Jews. In Solomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte—a seminal work for the German Jews of Kafka’s generation—Jews who manifested their inheritance of the Jewish linguistic tradition were often treated as talking beasts after acquiring German, albeit in the creative, self-dramatizing position of the “animal” who can quietly turn the tables on the more “cultured” whom he engages in equal terms. As I suggested in the “Introduction,” Kafka’s properly animal narrators evoke a foreign voice that is nonetheless part of “our” tradition, a reworking of the less than human position described by Maimonides—“weniger als Menschen, aber doch etwas mehr als Affen” (less than human but something more than apes) in Maimon’s version of his “Parable of the Palace” that Kafka possessed.64 The “talking-animal” position in Kafka is in this way also Kafka’s identification with Solomon Maimon’s humor. As Abraham Socher observes, Maimon refers to himself as a “talking animal” in a German, Hebrew, as well as comically Aristotelian fashion with sharply critical effects.65 In his letter on Maimon, Kafka describes his Lebens­ geschichte as a “grelle Darstellung,” or self-depiction—that is, a “harsh” but also “dazzling” self-portrait of a man “engaged in a ghostly [gespenstisch] transit between Eastern and Western Jewry,” a border crossing spirit that Kafka re-creates in a number of comic forms, in both the strictly human and more traditional talking animals who speak so articulately in his texts.66

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Kafka recovered this wily humor from the “talking animal” of Maimon’s self-description; the Yiddish-speaking Jew who learns German and acquires philosophic sophistication is also treated as a kind of pet. The talking-animal motif that Kafka takes from Maimon and other European linguistic sources emphasizes devotion of the filial figure in the sense of loyalty and the apelike quality of his secretly satiric or “cabaret” sense. “Filial” is meant in the familial and familiar as well as the more comic, literal sense of the word. The sense of the secret filiations in this case are linguistic ties that bind the figurative animal to his patron. In Solomon Maimon’s case, it is Marcus Herz who assumes the paternal German position vis-à-vis the Yiddish-speaking Jew. Kafka explores the continuing life of this translinguistic voice in his writing, transforming this German Jewish position of the figurative son as talking animal into other national terms. Bucephalus, for instance, the horse of Alexander the Great—­ Aristotle’s student—becomes “The New Advocate” in Kafka’s story by that name, where the talking animal has unique knowledge of “our ancient tomes.”67 Kafka’s modern animal and interpreter of the Law—“Advokat” meant “lawyer” in Prague German—thus becomes what one interpreter has called a figure of “grotesque comedy” (groteske Komik) while remaining a critical advocate who has stayed alive in just this hidden way—a filial beast who is doubly human in what he understands about legacies of his teachers and masters, surviving the canonical burden of inferiority that the ancient world had placed on his back.68 In “The Judgment” (1912) and its depiction of the son, Kafka drew his definition of this kind of satire from the genre known as Galgenhumor, or “gallows humor.” Though it was a German concept, Kafka discovered its Jewish inflections in an early history of Yiddish literature, the Histoire de la littérature Judéo-Allemande, that he read that same year. In Pines, Kafka read a definition of this Yiddish gift for taking what is painful and unpleasant and wrenching a wry and fulsome expressiveness from the worst dilemmas. This Yiddish version of what Pines calls “laughter through tears” is also a metaphor for the productivity of Yiddish writing—albeit in a translinguistic dimension, since he cites the German word “Galgenhumor” and gives it a French inflection in his text: “the laughter of Abramovitsch was full of bitterness: it was a laughter through tears, more plaintive and painful than those terms themselves. Yet alongside this special form of humor, ‘gallows humor’ which found peak expression in the oeuvre of Mendele the Bookseller, there could be found in the ghetto something that pertains to humor tout court, a genial spirit of gaiety that is the sign of the moral health of a people and its optimistic approach.”69 As Freud later analyzed the phenomenon, “Humor”



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upends the expectations of a painful situation by releasing a different, unexpected narrative where constriction prevailed. As a “triumph” of the “pleasure principle,” Freud defined humor in Oedipal terms as the son or figurative reader reoccupying the paternal position and thereby discovering a more pleasurable form of the filial voice.70 According to Bluma Goldstein, this “outwitting of the mechanism of repression” is what “Germans call Galgenhumor,” though Kafka’s source in La litterature judeo-allemande suggests a more Yiddish sense of humor in “The Judgment” and his other works.71 In his diary Kafka therefore sketched the “Mendele the Bookseller” who defined Yiddish humor in his Fishke the Lame, where “the eastern Jewish habit of biting the lips” (ostjüdische Gewohnheit des an den Lippen Beißens) becomes a signal gesture for a covert and sometimes caustic jibe: a mouth whose twists and turns suggest the “dampened comedy” (gedämpft lustig) in “Das Urteil” and later Kafka texts.72 Where censorship and the painful lip, or “Loshon,” prevail—to paraphrase Freud in Kafka’s Yiddish and Hebrew terms—there multiple and enjoyable voices shall be. Kafka uses such “gallows humor” at frightening scenes in “The Judgment,” opening up the “Kiev” of the story as both a Yiddish and a Hebrew source. This liberation occurs not “against” the father’s censorship in the story—“‘always ’agin you was really not my basic principle where you were concerned,” Kafka wrote to his father—though a liberating transcription of his literary paternity was.73 By provoking the father into a denial that the friend in Russia exists—“You have no friend in St. Petersburg”—Georg may, in fact, as critics have recently noticed, have engineered a reference to the political strains between Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire in 1912, exposing the father’s secret love of the border-crossing voice.74 The “friend,” as Georg notes, “used to tell us the most incredible stories of the Russian Revolution,” especially on a “business trip” he took to “Kiev,” where he witnessed a “riot” the father has narrated himself: “you’ve told that story yourself,” Georg dryly reminds the father, “once or twice since.”75 The violence narrated in “The Judgment” is in this way the opposite of censorship, evoking the liberation of Jewish voices in Russia that followed the events of 1905. One effect of the “Russian Revolution” Kafka describes was a liberation of the battle between Hebrew and Yiddish in their appeal to the Jewish masses, an emerging “language war” in Russia that influenced the Palestine that Kafka had been reading about when he met Felice Bauer in 1912. “Hebraists,” as Steven Zipperstein notes, “felt themselves on the defensive during these years,” as the paradoxical effect of anti-Jewish violence to

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which the father quietly alludes had actually given Yiddish literature a needed boost: The revolution of 1905 lifted long-standing censorship regulations on Yiddish, and newspapers in the language quickly achieved a much larger circulation than the older, Hebrew ones. In the revolutionary turmoil Yiddish appeared to be immeasurably better attuned to the masses than Hebrew. . . . With the masses of Jews speaking Yiddish, with newspapers, books even theater in the language suddenly legal and widespread, it was now argued that Yiddish was certain to be one of the crucial bulwarks of a budding Jewish national identity.76 Kafka’s diary followed precisely this development in 1911, after he attended a reading of a poem by Hayim Nakhman Bialik—the leading modern Hebrew poet of his generation, its “national” poet, and a disciple of Ahad Ha-Am. Yitzhak Levi had read “In the City of Slaughter,” Bialik’s Yiddish version (In Shkhite-Shtot) of what was already a Hebrew classic, “Ba’ir Ha-Haregah,” the work which made its author the leader of the “Generation of Bialik,” as writers in this period of the revival of Hebrew as a modern literary language came to be known.77 The transcription of the father in Kafka’s “Judgment” includes this history of Bialik’s vision as part of its satiric power. The portrayal of the “Friend in Russia” standing amid the smashed display cases of his “business” in Kiev, an allusion to the Russian Revolution in 1905, in this sense suggests Sholem Aleichem and the displacement of his comedy by Bialik’s prophetic and tragic Hebrew voice. With the legalization of Yiddish writing by the czarist regime and the pressure to emigrate, comic voices found liberation nonetheless. Sholem Aleichem himself—the world’s most famous Jewish writer in the period— would be forced to migrate from “his beloved Kiev” to New York, the scene of Kafka’s first novel.78 The “Judgment” breaks through the father’s attempt at ownership of these Jewish linguistic energies, making him an entryway for Kafka’s more expansive imagination of the modern Hebrew voice. “A poem by Bialik,” Kafka noted in 1911 after seeing a performance of “In the City of Slaughter” in a Yiddish version that ”the Hebrew poet” produced, is the one instance where the poet stoops from Hebrew to Yiddish [aus dem Hebräischen in den Jargon herabgelassen], himself



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t­ ranslating his original Hebrew poem into Yiddish, in order to popularize this poem which, by making capital out of the Kishinev pogrom, sought to further the Jewish cause. A recurrent widening of the eyes, natural to the actor, which are then left so for a while, framed by the arched eyebrows. Complete truth of all the reading; the weak raising of the right arm from the shoulder, the adjusting of the pince-nez, so poorly does it fit the nose . . . the weak joint between the upper and lower parts of the leg is particularly in motion [daß besonders die schwachen Verbindungsknochen zwischen Ober- und Unterschenkel in Tätigkeit sind].79 In these gestures of the actor, Kafka detects the conflict between Hebrew and the more popular Yiddish vernacular, convinced of the “complete truth of all the reading” (vollständige Wahrheit der ganzen Vorlesung) that ensues. The “weak joint between the upper and lower parts of the leg” that “is particularly in motion” embodies the articulation of the performance, its connection with the high voice of modern Hebrew, while the “borrowed” pince-nez points to the different sources of linguistic authority that enliven Bialik’s poem. Expressive power, in Kafka’s view of Hebrew’s national poet, therefore emerges only when this father figure gives himself over to the “weakness” of a Yiddish performer, whose gestures recapture the full range and connections of his voice. Kafka therefore responds with a feeling of liberation at hearing the Jewish vernacular version of Bialik’s poem, a strengthening effect that he noted in his diary after first recording a feeling of complaint. “After the reading, while still on my way home [auf dem Nachhauseweg],” Kafka notes, “I felt all my abilities concentrated [alle Fähigkeiten gesammelt],” or “collected,” as his German more literally puts it. The “way home” from listening to a Yiddish translation of Hebrew, as well as “humorous sketches” by Sholem Aleichem and a Yiddish piece in a more serious vein by Y. L Peretz, thus produces a creative form of complaining, which in the United States would be called kvetching: “and on that account complained to my sisters, even to my mother, at home [zuhause].”80 In precise fashion the grammar of “home” in Kafka’s diary makes it a journey rather than a singular linguistic destination, as the preposition “zu” (to) in the German idiom indicates—a being at home that reposes on continuous movement. Kafka’s complaint, we might say, expresses his dissatisfaction with the “prosthesis of origin” that nationalism suggests in its place.81 “Mutter” and “sisters” here represent “home” as a static position, in contrast with the performance of Bialik as a translinguistic act. It is in the translation from one language

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to another, as in the Yiddish performance of Bialik’s move from Hebrew to Yiddish, that the “complete truth of all the reading” is created, as the nation is portrayed as motion rather than fact. The performance of Bialik in Yiddish thus modeled the poet’s evocation of his multiple linguistic origins; Kafka’s richly striated version of German aimed at a similar effect. In his “Talk on the Yiddish Language,” Kafka therefore informed his audience in the Jewish Town Hall of Prague that “it was not so long ago that the common, colloquial language [vertrauliche Verkehrsprache] of the German Jews [der deutschen Juden], according to whether they lived in the town or the country, more in the East or the West, seemed to be a remoter or closer pre-form [Vorstufe] to Yiddish, and many nuances remain to this day.”82 In the model of national language that Kafka drew from Yiddish, a “Verkehr­ sprache,” or “language of daily intercourse”—a “foreign” language such as ­Yiddish—was constantly associating itself—verkehrt sich, as the German idiom has it—with the “standard” or more authoritative “Hochsprache” (high language) of German form. Colloquial language was, according to Kafka’s German Jewish definition, constantly trafficking across national boundaries, with the location in “East” or “West” determining where the transnational accent might fall. A “Verkehrsprache” thus revealed this hidden “Verkehr”—the “traffic” and the “connection” celebrated by the Jugendstil writers—as well as the cross-border sources of identity in varied linguistic forms. Such colloquial language revealed the stages of preemergence of national language preserved on the popular tongue. Such “Jewish” slang and banter therefore signified the German and Jewish voices that existed before the mother tongue of either as a singular entity had been conceived.83 Kafka thus described “The Judgment” as an act of reorigination. Connecting his writing of the story with his comments on “the Jewish mother” in his diary, Kafka linked the boundary zone of German and Jewish language to the emergence of his mature fictional style. “The story came out of me like a real birth,” he wrote after correcting the proofs of the story for publication, “covered with filth and slime, and only I have the hand that can reach to the body itself [die Geschichte ist wie eine regelrechte Geburt mit Schmutz und Schleim bedeckt aus mir herausgekommen].”84 Kafka’s scene recalls his own analysis of Yiddish: as if rewriting the birth of his own language in this ­lecture, Kafka had described Yiddish as reaching back to the cross-linguistic ­origins of German’s linguistic “being” in a figurative way. “The Yiddish [Jargon’sche] mir seien [we are],” Kafka told the audience, “is a more natural development than is the modern German wir sind.”85 Kafka’s point is correct: the Yiddish



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translation of the modern German for “to be” is in fact closer to the original German form. Understood as a linguistic allegory, Kafka’s example suggests that the pure “being” of any national language shares its initial forms. A language’s spoken origins, as Kafka figures them in this passage, appear together with the “filth and slime” of these primal interlocutors, who may indeed be discarded, though as this imagery suggests, only to the disadvantage of the language being born. In German, Kafka’s account of “The Judgment” has described the Nachgeburt, or “afterbirth” in English, the after that comically arrives before German’s proper linguistic origin, and then voices what his “Talk on the Yiddish Language” calls a “more natural” (natürlicher) development of “German” forms. As Kafka learned from David Copperfield, the “caul” or “afterbirth” saves its recipient from death by drowning, like the fortunate form of Yiddish nurture on which German’s figurative birth and subsequent linguistic history depend.86 It is therefore worth turning to the definition of Yiddish as it was spoken by Kafka’s parents’ generation, and whose traces could “not so long ago” be found in the “tägliche Verkehrsprache” or everyday language of “German Jews.” As Benjamin Harshav reminds us, the name of Yiddish was itself a reminder of the multiple origins of its tradition, and it is possible that Kafka used the French term Jargon for it in his lecture to preserve this internally constitutive meaning. While the German name Muttersprache carried a sense of fixed, monolingual origin, the affectionate term that referred to Yiddish defined it as an emergence from the difference between high and low language and thus as a process of creation that continues rather than ends: “The expression mame-loshon (‘mama-language’) is a typical Yiddish compound of Slavic and Hebrew roots, connoting the warmth of the Jewish family, as symbolized by mama and her language, embracing and counteracting the father’s awesome, learned Holy Tongue. (This popular nickname of the Yiddish language is diametrically opposed to the sociological term used in modern Yiddish, the cold, Germanizing, muter-shprakh, ‘mother tongue’).”87 In Harshav’s gloss, the Germanizing voice that would determine the “mother tongue” as native—the language into which I was born, natus, which would determine my nation—expresses itself against the transnational principle of multiple “roots” (“Slavic, Hebrew”) found in the more vernacular voice. Yiddish preserves the “warmth” of the mother’s own Loshon, or “tongue,” as ­English would have it, though the actual Hebrew word means “lip.” “Coldness” in Harshav’s formulation is conveyed by the linguistic closure of “Mutter” and “Sprache.” “Mama-Loshon,” by contrast, with its European “mama”

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and ­accent from biblical Hebrew, expresses the multilinguistic formation of everyone’s actual—though not necessarily Jewish—mother tongue. Kafka’s diary reflects this same view of native languages, bemoaning the German estrangement he sometimes felt from his own mother’s transnational voice. “Yesterday,” he wrote on October 24, 1911, “it occurred to me that I did not always love my mother [Mutter] as I could [nicht immer so geliebt habe] because the German language prevented me. The Jewish mother is no ‘Mutter.’”88 As in Harshav’s analysis of muter-sprakh in Yiddish, with its “cold, Germanizing” overlay, Kafka refers to the “Christian coldness” of the term. The effect of this “Christian” German was to freeze out, as it were, the transnational contact that created both German and Yiddish, apparent both in German Jewish Verkehrsprache and in the “pure” Middle High German that the Jewish vernacular preserved. This rejection of multiple origins has an estranging effect on the “Jewish mother”: refracted through the self-narrowing prism of the High German “Mutter,” she loses the ability to take pleasure in the linguistic difference she represents. “The Jewish woman who is called ‘Mutter,’” Kafka notes, therefore becomes not only “komisch aber fremd” (comic but strange).89 Kafka signals his revision of Freud in this passage: what is “strange,” or “fremd”—or what in other terms could be called “uncanny” (unheimlich) about the “Jewish mother”—reflects a heimlich state in which the different sources that nurture an “original” language are still waiting to be fully enjoyed. Where “psychoanalysis lays stress on the father complex, which many find intellectually nourishing,” as Kafka later wrote to Max Brod, “I much prefer insight not into the guiltless [unschuldigen] father, but into his Judaism [Judentum],” as the “Ben-de-Mann” of Mr. Bendemann—or “Son of Mann” in the Hebrew-French-German sense of the name Kafka analyzed—suggested the multiple origins of the father as pleasure in the filial sense.90 The issue was thus not paternal origin—nondetermining in the Jewish tradition—but differences that Kafka “found nourishing” (sich nährt) in the notion of the mother tongue as drawing its energy from different national sources, which he brought to bear in his narrative voice in a number of ways.91 The Oedipal contest in Kafka’s “The Judgment” is thus not a battle with the Christian father—who rules the primal scene of nativity—but a comic recapture of the lost origins of German Jewish literary creation. The father instead becomes a boundary-crossing figure, with a German name that recalls the declamatory Yiddish of Bialik’s poem that Kafka heard in Prague.92 Kafka recovers the father’s linguistic energy by portraying him as a twisted form of the Yiddish wedding jester, as Mr. Bendemann performs a vaudeville



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bump and grind to mock Georg’s fiancée, undermining his own attempt to found the “blessed” memory of the mother in more serious terms:93 “‘Because she lifted up her skirts,’ his father began to flute, ‘because she lifted up her skirts like this, the nasty creature,’ and mimicking her he lifted his shirt so high that one could see the scar on his thigh from his war wound, ‘because she lifted her skirts like this and this you made up to her, and in order to make free with her undisturbed you have shamed our mother’s mementoes [unserer Mutter Andenken], betrayed your friend.’”94 Here, Mr. Bendemann’s attack on Georg’s plans to marry riotously devolves into a parody of the figure of King David, traditional author of the Hebrew Psalms and central warriorpoet of the Hebrew literary tradition, who danced in front of the “ark of the Lord” himself (2 Sam. 6:14). At the same time the energy expended in defense of “our mother’s mementoes” (unserer Mutter Andenken) unleashes a less than holy vision, as the would-be nationalism of the “war wound” turns into an unabashed expression of joie de vivre and vaudeville camp. The sorrows of “Russia” are overshadowed; instead the father stages his overt identification with the pleasures of the fiancée who takes the mother’s static place. As his “Hemd” becomes the skirts of the seductress—“weil sie die Röcke so und so gehoben hat”—this translated figure of the Yiddish wedding jester lifts the veil on his own linguistic variety show. The father’s dance in defense of the singular and irreplaceable mother discloses his own multiple accents, performing a bawdy version of the Yiddish, Hebrew, and sexual expressiveness he clearly loves to suggest.

Transnational Origins: The Road to Amerika And so I asked the question [Da fragte ich weiter] . . . if this is the situation, where is the way out [wo ist der Ausweg]? —Ahad Ha-Am, “What the Facts Teach Us”

In this paternal portrayal of marriage, Kafka anticipates a speech on the relations between Hebrew and Yiddish that Bialik would give in Tel Aviv in 1927. Given three years after Kafka’s death in Berlin, the speech is nonetheless a reminder of the Jewish language debate that Kafka had been following as early as his meeting with Felice Bauer in Berlin in 1912, when he arrived with a German version of Ahad Ha-Am’s “Sakh Ha-Kol,” or “Die Lehre der Tatsachen” (What the Facts Teach Us), in his possession. One year later Kafka would attend the

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eleventh Zionist Convention in Vienna and write a description of the director of the new Hebrew Gymnasium in Jaffa, indicating his interest in this linguistic dimension of the Jewish national project. Bialik’s speech emerged from this same history and was given, as Naomi Seidman notes, at the historical “moment the Hebrew-Yiddish Language War had been settled in Palestine,” without Kafka ever having made his planned journey there. In Tel Aviv, Bialik declared, “Hebrew and Yiddish are a marriage made in heaven that can never be dissolved, just like Ruth and Naomi, but the very instance that Yiddish tries to cur herself off from Hebrew, she ceases to be ours. . . . As of the present the edict of Rabbenu Gershom [against bigamy] does not apply to languages.”95 Bialik’s 1927 image of language mixture recalls Kafka’s diary judgment of his Hebrew nationalism. The poet who let himself “fall” into “Jargon,” as Kafka noted in 1911, was actually involved in linguistic flirtation, if not outright bigamy, in his seductive engagement with Yiddish and with the tradition’s ties to other languages as well. As Pascale Casanova observes, this repackaging of folk history— transforming popular traditions into a more valuable form of literary capital—defines the road to literary modernity that most nations take.96 As ­Bialik stated so candidly in Tel Aviv, however, the attempt to elevate Hebrew to the status of national language would depend on a more flirtatious relation to the European form of Yiddish, bringing the translinguistic aspect of this folkmaking process to the fore. It was necessary, as Bialik suggests, for Hebrew not just to engage in a monogamous marriage with a Yiddish—a “marriage made in heaven”—but to engage in licentious forms of linguistic contact, before translating these affairs and seductions into a high cultural, monogamous version of the national tongue. “The Judgment” makes light of this imagery of marriage and its notion of the nation’s literary modernity. As early as 1910, as Max Brod reports, Kafka had already begun familiarizing himself with Ahad Ha-Am’s position on the primacy of Hebrew in the cultural renascence of the Jewish people and its ultimately monolingual ideal of the national tongue. 97 In this spirit, Selbstwehr— the Prague Zionist newspaper in which he published—announced on January 6, 1911, that it was laying claim to the mantle of such cultural Zionism, arguing that its movement for national renewal would have to rise above these seductions. “What we want is the preservation of the present and future of the Jewish people [Volk],” the editorial declared, “that is, the battle against the Un-Jewish [das Unjüdische] in Judaism.”98 “The Judgment” portrays this desire for separation between national voices in a manner that parallels such cultural nationalism, while giving it a multivalent and ultimately more open



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sense. In tandem with Ahad Ha-Am’s “What the Facts Teach Us,” the “Ein­ heim­ischen” encountered by the “friend” in Russia resemble Hebrew speakers in Palestine, lacking “gesellschaftlichen Verkehr” with the local population— working with but set apart from the Arabic-speaking population on whom they depend.99 Like the “friend”—who represents an initial silence on transnational influence—Hebrew speakers could also be cut off from their “Lands­ leute,” a word that, in both the Russian and Palestinian contexts, echoes with the multiple voices to be heard on the very “land” where a national language strives to emerge.100 The Hebrew “Kolonien” in Palestine that Kafka read about reflected this larger linguistic process, suggesting the contact between different national voices that Kafka explores in his subsequent work. Kafka would find one source for this “way out” through Zionism, in Ahad Ha-Am’s comments on the “halbe Herrschaft,” or “half-dominant,” status of Hebrew in Palestine, a position the “friend” in Russia also represents for the imagination of Georg as he discovers the hidden influences in his own house. As in Ahad Ha-Am’s description of the situation of Hebrew speakers in Palestine, Georg encounters his “friend” in a peculiar way. The Jewish “Kolonien” depended on Arab labor in the Palestine of this period, in sharp contrast to the doctrine of Hebrew self-sufficiency, giving the Zionist slogan “to build and be built” a transnational slant. These “Kolonien,” it turns out, could not survive without “gesellschaftlichen Verkehr,” or “social intercourse,” in Kafka’s terms, especially if these “farms,” as Ahad Ha-Am calls them, were to achieve their linguistic dream of reviving the Hebrew tongue.101 The modern Hebrew language, as we will see in Chapter 5, needed more to survive than “Verkehr” with the Arabic workers Ahad Ha-Am mentions; “half-dominance” represented a crucial stage of Hebrew’s integration of European and other linguistic resources the language needed to modernize and grow. Without such licentious social and linguistic relations, Hebrew threatened to remain a stale and bookish language. The narrator of “The Judgment” thus imagines the “friend” in Russia with “yellowed skin” (gelbe Hautfarbe) that suggests a “progressing disease” (entwickelnde Krankheit), making him a shadow of the story’s more vigorous voices, accessible only through the letters that mediate him in the text.102 Ahad Ha-Am, by contrast, argued that the official language of a national culture, while it might flourish through transnational contact, could be preserved only in national schools.103 Kafka’s friend in Russia offers a lively and implicit critique of this notion: insofar as he remains distant from the spoken language in Russia or signifies the isolation of “Kolonien” in Palestine, he thus

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appears sickly and unrenewed. Like a withered textual presence, existing only in the bookish writing of the schoolroom, he is ready to be thrown away. Separation from the spoken language makes “the friend” seem older, untouched by the varied forms of the vernacular voice, like a high cultural Hebrew or German that can emerge only from books. To oppose such sterility, Georg identifies the “friend” with a vernacular, story-telling tradition—excited about the story of “Kiev,” the home of Sholem Aleichem, and a traveler such as the “friend.” The father, on the other hand—at least in his non-wedding-jester, or non-“badchen,” moments—sees “the friend” as primarily a written inscription, with Mr. Bendemann imagining him as subject to his monumental canonization alone.104 “I’ve been writing to him,” the father declares; “you forgot to take my writing materials away from me.” Expressing himself with the power of a renascent Lawgiver, the father appears as both majestic and stifled, prompting Georg’s acerbic quip that he was still “a giant of a man.”105 Such was the vision of “Moses” popularized by Ahad Ha-Am in his essay of 1904, in which Moses is the figure of a Hebrew reborn: a new, high cultural figuration of the formation of the people’s voice.106 As a revision of this model, the “friend” in Russia suggests a model of high language as a hidden contact zone, a position that the father as wedding jester performs with a comic twist. The emergence of such coded Yiddish and Varieté, or vaudeville, gestures allowed Kafka to expose the boundary-crossing sources of such prophets whom otherwise, as he wrote of Hugo Bergmann’s “Moses,” he had “nothing to do with” (damit nichts zu tun).107 The kind of translinguistic wordplay that appears in “Ben-de-Mann” quietly deflates such nationalistic visions. In his diary Kafka notes the similarity of the initials of “Frieda Brandenfeld,” the fiancée of “The Judgment,” to those of Felice Bauer, “and in the word ‘Feld’ [field], a certain connection in meaning, as well.”108 Such a “field” would suggest the “land” as a source of national identity—as in agricultural Zionism—especially forceful in the name “Bauer,” or “farmer,” since Kafka read avidly, as Iris Bruce notes, about the “preparation of the land” in Palestine.109 The “friend” in Russia who separates himself from the “Einheimischen” as well as the “Landsleute” of his own “Kolonie” thus becomes a seductive figure, since his continued existence suggests his ability to engage in foreign relations without exposing his allegiance to any single “Heim.” “If your friends [solche Freunde] are like that,” a witty Frieda Brandenfeld tells Georg of his secretive relations, “you shouldn’t ever have gotten engaged at all.”110 As a figure for Zionism, “Fraulein Frieda Brandenfeld” conveys this erotic energy within Kafka’s literary imagination, inseparable from a vision of



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“Frieda,” or peace, between different national realms.111 “Frieda” as a “Feld,” or field, of associations that suggests Palestine as well as Georg’s betrothal to the German language thus remains a marker of his translinguistic passion— and thus anything but a prudish figure, as “Brandenfeld,” with its literal meaning of “field of fire,” suggests. In addition, like the many languages in Palestine that concerned Ahad Ha-Am, multiple influences on her future husband are imagined by Frieda, rather than seeing him as a singular and beloved spouse. In this more playful sense, “if your friends are like that” evokes a common Yiddish expression warning against the impulse to celebrate marriages at locations both far and near. Every national language entertains such multiple linguistic engagements, just as the Zionist support for modern Hebrew depended on expressions and vocabulary from other nations it translated into what felt like Jewish forms.112 The Yiddish saying that “you can’t dance at two weddings”— or “not getting engaged at all,” in Frieda’s phrase—rests on a similar wish to come into contact with brides in different regions, just as the “permanent bachelorhood” (endgültiges Jungesellentum) of the “friend” in Russia signifies a continuous state of desire.113 “The Judgment” therefore shows little “grief” (Trauer) for the mother revered by the father, whose “ blessed mementoes” of the maternal spirit (Andenken an die selige Mutter) hang like so many hunting trophies on the wall.114 The “friend” who is the “link between father and son” in the story, in Kafka’s interpretation, refers to her “Todesfall,” or “death,” with a corresponding “Trockenheit,” or “dryness,” while “in der Fremde,” that is, “Russia,” unable to imagine such a static figure for the mother tongue.115 The friend’s multiple positions— near “Kolonien” in Russia as well as the Palestine of Kafka’s imagination— evoked locations where language as a form of national expression was engaged in contacts, both avowed and secret, with other national groups. The “Kolonien” in “Russia “ thus decolonized Kafka’s literary expression: through them “The Judgment” was able to summon aspects of Yiddish, as well as the situation of Hebrew in Palestine, while recovering a more plural sense of what it means to speak a mother tongue. Georg’s final statement in “The Judgment,” “dear parents, I have always loved you just the same,” therefore addresses the mother of the story as if she were still alive, quietly opposing the father’s “selig” and ultimately deadly desire to fix her “Andenken” in trivial, paternalistic form. Georg’s departure from his parents is Kafka’s own valediction without mourning in this respect, a leave-taking from nationalistic assumptions about Yiddish and Hebrew that shaped the major Jewish writers of his period. At the same time Georg’s final “fall”—“und ließ sich abfallen” (and let himself fall away)—echoes

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Kafka’s earlier description of Bialik, who also “lowered” himself (hat sich . . . herabgelassen) into Yiddish in a redemptive and opening move. As Kafka described Bialik’s prophetic poem on the Kishinev pogrom, he wrote that the poet “hat sich . . . aus dem Hebräischen in den Jargon herabgelassen” (“let himself . . . descend from Hebrew to Yiddish”), or what Kafka calls “Jargon” in his diary’s French terms.116 In this prefiguration of the conclusion of “The Judgment,” Kafka imagines the transition from Hebrew to Yiddish as a gradual falling away from a grandiose concept of national languages toward a more comic sense of the compilation that lives beneath.117 Bialik’s switch from Hebrew to “Jargon” thus signifies a dual move in Kafka’s account: the “popularizing” gesture (zu popularisieren) of an “exploitive poem” (ausbeutendes Gedicht) in its move to Yiddish; and a gesture of descent (herabgelassen) that opens the Hebrew language to continued growth. Georg’s “letting himself fall” (ließ sich abfallen) in “The Judgment” rewrites this gesture as a form of permanent motion toward the river below. “I Sentence You to Death by Drowning!” names the conclusion of the story as a movement toward life, reflecting Kafka’s recovery of the meaning of Yiddish from the dour Jewish fathers of his generation. Georg’s final position between bridge and river thus defines Kafka’s trajectory toward the fluidity of the multilinguistic imagination that animates his later prose. In his next fiction those currents would be discovered at the mouth of a different river, as Kafka’s subsequent novel drew him from Russia and Prague to the shores of Manhattan and to a city he would call Ramses, New York.

Chapter 3

Hebrews in New York Amerika, or The Man Who Disappeared

And the children of Yisrael journeyed from Ra’meses to Sukkot, about six hundred thousand men on foot, beside children. And a mixed multitude [erev rav] went up with them. —Exod. 12:37–38.

Though the novel that came to be known as Amerika has long been seen as ending with references to the New Testament, New York is the location that sparked Kafka’s reimagination of the Hebrew voice.1 “The Judgment” had already taught Kafka how to write a German shot through with foreign sources and liberated his writing, with the model of Yiddish inspiring him to rethink the idea of a mother tongue. Kafka’s New York novel became the fictional site that allowed him to rethink his relation to his own linguistic origin in broader ways with the broader range of Jewish languages in mind. Karl Rossman, the novel’s protagonist, will therefore be banished from his father’s house for having been seduced by the Christian maid but obviously, in this German Jewish parable, for having been seductive to her as well. Without a proper name, Yiddish in Kafka’s New York resembles the offspring Karl left behind in Prague: like that child, who was “christened Jakob” (in der Taufe den Namen Jakob erhielt), Yiddish in 1912 was the product of a vibrant Hebrew language and its love for the common German tongue.2 This symbolically German Jewish romance leaves Karl’s child in Prague and leads him to discover in New York his long-lost Uncle Jakob, who is engaged in what is often a more acceptable form of trade and exchange, one that will suggest Kafka’s own reading of the hidden but infinite potential of the Hebrew voice.

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New York is in this way Kafka’s first, large-scale site for encountering the symbolic force of Hebrew in his fiction and for imagining an exodus among others as key to its lasting effects. Kafka’s use of biblical sources does not make this a story of his linguistic origins alone, as Karl Rossman’s sojourn in the “Hotel Occidental” suggests. After leaving New York and the house of Uncle Jakob, Karl heads to the city of Ramses, New York, by sharing his fate with the “Irishman” Robinson and “Delamarche, I’m French,” giving Kafka’s first hidden exploration of Hebrew in his fiction a radically biblical and at the same time hypermodern, transnational sense.3

Immigrant Israel: Kafka and Morris Rosenfeld Kafka’s German Jewish vision of New York is symbolized by the sword in the hand of the Statue of Liberty on the novel’s first page. This “divine messenger,” as Heinz Politzer calls her, finds a source in the Hebrew meaning of that term, whose translinguistic meaning is outlined in Salomon Maimons Lebengeschichte, a book that Kafka mentions in a letter to Felix Weltsch as a source for Maimonides.4 There the Hebrew meaning of such a “messenger” is discussed in the section on angels in Moses Maimonides’ terms. In the Hebrew Bible, Maimon writes, translating Maimonides’ twelfth-century text, working from a Hebrew translation of the original Judeo-Arabic in which The Guide of the Perplexed was composed, “every action [Wirkung] occurs, that is to say, through the offices of an angel”: “for angel [in Hebrew, malakh] means messenger [Bote]. He who follows the order of another is an angel. Thus we find that the Holy Scripture even attributes the involuntary movements of senseless animals [unvernünftige Tiere] to angels, when, that is, those actions have a purpose.”5 Angels, in other words, are translator figures, and Kafka’s sword—replacing the torch of the actual statue—confirms this sense of “angel” as “messenger” in just this sense. In the world-famous poem by Emma Lazarus that became part of the pedestal of the statue in 1903, the allegorical freedom of this angel figure is called the “mother of exiles.” In this sense Hebrew is figured in New York as a translation of foreign voices, even animal ones, and as Politzer reminds us, “Rossman,” Karl’s family name, can suggest horse-man.6 Kafka’s liberty thus signifies both exile, like the angel with the flaming sword guarding the gates of paradise after the expulsion, and the redemption of otherness through translation (Gen. 3:24). At the same time Lady Liberty’s sword is also a sign for the German Jewish figure of Emma Lazarus, an American poet who translated the Hebrew poetry of Jehuda



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Ha-Levi from its German version into English and was a descendant of ­Sephardic Jews who had passed under the Spanish sword in 1492.7 Karl Rossman arrives in New York under this sign of Hebrew’s creative and hidden potential, making it hardly a surprise that this scene of arrival recalls a Yiddish poem by Morris Rosenfeld that Kafka read, as he reports, voraciously in Meyer Pines’s voluminous work.8 “Unser Shif,” or “Our Ship,” his poem that appears in the Histoire de la littérature Judéo-Allemande, imagines what Pines calls “l’éternite de son people,” founded not on a rejection of the foreign but on an ability to cross boundaries instead. “Beaucoup de vaisseaux font naufrage, Et n’atteignent pas le rivage” (Many vessels suffer shipwreck and more, never attaining their destined shore), as Pines puts it in his translation, making use of the traditional image of the ship of state. At the same time “Our Ship” steers the conventional topos toward a vision of Egypt, marked with the inflection of Yiddish as a German Jewish voice: Oh! Sur toutes les mers déjà Notre vaisseau a glissé Sur la mer Rouge, sur la mer Morte Sur la mer Noire il voyage maintenant.9 (Oh! How many the seas Our vessel has crossed The Red Sea, the Dead Sea, And now the Black Sea it travels.) Kafka’s interest in such a poem would not have been incidental to his decision to send his first novelistic protagonist to New York—in its Egyptian version— where Rosenfeld had lived since leaving the pogrom-wracked “Russia” that Kafka imagined in “The Judgment.” In imagining a crossing of the “Red Sea” and envisioning the “Black Sea” of the present, Rosenfeld was alluding to the Hebrew and Yiddish literary scene with which Kafka was familiar, and which was influential in the German Jewish literary world where his own writing emerged. When Rosenfeld gave a poetry reading in Prague in 1908, writers for the Zionist newspaper Selbstwehr (Self-Defense) thus saw his Yiddish-speaking presence as an act of German Jewish self-assertion. The Rosenfeld who had traveled from New York to Prague was hailed as an example of “the heroism of the Jews who had steadfastly held onto German culture and preserved their German language in a dialect which was called jargon or Yiddish.” At the same

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time, as Iris Bruce suggests, Rosenfeld’s poetry could be cited in support of a “Germanophile” position in Yiddish letters, and in fact his ­detractors would charge that his verse had become German-laden in its contest with English and other languages on the streets of New York.10 Amerika alludes to these varied accents and languages in Karl’s almost constant companionship with Delacourt the Frenchman—a witty allusion to his reliance on Pines’s French-language text for his Yiddish sources—and the Irishman Robinson, the kind of stereotypically dangerous immigrant he was warned about before he left Prague. Karl thus first declares himself a “German” to his fellow immigrants and proceeds to question their “nationality”—“ich bin ein Deutscher”—a declaration that is suggestively Jewish as well as German in pre–World War I New York.11 Yiddish could thus be considered a German language and a Jewish language at the same time, a fact that helps to explain the equal and opposite pull in Karl’s heart toward a “stoker” who delivers a “mishmash” (Durcheinanderstrudeln) of complaints to the captain and whose “clumsy way of expressing himself” (ungeschickte Ausdrucksweise) reflects attitudes toward Yiddish as an artless German at best.12 Karl Rossman’s reactions in this way participate in a form of the contemporary debate on the meaning of Jewish languages. This linguistic comedy begins well before his German “ship” finds its New York berth. In “Unzer Shif,” which Kafka read in transliterated Yiddish and in French translation, Rosenfeld’s Yiddish refers to the Jewish voice of immigrants on board in equally hidden terms. Rather than referring to the “Jewish vessel”—suggesting language as a singular affair—national tradition is figured by a voice that is far from monolithic and which expresses itself indirectly. “Our vessel is unique,” “Unzer Shif” concludes; “our vessel, our vessel is the silent one.”13 This effect of Pines’s French translation from the Yiddish is subtle but hard to miss: both “vaisseau” for “vessel” in French and “shif” in Yiddish convey the parallel sense of “shipping,” as in the transfer of goods or material—a process which, as a people moves from shore to shore and crosses national boundaries, means the hidden and open transfer to linguistic influences as well. In this linguistic dimension “Unzer Shif,” or “notre vaisseau,” in the Yiddish sense that Rosenfeld evokes is the act of translation, a process that can go on quietly when the “vessel,” like a language, is “ancient”: the words that travel from one language to another—whether from Hebrew to Yiddish, within one national group, or from German to Yiddish—may be naturalized over time. By the time this “shipping” process is discovered in the hint of an accent or different national contribution, the recognition sets in that it has been going in the “silent”



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vessel,” as Rosenfeld names the expansive potential of the traveling Hebrew voice. In Pines, Kafka read an interpretation that placed German in the Jewish hot seat in the New York form of this question. Jewish immigrants who had already arrived and settled, he points out, tended to look down on Yiddishspeaking greenhorns. This “spirit of arrogance shown by certain residents of the New York ghetto, though once immigrants themselves,” resulted in a flight to German that can also be felt in the texture of Rosenfeld’s poems. These “old immigrants” and now New Yorkers “no longer wish to show their connection to other Jews who have not yet had a chance to make their fortunes,” as Pines explains: “in order to affect an air of self-importance, they speak a judeo-allemand Germanized to a ridiculous extent.”14 In the “Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language,” which he delivered on February 18, 1912, in Prague, Kafka introduced a reading of a poem by Rosenfeld that he misnamed “Di Grine,” or “The Greenhorns,” and which was more likely “Di Historishe Peklakh,” or “History’s Baggage.” In his introduction Kafka describes this “arrogant” comedy of foreign integration taking place on the street that Rosenfeld’s poem describes and the inevitable forgetfulness that ensues: “Herr Löwy will now—and this is indeed the case—recite three poems. First, Di Grine [Di Historishe Peklakh] by Rosenfeld. Grine are the green ones, the greenhorns, the new arrivals in America. In this poem a little group of such Jewish immigrants are walking along a street in New York, carrying their seedy luggage. A crowd, of course, gathers, stares at them, follows them, and laughs.”15 Kafka’s sense of this humor comes through better with Rosenfeld’s poem in mind, for the New York crowd that makes fun of the “foreigners” represents not just the voices of newly established Americans but also the forgetfulness of standardized languages. In “Di Historishe Peklakh” more-established Americans make fun of the “jüdische Auswanderer,” or Jewish immigrants, for their obvious difference. The more subtle comedy in Rosenfeld’s poem is that the crowd representing the more established language is described as multilingual: “many sighs are heard, and then laughter as well: / people are speaking and chatting in tongues too many to tell” (es heren zikh zoyftsen, es hert zikh a lakhen, / men redt un men ploydert oyf alerhand shprakhen). Laughter, as Kafka’s “Introduction” suggests, becomes a hidden form of linguistic recollection: the spite of these naturalized “immigrants” who no longer have “baggage” is Rosenfeld’s comic reminder of the “alerhand sprachen”—the many different languages—they brought to America themselves. The German national identity pleaded for by the “stoker” becomes comic in this multilingual context. His awareness that “different ports have different

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morals” and his agreement that “there’s a lot of bias” in America turn Karl’s spokesman for the “Germans” on board into a beloved immigrant figure as well.16 As the sources of Kafka’s novel already suggest, such sensitivity to the multiple sources of identity goes back to the origin of the nation, especially in Hebrew and its larger biblical terms. The first reference to “Ramses” in the Hebrew Bible, Exod. 12:37, occurring precisely when “the Israelites journeyed from Ramses to Succoth,” may well have sparked Kafka’s imagination, but the following line even more so: “moreover, a mixed multitude [erev rav] went up with them,” and this transnational group of foreigners was also present at revelation.17 On a more linguistic level, the “stoker” who appears to stoke the fires of nationalism and is reproved by the captain is also a comic figure in a poetically Yiddish sense. “One of the central complaints leveled against Rosenfeld,” as Marc Miller observes, was that his poetry was too “daytshmerish”; he was criticized for a Yiddish whose colloquial level and usage were marred by an excess of lofty German diction.18 This gap within Rosenfeld’s Yiddish was the same one that Kafka was concerned with exploring in his writing: the space between the apparently “national” claim of words from “pure” German and the influence of Jewish and other national voices—those dialects and foreign sounds that, as Kafka wrote to Brod in 1921, were the only things keeping the German language alive.19 In New York, Rosenfeld had become a lightning rod for the debate over how much “foreign” content a nation’s literature—in this case Yiddish, but the principle applied to English and German—could use to enrich itself without being accused of going over to the other side. The problem of daytshmerish was therefore highly Kafkaesque in the sense of being both foreign and deeply familiar at once. The German content of Yiddish that had already been naturalized— comprising roughly 70 percent of Yiddish, according to Rosenfeld’s promoter, the Harvard professor Leo Wiener—suddenly appeared as a nightmare instead: a “strange” infusion of “resources,” as later linguists put it, that were not “our own.”20 Kafka’s sense of the importance of foreign words to any national literary style—whether “Unzer Shif,” Rosenfeld’s poem that describes the Jewish tradition in exile, or the stoker’s would-be all-German boat—makes the comedy of New York apparent from the start. The very notion of “our ship,” in the sense of the “vessel” that is a national language, becomes comic as Kafka writes a novel of immigration in his own form. The would-be German ship, like Rosenfeld’s Yiddish voice, carries the passengers it sustains by constantly taking foreign provisions on board. Hence the importance of the description of Rosenfeld’s poetry that Kafka read about in Pines, whose Histoire de la littérature Judéo-Allemande



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argues that his New York Rosenfeld’s poetry was distinctive for precisely the multiple sources it emphasized in Yiddish’s American form. Pines therefore notes the tendency of Rosenfeld to include words of recent acquisition, added to the Hebrew and Slavic component of his vocabulary, without being afraid to use German elements not yet fully naturalized by Yiddish syntax and the flow of its speech. In this account of Yiddish poetry, diversity of foreign content is seen as a source of poetic strength rather than barbarism that drags the language down. The following description of Rosenfeld’s style reads like a snapshot of the process of transnational metamorphosis that forms a linguistic tradition, caught in medias res as the process of fusion is under way. According to Pines, Rosenfeld’s poetry therefore included a certain number of English words, such as “sweat-shop, penny, judge, miner, boss, sir, lady, etc,” which entered into the dialects of American immigrants, and which serve the primary purpose of giving his poetry a taste of local colors. In general, his language is one of the most pure, and at the same time one of the richest one can find among Yiddish writers [les écrivains judéo-allemands]. The number of Hebrew words, especially in his nationalistic and popular poetic works, is quite considerable. On the other hand, he has also drawn widely from the resources of German dialect. Its borrowings, done with tact and without exaggeration, and with no affront to taste, combine with Hebrew and Slavic vocabulary in a way that allows the author to attain a richness in synonym and the careful use of nuance that is completely remarkable.21 Here the Yiddish writing that is the most “pure” is also described as passing through the Kafkaesque process in which multiple national sources are revealed as hidden constituents of the spoken and poetic tongue. The elements of Rosenfeld’s Yiddish, as well as American, Hebrew, Russian, and German, style indicate the trajectory of Amerika as a novel, as Karl moves from Europe, to the Hotel Occidental in Ramses, New York, full of immigrants and foreigners like himself, to the “Theater of Oklahoma,” where “everyone is welcome,” with its messianic ideal of identity as a theatrical art. In this larger sense the stoker’s rhetorical question—“warum sind wir nicht lauter Deutsche hier?” (Why aren’t we simply Germans here?)—points to the deepest subject of this New York novel, the multiplicity and interlocking forms of national identity and language that Kafka’s German Jewish novel explores.22

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Of Slovaks and Suitcases: Hebrew as a Medial Language Jacob’s sin. Esau’s predestination. —Kafka, diary

Karl’s uncle from the old country is largely correct in his statement to his longlost nephew that “the stoker must have put you under his spell” (scheint Dich bezaubert zu haben). No sooner has Karl Rossman arrived in America than he has temporarily lost his “Koffer” (suitcase), the same one “his father had given . . . into his possession” (als ihm der Vater den Koffer für immer übergeben hatte), in what we later learn to have been Austro-Hungarian Prague.23 The fact that Karl’s immigrant “Koffer” undergoes so much secret transfer—lost or stolen, he fears, by the Slovak, returned once Karl is sent into exile again by a letter from Uncle Jakob, and pillaged by Frenchman and Irishman alike—suggests that Kafka gave special attention to a line by Rosenfeld in which immigrants and a version of the Hebrew Bible were already linked. In Rosenfeld’s “Di Historishe Peklakh,” or “History’s Baggage,” the speaker examines these new arrivals on the New York waterfront. After asking what might be in their baggage, he discloses a text metonymically inseparable from their migration that has accompanied them from shore to shore. Their bags, the narrator announces, contain a “little book” (bikhl) that, though “torn” and tattered, turns out to be “dos heyligste bukh fun di heyligste bikher,” or the “holiest of all holy books”—that is to say, the Bible of Yiddish-speaking immigrants, a Hebrew text equated with the ability to travel and change, like the migrants who carry it, without the original getting lost.24 In chapter 4, “The Road to Ramses,” Kafka’s narrator tells us that Karl Rossman’s “Koffer,” once it has mysteriously been returned to him, contains a version of this same little book, a “Taschenbibel,” or pocket Bible.25 The fact that Karl’s “Koffer” will soon be rifled after he discovers its return represents one comic commentary on his Hebrew inheritance: no matter how this parental baggage is lost or squandered, the “Koffer” that carries what is likely a German translation of the Bible becomes interesting to the Irish and the French. Though “nothing at all was missing” from the suitcase, its contents are rifled by Robinson and Delamarche, the former an emigrant from a colonized nation and the latter a figure for French elegance with a more proletarian taste. In this context the Bible’s Hebrew original is not as important as the “piece of Veronese salami” packed alongside it in the suitcase and which Karl’s “mother had given him as a last minute gift.” As an ethnic marker—from the nation that created the word



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“ghetto”—that maternal sustenance is eventually consumed by Robinson and Delamarche on the road to the Hotel Occidental. The “Koffer” containing a version of the Hebrew tradition initially conveys the “salami” as a tainting stigma from this broader, Western perspective: the product of Italy for which Karl ”had very little appetite” had “imparted its smell to everything in the suitcase; and if that couldn’t be removed by some means, Karl”—as the narrator tells us—“faced the prospect of going around the next several months shrouded in that smell” himself (in diesen Gerucht eingehüllt). 26 This taint on the Bible that Karl takes—or in another sense returns—to Ramses is itself a humorous translation of Rosenfeld, where Hebrew’s curse becomes a secret blessing carried by the Jews. Such is the explicit message of Rosenfeld’s “Goles Marsh,” or “March of Exile,” which appears in the edition of Littérature Judéo-Allemande that Kafka reports having devoured. There the charges made against “unzer Torah,” whose translation Karl carries in his suitcase, are envisioned as capable of being transformed—that is, translated—into an advantage or blessing in disguise, as the energy of the curse undergoes a linguistic metamorphosis that allows the tradition to thrive. According to Benjamin Harshav, the motif of the “wandering Jew” worked its way into Yiddish writing. The “traditional image of Christian, often anti-­ Semitic literature” of the cursed, eternal Jew who migrates from land to land became a literary advantage and was “adopted by modern Yiddish literature as a symbol of self-understanding.”27 The Rosenfeld poem Kafka knew was a prime example of such creativity, where the charges that would make the Hebrew tradition “smell” like a salami-stained suitcase are transformed into a source of insight instead: Unser Thore is a raub Unser Nomen—a gefahr Unser jichus nor a zaar Unser geones nor a chet, Unser feinkeit a gespet. Immer schlecht, schlecht, schlecht, Immer knecht, knecht, knecht, Immer such, such, such Segen in dem sseines fluch. (Our Torah they say is plunder, Our very name—a danger,

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Our pedigree—nothing but misery, Our genius—simply crime. Our manners—not refined. Always depraved, depraved, depraved, Always enslaved, enslaved, enslaved Always search, search search For the blessing in the enemy’s curse.)28 This “march of exile” that Kafka read gives Karl’s biblical luggage and its Italian “salami” and smell a new dimension. To be in exile, in Rosenfeld’s “Goles,” means to have one’s tradition or language misunderstood in his ironic sense: the “Torah” is considered a symbol of “plunder,” when it is in fact the nations of the world who have helped themselves to Hebrew’s resources, as biblical translation created a literary tradition of one’s “own.” Exile for Rosenfeld means to have one’s tradition misunderstood; to depart from that slavery means recognizing the “curse” of the Jews as an excuse for textual robbery, rediscovering the potential for textual and human exchange that “unser Thore” actually represents. This “blessing” to be found in the “enemy’s curse” centers on “unser Nomen,” or “our name.” Here transforming the “curse” placed on the foreign means a recognition of Hebrew and its potential for change. In the biblical text it is Jacob who will have his name changed to “Israel” after struggling with the angel; he will be granted the name of the nation only after recognizing the angels as translator figures—as a series of messengers, traveling on a “stairway” between different realms, who cannot be mastered by a single “Jakob,” no matter how strong (Gen. 28:12, 32:29). In Kafka’s New York, the Uncle Jakob who undergoes a similar name change conveys this same Hebrew sense of difference as the essential principle that is required for human growth. Changing “Jakob” from his first name to his last, Karl’s uncle becomes more “original” in the biblical sense, identifying with the “Israel” whose identity was founded in a vision of continuous exchange. In Kafka’s New York novel, getting one’s “nomen” changed means reversing the curse, as Rosenfeld suggests, and discovering the origin of tradition in forms of exchange. Uncle Jakob has therefore given up what the text calls his “Taufname,” or baptismal first name, and with it the notion that his sinful, “other” identity must be shed. The avuncular patriarch thereby has become more Jewish, not less, and in an original sense: by giving up the name “Bendelmayer,” Karl’s mother’s maiden name, he opens up the American “bundle” of



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the German Jewish nexus, reclaiming the binational principle of trade with the other from which the first Jacob of the Hebrew Bible emerged.29 “Zwei Völker,” as Rachel is told in the Luther Bible, “sind in deinem Leibe, or “two peoples are in your womb” (Gen. 25:23). Uncle Jakob’s line of business recalls this quite Hebrew version of the Rossman family line. In a nod to Rosenfeld’s “March of Exile” where the Christian belief that “Unser Thore is ein raub” is revised, Kafka gives Jakob a business that recalls the Yiddish proverb “Toyre iz di beste skhoyre” (the Torah is the best merchandise)—a saying that Kafka recorded in his diary— by making Uncle Jakob into a biblical and contemporary tradesman of New York proportions.30 His mysteriously textual workers connect diverse parties, in a business that “actually consisted of a kind of intermediary trade [Zwischen­ handel], which did not transfer goods between the producers and consumers, or even to retailers, but which obtained the raw materials and original products [Urprodukte] for the massive factory cartels [großen Fabrikskartelle], and in fact established the supply links between them [zwischen ihnen besorgte].”31 Jakob’s business is obtaining the “Urprodukte,” which are then processed by cartels that resemble the interpretive monopolies of both the “old” Hebrew text or new “testament,” as some call it, and establishing these “supply links” to the new world in New York. In this respect Uncle Jakob is very much a figure for the Hebrew language, in a medial sense. In a “business” that is also the transcription and redemption of Christian prejudice, his “intermediary trade” is conducted very much in the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator,” which concludes by remarking that “the interlinear version of the Scriptures is the prototype or ideal of all translation.”32 Uncle Jakob, like the meaning of biblical Hebrew, is controlled by neither the “cartel” of Jewish nor any other religious or national point of view. The business of Uncle Jakob, in Kafka’s New York, is the translatability and infinite interpretability of the “orders” he receives, in a hypermodern vision of the fecundity that ensues from the act of textual exchange. For the Kafka who made a note that the “Zohar” was the “Bible of the Talmudists” (Zohar, “Bibel der Kabbalisten”), the name “Jakob” provides a case in point.33 As Elliot Wolfson has shown, Jacob’s “apparent deceptiveness with respect to purchasing his birthright from Esau” was a “point exploited in Christian polemicists against the Jews,” a vision of Jewish tradition successfully expanded in Kafka’s text.34 When Karl travels to the “Country House [Landhaus] in New York,” which centers on a “lofty room” in which he felt as though he were “standing in the gallery of a church” (wie auf der Galerie

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einer Kirche), he encounters his uncle’s two business partners and comments on precisely this Christian monopoly on Jacob’s interpretation: “if one didn’t know Mr. Pollunder, one might have easily supposed that what these two were talking about was not business at all, but something of a criminal nature” (etwas Verbrecherisches).35 The biblical figure of Jacob-cum-Israel became the Jewish counternarrative in the medieval period that expressed an equal and opposite vision, which in a Hebrew sense proceeds from beneath. This critical unseating of Christian prejudice finds its image in the Hebrew root of “Jacob,” which means to undercut from the heel—ya-a-kov and l’a-kev—as Jacob’s grasping his twin brother’s foot during delivery suggests from the start. “Reversing the Christian myth,” as Wolfson points out, “Jacob-Israel, not Jesus,” becomes “the tree of life that bears the fruit of salvation.”36 In Kafka’s version the “tree of life” thus belongs to Jacob, as the ability to translate between interpretive positions in a manner that keeps tradition fresh and alive.37 At this exegetical level, Uncle Jakob’s art and “trade” provides material—the “Urprodukte,” or “original” text—and then consists of walking between the “cartels” of Christian and Jewish nationalistic interpretation, sometimes disappearing as he allows other traditions to grow. In the section of the Zohar based on Judg. 5:11, which Kafka owned in a 1913 German translation of the kabbalistic text, this “‘voice of he who treads in the middle’ [Die Stimme der in der Mitte Schreitenden]—that is the voice of Jakob [das ist die Stimme Jakobs]” himself. 38 In Kafka’s New York, Uncle Jakob is the figure who, like the Hebrew language that was destined to be translated, must trade and continue to trade with Israel’s other. In the same way his biblical namesake had to subjugate the Esau—“the older shall serve the younger,” as the prophecy of the original Jacob’s birth has it—and then recognize the other and his rights (Gen. 25:23). The word mechazzim, used to interpret Jacob in the version of the Zohar that Kafka possessed, thus has different meanings in different national and religious versions of the Bible. According to the Revised Standard Version, this word from the Song of Deborah comes from “the oldest remaining considerable fragment of Hebrew literature”; as a result the “meaning of the Heb. is uncertain,” as the parallel note in the authoritative Jewish translation of the Hebrew text into modern English declares. According to Walter Benjamin, Kafka had described precisely this linguistic register: he had “relinquished the truth” for the sake of clinging to its “transmissibility” (Tradierbarkeit), just as Uncle Jakob provides an “Ur-Produkt” that can be translated—handed down—in many different forms.39 Sometimes, then, mechazzim (‫—)מחצצים‬a



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word printed in German transliteration in this section of the Zohar that Kafka owned—is translated as “the sound of musicians at the watering places,” as in the Revised Standard Version, close to Luther’s German. At other times the Hebrew word is translated quite differently as the “sound of archers,” as the Jewish Publication Society version reports. Together both readings suggest a boundary between national languages and the sounds or weapons that inevitably move across.40 The “voice of Jacob” is therefore not cheating, as Abraham says when he gives the younger son his blessing—“the voice is the voice of Jacob, yet the hands are the hands of Esau” (Gen. 27:22)— but a linguistic source that openly conveys the “transmissibility” of an originally dual “Israel” instead. Uncle Jakob resists his nephew’s visit, however, not just because this house has a “church” for an entryway but because Karl is not yet ready to grasp the multiple forms this Hebrew potential suggests. In the sense that “Kabbalah” means a secret or esoteric form of Jewish knowledge, his Landhaus carries Yiddish significance in this sense: the New York celebrity who stirred controversy by moving to a “Country House” was none other than Morris Rosenfeld, whose poetry Kafka had introduced in Prague in 1912. This was the period when Rosenfeld became “the first Yiddish best seller” and could indeed be charged with abandoning the common Jewish voice. He had, in fact, already made his move and left the Lower East Side behind; living in Yonkers by 1907, he nonetheless “still owned his country home in Spencertown, New York,” and thus maintained his own distance from the kind of “striking metalworkers” (demonstrierenden Metallarbeitern) he saw in the New York streets, a staple of the kind of engagé Yiddish writing that made Rosenfeld famous as the “Sweatshop Poet” of New York.41 Karl passes through, or passes over, just such a crowd while being driven through the New York streets to Mr. Pollunder’s house. Hence Uncle Jakob’s problem: this Landhaus lacks a lantzman, or “country­ man” in Yiddish, and remains in denial of the transnational identity built into this structural home. For a Karl who watches in amazement at Jakob’s own workers, who carefully man the telephones and take down orders from different cartels with the accuracy of Torah scribes, the Pollunder home is first and foremost a site of exploitation: “a country house, which, in the manner of rich people’s country houses around New York, was bigger and higher than country houses meant to serve a single family” (das bloß einer Familie dienen soll).42 Jakob’s reluctance to let his nephew visit results from the house’s denial of these unilluminated, yet internal others, whose traces haunt

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its corridors nonetheless: “‘Electric power has so far only been connected to the dining room,’ explained Klara,” Mr. Pollunder’s daughter; “‘we only recently bought the house, and had it completely converted, in as much as you can remodel [umbauen] such an old and idiosyncratically constructed house [mit seiner eigensinnigen Bauart] like this.’” In its newness the house is only a partial New Testament to the plutocrat’s wealth, with the “old” structure that peeks through its incomplete renewal suggesting the Yiddish socialism that Rosenfeld’s own move to the “country” never left behind. Thus when Karl looks at the house for himself, he passed great stretches of wall that had no doors at all, so that one couldn’t imagine what lay behind them. Then it was one door after another, he tried several of them, but they were all locked and the rooms were apparently unoccupied. It was an extraordinary waste of space, and Karl thought of the eastern districts of New York [östlichen Newyyorker Quartiere], which his Uncle had promised to show him, where one small room apparently housed several families, and a corner was home to a whole family. . . . And here there were so many empty rooms, whose sole purpose was to make a hollow sound when you knocked on their doors. 43 One origin of this transnational architecture is the Yiddish socialism that Kafka heard about in Prague—both in the Rosenfeld vein and in the more Germanic sympathy for the “eastern districts” or Lower East Side of New York, which he read about in Arthur Holitscher’s Amerika Heute und Morgen.44 At the same time the “empty rooms” of this “Country House” represent American plutocratic wealth and its expropriation, both of economic resources denied the poor and of Christianity’s disavowed dependence on “other,” still vibrant textual traditions, which Uncle Jakob promises to point out. Kafka’s hidden Jewish satire of the Landhaus suggests the Christian overlay or reconstruction of an older Hebrew tradition. The building suggests this to be a case of the rich getting richer, extracting the resources of an older “house” while claiming a superior and superseding version that is new. The enforcer in this combative comedy is the figure of Mr. Pollunder’s daughter Klara, who displays her talent at “ju-jitsu”—using Karl’s efforts against him—and does everything she can to the nephew of Uncle Jakob to—as she tells Karl—“push you down.”45 The satire of Mr. Pollunder’s wealthy daughter treats her as if she were a Christian saint with a secret history, and her proud



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display of the Landhaus to Karl comically works against her in this respect. Mr. Pollunder’s “Country House” instead comes across as the emblem of wealth as plunder, both of economic resources and of older textual traditions, with the lit dining room illuminating both Klara’s name and the comedy it suggests. The “Klara” who specializes in riding lessons with “Mack,” her American boyfriend, becomes a parable of conspicuous Christian consumption in this respect: Kafka gives her the German name of “Saint Clare of Assisi” (b. 1193/94), author of a famous letter preaching poverty and service to Agnes of Bohemia, who in turn founded the “Poor Clare” convent and dedicated herself to the service of lepers in Prague.46 In this comic rewriting of “my father’s house has many mansions” (John 14:2), Mr. Pollunder’s house suggests the overwriting of a Hebrew tradition that is endlessly ramified and interconnected with its later versions. Karl’s “wandering along these passages” looks forward to his ascent to Brunelda’s New York apartment, where “at the end of each flight of stairs another would begin in a slightly different direction.”47 The model for Mr. Pollunder’s “many rooms” model of Jewish languages, however, belongs to the church father Origen, as Gershom Scholem’s classic account of the interconnection between kabbalistic and Christian sources of biblical interpretation has pointed out: “In his commentary on the Psalms, Origen quotes a ‘Hebrew Scholar,’ presumably a member of the Rabbinic Academy in Caesarea, as saying that the Holy Scriptures are like a large house with many, many rooms, and that outside each room lies a key—but it is not the right one. To find the right key that will open the doors—that is the great and arduous task. This story, dating from the height of the Talmudic era, may give an idea of Kafka’s deep roots in the tradition of Jewish mysticism.”48 One reason that Uncle Jacob does not want Karl to visit this “country house” is in this Hebrew sense not all that mystical when seen from this translinguistic point of view. Though he trades with Mr. Pollunder and with the newer, symbolically Protestant and somewhat envious Mr. Green, Uncle Jakob in this original Hebrew sense might not want his own “Urprodukte” to be canceled, fully hidden, or plundered by a “Church” rebuilt on an older “building” or Haus—such as “das Haus Israel” of Luther’s Bible—a term that in the Hebrew tradition means “Bayit” and thus also a people’s home. Kafka’s Uncle Jakob bears the name of the figure who transforms the notion of Hebrew as an original source. Acting as a proprietor, he furthers the notion that the exchange between different languages serves as the foundational structure that undergirds tradition. “The varying customs (prevailing

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among the different nations) becoming famous,” as Origen formulates this principle, “are regulated by the word of God, being given as a possession to him who is figuratively termed Jacob.” 49 The many rooms of the New York Landhaus represent a disavowed “Origen” in the broadest sense. In “wanting Christians to have an accurate text of the Bible,” as Michael Singer develops his significance, Origen was moved to “compose the Hexapla, which presented the Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic version of the biblical text in parallel columns,” exposing the translinguistic traffic with Jewish languages as a constitutive process within the “Church.”50 Uncle Jakob’s business, with its scribal telephones, thus looks backward to Hebrew’s relations with other traditions and forward at once. Work in his office resembles a hypermodern scene of transcription, where the “doors of telephone booths were opening and closing” as linguistic material is acquired and reshaped.51 In Kafka’s New York, Hebrew’s transmissibility begins at home but never ends there: the Origen to whom Kafka’s New York houses allude also deployed “methods used by Philo,” the Jewish scholar of Alexandria, the same scribe who helps Derrida trace what he calls “interpretations at war” and argue against any single origin for German or Jewish thought.52 The birth of Uncle Jakob’s namesake in the Hebrew Bible thus occurs with the forecast that “One people shall be mightier than the other / And the older shall serve the younger” (Gen. 25:23). Kafka’s Jakob suggests that it is the “supply links” between “cartels” or nations and their monopolies of interpretation on the biblical text that allow their different traditions to thrive and survive; hence the peacemaking of the biblical text with Jacob’s return of gifts to Esau, where the “Zwischenhandel,” or “intermediary trade,” of Kafka’s Uncle Jakob finds its original source. As the Bible suggests, the “older” nation does not “serve” the younger in a servile or uncompensated sense, just as the “national” text of the Hebrews cannot serve as the biblical foundation for other peoples without acquiring lexical material of its own. In the ethos of Jakob, a constant back and forth between different “nations” formed the original “Israel,” and the former Jacob, after his vision at Beth-El of the angel-messengers, will thus give back to his older brother in turn. “To my Lord Esau, thus says your servant Jacob,” as Genesis puts it: the newer version always gives wealth back to the foreign original—“return to your native land and I will deal bountifully with you,” he tells Esau—just as translation always helps us to see more of the riches present in the older text (Gen. 32:4, 32:10). It is in this sense that Kafka’s Uncle Jakob banishes his nephew Karl Rossman for going to Mr. Pollunder’s house, with its “gallery of a Church.” The



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name “Pollunder” quietly suggests a raid upon rather than recognition of the older tradition of Jakob, and the Landhaus, or country house, as the Yiddish intonation of the German evokes the fact that there is no supportive brother from the old country who will preserve the tradition’s original forms. Not surprisingly Jakob dislikes Karl’s attraction to this new house and its structural testament, as if the proto-Christian reconstruction had seized the blessing of the older “Haus” and its potential, in just the kind of transference his biblical namesake had once performed.53 Uncle Jakob’s letter of banishment thus describes Karl’s visit to the churchlike structure as “that general assault on myself” (jenen allgemeinen Angriff gegen mich), promising his nephew that an exaltation will ultimately be communicated to him in exile. “I would love to take these two hands that are holding and writing on this piece of paper,” as he puts it, “and lift you high up in the air [auffangen und hochheben],” sending his nephew off to learn the lessons of Ramses: “however, as there is no suggestion that this might ever occur, I am bound to send you away [fortschikken] from me after what has happened today.”54 Thus when his tribal anger exiles his nephew to the Hotel Occidental—“nothing good, Karl, can come from your family” (Von Deiner Familie, Karl, kommt nichts Gutes)—Uncle Jakob has already exposed Karl to the Hebrew tradition in translation, enabling him to read the signs of redemption he encounters along the way.

Uncle Jakob’s Desk: Kafka’s Kabbalah The “American desk” (amerikanischer Schreibtisch) that Karl Rossman receives from Uncle Jakob represents this rich, transnational potential of the Hebrew, figured as a tradition whose deepening interpretation produces an endlessly transformable text. The reading surface of Jakob’s desk is overlaid with what in German is called an “Aufsatz” of filing slots, rendered awkwardly in English as the desk’s “top part,” a case of meaning lost in translation at its best, for this “Aufsatz” was made up of a series of partitions filing slots or “compartments” that are in German called “Fächer”—a word that can also mean “field” or “subject.” This filing system that categorizes written documents can also be spun by a handle to “form the floors of newly created compartments” (neu aufsteigender Fächer), as if new “subjects” could be discovered in written documents as their own hidden, potential pockets of meaning come into view.55 The word Aufsatz, of course, is the same German word more commonly used for the English “essay,” making this apparatus of

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constantly changing categories a literal example of the interpretive process. Kafka’s diary uses “Aufsatz” on January 31, 1912, to describe his planned essay “Goethes entsetzliches Wesen” (Goethe’s Repulsive Essence), as I have discussed in Chapter 1. Here the “Aufsatz” that sits atop Uncle Jakob’s desk models the way categories that prestructure the content of biblical Hebrew can give rise to ever-new readings, as transformed categories for interpreting the canonical text suddenly emerge. “All desks were now fitted with this new feature [Neueinrichtung],” the narrator observes of this “Aufsatz,” suggesting a modern textual openness in this sense. This new filing system, after all, had the “added advantage of being inexpensive to mount on older desks.” Uncle Jakob “was not at all pleased with the desk” as a site that evokes Hebrew’s scriptural transformations, for this new overlay can just as easily create a New Testament, effectively stifling the multiple truths of the older text. Kafka’s reference to “older desks” and scenes of writing thus soon has Karl thinking of the “nativity scenes” (Krippenspiele) he saw staged in Prague. “Of course, the desk hadn’t been designed to recall such things,” the narrator observes, “but the history of inventions probably gave evidence of a similarly vague connection” (aber in der Geschichte der Erfindungen bestand wohl ein ähnlich undeutlicher Zusammenhang), and one that occurs in this passage is dim presence of Moses as well. In the Jewish tradition, the author of the Pentateuch or “The Five Books of Moses” is considered to be Moses himself, and so in the “Christmarkt,” or “Christmas Market,” that reminds Karl of Uncle Jakob’s desk, Karl as a child had “incessantly compared the turning of the handle, which an old man performed, with the effect that it had on the scene.” To Karl, the “Markt,” or market, where Christianity stages its drama of pure origin thus makes him recall that his “mother, standing behind him” in Prague, was not “following the events closely enough,” as if this older text deserved attention as well. Christmas makes Karl think of the infinite categories that can be generated by Uncle Jakob’s scene of writing, in which original texts come to resemble the many strands and changing paths that modern scriptural interpretation would take. Thus it is not surprising that while Jakob’s desk “hadn’t been designed to recall such things,” it at the same time evokes new ideas on biblical scholarship then current in Kafka’s circle in Prague. In 1913, not long after Kafka composed this section of Amerika in the first week of October 1912, Hugo Bergmann, his school friend and later one of the founders of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, would publish his introduction to the German volume Words of Moses (Worte Mosis).56 Among his other connections to Kafka,



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Bergmann was his schoolmate in Prague and recalls doing homework with him over a form of Uncle Jakob’s American “desk,” or “Schreibtisch,” as Kafka, he reports, was one of the few members of his class who “had his own desk” (seinen eigenen Schreib­tisch besaß).57 After hearing Bergmann’s lecture of 1913 entitled “Moses and the Present,” Kafka wrote in his diary that while it made a “pure impression—in any event, I have nothing to do with it”; the “pure” (rein) in the sense of the Hebrew Bible as a national document was not a view he shared.58 Words of Moses did, however, share the multiple view of Hebrew that recalls Amerika. There, Bergmann described the varied “Schichten”—the layers or component pieces in which the Hebrew Bible had been composed—a notion comically reflected in the shifting level of the many “Fächer” that appear on Uncle Jakob’s desk. “Hasn’t the critical study of the text,” Bergmann writes, “destroyed the old tradition handed down to us [alte Überlieferung] that the Pentateuch originated with Moses, and shown that what we are dealing with here is instead a compilation [Sammelwerk], which has flowed into one stream [zusammengeflossen] from many sources?”59 A modern “Jakob” invested in a single, sacred source for the documents that come to define his nation. With this later biblical tradition of Moses in mind, even an avuncular figure might very well look askance at a “desk” whose varied compartments, or “Fächer,” could conceivably take a single document and recategorize it another time. While authorizing Karl to read and write in Amerika, Jakob remains unsure of how far the modern reader should “deconstruct,” as David Damrosch calls it, the previously unified text or reconstruct it, like the critical study of the Bible, in a series of new and different ways.60 Uncle Jakob’s reluctance to let Karl use the “Regulator” (handle), with its capacity to create ever-new “Fächer” and readings, however, suggests a resistance, though not in a conservative sense. Voiced in the name of the patriarch, Jakob pronounces his modern fear of a nationalist reading and the limits to interpretive freedom that might ensue. As Jakob tells Karl shortly after his arrival, “the first days of a European in America were like a new birth” (ja einer Geburt gleich), a version of the sort of nationalist renaissance preached by Ahad Ha-Am, the founder of cultural Zionism, and articulated in Bergmann’s text (29, 56). In Kafka’s terms, the “Regulator” that unleashed modern readings of the Bible’s multiplicity could overregulate when national fantasies seized the text. According to Bergmann, it was likewise “the imagined self-image [Phantasiebild] that a nation [Volk] creates according to its own needs and impulses: that and only that provides it with its historical heroes, not the actual [sinnliche] existence of the original, which existed for only a short period, and of which the nation

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knows little or nothing at all.”61 For Ahad Ha-Am, Moses was therefore a unifying figure, overriding what Bergmann identified as the different “layers” (Schichten) that composed the Hebrew Bible and serving as a nationalist “regulator” for its multiple text. Uncle Jakob, by contrast, provides Karl with a more open model of the Hebrew tradition and displays it in his attitude toward his New York desk. His advice to Karl on the use of the handle that controls the “Fächer,” or compartments, of the desk is nonetheless precise. Jakob thus endorses the critical attitude toward the Bible, figured in the apparatus, or “Aufsatz,” that can sort texts in a seemingly infinite number of ways. His concern with the “neue Einrichtung” called the “Regulator”—the turning device that transforms the structure of interpretation—is thus a defense of interpretive innovation. What Jakob opposes is the destruction of categorical freedom, while defending the limitless readings that new categories suggest: “Still, the Uncle kept urging Karl preferably to avoid using the regulator at all. To back up his advice, the Uncle claimed that the machinery was very delicate, easily broken, and expensive to repair. It wasn’t hard to see that such claims were mere excuses if one reminded oneself that it was very easy to immobilize the regulator, which the Uncle never did.”62 Uncle Jakob will therefore not “immobilize the regulator,” because this apparatus produces ever-new ways of categorizing and subdividing—and therefore understanding—his texts. The freedom he grants his nephew parallels “the authority of commentary over author” in the Jewish tradition, recalling the famous example of Rabbi Eliezer, whom Kafka cites in his diary entry on pardes and the parable of the Oven of Akhnai. The Talmudic passage ends with the prophet Elijah reporting the divine attitude toward human interpretive freedom: “God smiled and said: My children have defeated Me, My children have defeated Me,” a comic response that matches Uncle Jakob’s own refusal to banish Karl from his wonderful desk.63 The Talmudic source behind this scene is explored in Kafka’s diary. There on October 29, 1911, he produced his own version of the Talmud’s model of fourfold interpretation known as pardes. Appearing in the Babylonian Talmud Hagiga 14b, Tosefta Hagiga 2:3–4, these passages also became the basis of the Zoharic justification of kabbalistic practice (Zohar 3:202a).64 Though a version of Hagiga 14b–15a appears in Fromer’s Organismus des Judentums, which he possessed, Kafka reports receiving the tradition from his friend Yitzhak Löwy, an actor from the Yiddish theater and a former yeshiva student, and records it in this form: “Löwy: Four young friends became great Talmud scholars in their old age. But each had a different fate. One became mad, one died, Rabbi Eliezer



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became a free-thinker [Freidenker] at forty and only the oldest, Rabbi Akiba, who had not begun his studies until the age of forty, achieved complete knowledge [vollständige Erkenntnis].”65 Karl Grözinger points out that Löwy may have given Kafka a mixed version of two Talmudic stories that appear on the same Talmudic pages.66 In the process Löwy may well have combined the story of Akiba’s late start as a student of the Torah with the pardes passage that concerns Akiba, Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, and Elisha ben Abuya, the “heretic” known as “Akher,” or “the Other,” in the rabbinic tradition. This latter figure has been renamed in Kafka’s diary as “Rabbi Eliezer.”67 This renaming may have been Kafka’s simple mistake; at the same time his version of the Talmudic parable as it stands conveys a different model of reading the text, giving the “Regulator” another turn. In Kafka’s telling of pardes—an acronym that suggests the original ­paradise—the “other” is figuratively contained within the figure of official tradition. Here, Rabbi Eliezer voices the words that the heretic would speak. Kafka’s rereading of “paradise,” in this interpretive sense, suggests a different location for the “other” in the recovery of an original fullness of meaning, especially in the drama of interpretation that the Talmudic parable and its original version already depict. The animus against Elisha ben Abuya, or “other,” is conveyed in the Tosefta and its tradition by the statement that he “cut the shoots,” a metaphoric reference that coincides with the description of heresy as sterile.68 Casting aside the observance of the Law, Elisha is depicted in the form of “Eliezer” in Kafka’s diary. In the longer diary passage that borrows from the Talmud, the heretic is portrayed as “going for a ride” on Saturday, thus violating Sabbath proscriptions, while his disciple “Rabbi Meir” walks observantly by his side. Kafka’s version thus restages the Talmudic drama: the figure who cut the “shoots” is recast as a more respected figure, and the heretic who rides on the Sabbath in the Talmudic version is not reviled in his version of the tale. “From this walk,” as Kafka concludes, “emerged a symbolic address and reply: come back to your people, said Rabbi Meir. Rabbi Eliezer refused with a play on words” (Wortspiel). In this version of the paradise of interpretation, the “other” known as Elisha ben Abuye already exists within the “Eliezer” of Rabbinic orthodoxy. In addition the many meanings of that can be released by the “Wortspiel” to suggest a heretical multiplicity of interpretation that exists as a pleasurable potential, waiting to be pronounced in the tradition’s own terms. The emphasis on “Wortspiel,” or “play on words,” in Kafka’s version is therefore worth considering, especially given his 1921 diary entry declaring

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that his previous writing might be read as a “new Kabbalah” or “secret teaching” (Geheimlehre) in his terms.69 Traditionally the four rabbis of the passage are associated with different levels of interpretation, each signified by a consonant of the word whose vocalized form means “paradise.” As Moshe Idel points out, pardes, comprising the Hebrew consonants P-R-D-S, “stands for peshat or plain meaning, remez or hint, sometimes designating allegorical explanations, derash or homiletic exposition, and sod or secret (namely symbolic) interpretation of the text.”70 In Kafka such fullness of interpretation counts as paradise—another meaning of pardes—as his aphorism on the coming of the messiah declares: “the messiah will come as soon as the most unbridled individualism of faith becomes possible.”71 Kafka’s version of the Talmudic parable thus suggests that such fullness of interpretation is possible without the destructiveness that tradition assigns to the heretic other, and it quietly celebrates the multiplicity of the traditional Hebrew text. Uncle Jakob’s “intermediary trade” (Zwischenhandel) reflects this same kind of interpretive transaction, where respect for the law and love for interpretive freedom go side by side. The accurate transcription of messages in Jakob’s office echoes this principle, evoking a modern form of the traditional copying of the Torah famously depicted in S. Y. Agnon’s modern Hebrew tale “The Torah Scribe.” Thus in Jakob’s New York office Karl is astonished to see how “Meldungen,” or “messages,” are “taken down by two other employees and then compared [verglichen], so that errors [Irrtümer] could be ruled out as much as possible.”72 In the Talmudic tradition, the same Rabbi Meir whom Kafka mentions in his pardes version was famous for strictly following the letter of the law, and with the same paradoxical effect. The more that literal correctness is valued, the more each word comes to be invested with a mystical, even world-changing significance, as attention to the letter eventually reveals potential “others” that open up the meaning of the text. As Rabbi Meir declares in the Talmud, here quoted in a version of Eruvin 13a that Gershom Scholem provides: “When I was studying with Rabbi Akiba, I used to put vitriol in the ink and he said nothing. But when I went to Rabbi Ishmael, he asked me: My son, what is your occupation? I answered: I am a scribe [of the Torah]. And he said to me: My son, be careful in your work, for it is the work of God; if you omit a single letter, or write a letter too many, you will destroy the whole world.”73 Fidelity to the letter and its “messages,” as Uncle Jakob practices this notion, leads to a flourishing “business” in New York in a more comic form. Scrupulous attention to the letter thus acquaints the reader with the infinite potential of its inferences, multiple meanings, and even secret



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combinations of the letters of the law. As a Jewish scholar who used Kafka’s pardes passage for his commentary on Exodus once declared, “whoever believes only in the plain sense of the Bible, peshat, is indeed a fool,” playfully demonstrating his reading by rearranging the consonants of peshat to show that they also spell the Hebrew word tipesh, that is, “foolish,” meaning someone who misses the hidden meanings of the traditional text.74

The Voice of the Dog: Vaudeville in the Hotel Occidental Arriving at the Hotel Occidental with its “luminous sign” (Aufschrift Hotel occidental leuchtete), Karl Rossman seems to have left the hidden Hebrew implications of Uncle Jakob and his desk behind.75 At the same time he receives a job as liftboy running the elevator in this hotel filled with foreign guests. The hotel contains a special kind of translation bureau in its lobby, making an obliquely humorous reference to Jacob’s messenger angels going up and down the ladder in his dream at Beth-El. Kafka portrays Karl as a cursory reader, however, in a way that slyly points the reader to the hidden meanings of Hebrew’s traditions in the broader and more comic Western sense suggested by the name of the establishment. Thus while Kafka treats us to the scene of Karl leafing “around in his Bible without reading it” in the chapter entitled “The Road to Ramses,” the Hotel Occidental, where he will labor, models the West and its relation to its others —a building where foreign voices are constantly being translated and where the history of that borrowing and imitation remains in the “not indispensable cellar [nicht unentbehrlichen Keller] of the structure,” as Kafka remarked of German literature in 1911.76 Thus while “the lift to which [Karl] was assigned” in the hotel was “restricted to the upper floors [für die obersten Stockwerke bestimmt],” Kafka’s vision is directed to the level that is a little lower than the angels, bringing our attention to the vaudeville routines that takes place beneath the Hotel Occidental, when “Karl saw some guests emerging from a cellar bar [Kellerlokal], where a varieté performance [Varietévorstellung]” had just left the stage.77 The Hotel Occidental is thus also Kafka’s model of Western culture, in which one culture copies the linguistic and musical patterns of another group and not so secretly builds—through translinguistic and cultural contact— the supposedly separate nations of the West. Actual vaudeville performances were well enough known to Kafka for him to comment on the specifically American form they took in this period, and he did so long before his

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composition of Amerika. On December 15, 1910—before his immersion in the Yiddish theater and his composition of Amerika began—he noted that the inferior work he produced when writing badly could be compared to the practice of blackface, that staple of the American vaudeville theater in New York at the time. “Almost every word I wrote jars against the next,” as Kafka put it, referring to the overly harmonious sound his prose produced when it was false: “I heard the consonants rub leadenly against each other and the vowels sing an accompaniment like Negroes in a minstrel show [Ausstellungs­ neger]. My doubts stand in a circle around every word . . . I ought to be able to invent words capable of blowing the odor of corpses in a direction other than straight into mine and the reader’s face.”78 The “corpses” Kafka fears represent a German language that becomes a kind of bad vaudeville theater, in which the Jewish writer is forced to imitate his own identity, as it were. Bad writing for Kafka compares with the position of African American comedians who, in order to perform onstage in New York, were often forced to “black up” themselves in order to harmonize with the dominant linguistic, if not visual, stereotype of their group. In Kafka’s terms, to perform the dominant racial or ethnic stereotype of oneself was to become a “corpse” of one’s own tradition, while allowing the richer and often hidden content of the Jewish or African tradition to go unread or unheard. At the same time vaudeville retains its place in the “not indispensable cellar” of “great literature,” just as it does in the Hotel Occidental. By exposing the borrowing that still goes on between traditions, vaudeville suggests the imitative exchanges to which every national inheritance owes a share. The singular notion of national identity, however, remained a problem. The idea that a song and dance could express either Jewish or German or African American identity once and for all, as Kafka remarks, would leave both of them more dead than alive. In “The Case of Robinson” the Irishman presents a form of this same scandal to the headwaiter of the Hotel Occidental. “I don’t believe he’s called Robinson,” he declares, judging the immigrant by the stereotype his nation is assumed to perform; “no Irishman in that country’s history has ever been called Robinson” (126, 244). Robinson at the same time points to the deeper scandal that the bar in the basement of the Hotel Occidental suggests: that the transfer between stereotypic performances of national accent and dialect was the rule rather than the exception on the vaudeville stage. According to Harry Jolson, brother of the most famous Jewish blackface performer of New York, “a comedian was expected to be versatile. He would be a Dutchman in one act, a Jew in the other, and an Irishman



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in the third, with a perfect rendition of the dialect of each.”79 The real shame of blackface, in this transnational sense, was that only “gravestones” (Denkmälern), as Kafka’s diary calls them, of African American language were left once the mining of these transnational riches was complete. Kafka’s “Ausstellungsneger” were precisely what his German suggests: while putting on display (Ausstellung) an inferior identity, the performer profited first by degrading and then by shamelessly borrowing the linguistic and national resources of the imitated group. Kafka’s ape narrator in “Report to an Academy,” published in Martin Buber’s Der Jude (The Jew) in Berlin in 1917, can thus be read as a send-up of this tradition of blackface. Peter’s roots thus extend to Kafka’s New York novel and his diary entry on the minstrel show. In German terms Kafka’s ape is given a Hobson’s choice between the zoo in Berlin or vaudeville (erkannte ich bald die zwei Möglichkeiten die vor mir offen standen: Zoologischer Garten oder Varieté); the “way out” he finds in his speech to the academy combines both roles.80 Unlike Robinson, unable to remain in a standing position in the Hotel Occidental, drunk as if he were a beastly Irishman from the vaudeville repertoire, “Red Peter” casts aside the dualism that reads the ape figure of the story for eastern European Judaism or primitive Africans as well.81 While imbibing these ethnic stereotypes, Kafka’s talking animal breaks down the boundary between the national types they suggest, by alluding to a forgotten intercourse between the Jewish voice and the African American voice instead. Thus when the African imitates his German captors in his “Report” by nipping at their schnapps bottles, he is also aping a staple Jewish comedy scene of vaudeville New York in which Frank Bush, the “Hebrew comic,” would impersonate a “German entering a saloon” who has stumbled and lost his “pantoffel” (slipper) as he goes. “‘Ich bin heis’” (I’m hot), the Jewish comic would announce in German with a New York accent mixed in: “‘Ich will ein glas bier haben [sic]. (Business of drinking). . . . Wo hast mein pantoffel gesehen? Wo hast mein pantoffel gesehen!’” (I want a beer! Have you seen my slipper anywhere?).82 With this context in mind—“under the slipper” (pantofln) is a Yiddish saying that signifies subordination in Blimele, a Yiddish play Kafka saw in Prague—Red Peter is neither an African stereotype nor a Jewish one, as strong readings of the story suggest, but rather a figure of the exchange between African and Jewish voices, and a send-up of German cultural superiority in the period as well.83 Kafka’s diary entry of October 14, 1911, records an actual experience of the comic destruction of stereotype, as the following description of the end of a Yiddish theater performance at Prague’s Café Savoy shows. Just when Yitzhak

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Löwy is supposed to invite the audience to the following day’s performance, using the boilerplate teaser for the next day’s show—“tomorrow’s performance, when the world famous masterpiece [blank] by [blank] will be produced”— Kafka takes delight in recording the vaudeville scene as it leaves the actual stage: “we see Löwy walking towards the footlights and, his face turned to us, the audience, defending himself with his hands against someone who is attacking him from behind, until suddenly the whole curtain with its wire supports on top is torn down by Löwy. . . . Before our eyes P., who had played the savage, . . . grabs Löwy (who is on his knees) by his head and pushes him sideways off the stage.”84 Here the same “P” who had just played the role of “the savage servant Absalom” in Goldfaden’s Shulamit, famous for the Yiddish standard “Raisins and Almonds,” comes into conflict with the other actors. Together they “bring down the house,” as it were. Madcap energy, rivalry, and sheer passion are directed here against the reverential announcement of the classic, as the actor who played the “savage servant” of King Absalom displays a “Yiddish” emotion that begins to tear Jewish stereotypes apart. The symbolic voice of the dog emerges from the position of headwaiter, who pushes Yitzhak Löwy to the door as if giving the hook to the unruly actors. While it is Löwy “on his knees” during this chaos, Kafka places the waiter in the canine position, and he thus becomes a different kind of animal than the unruly Jewish vaudeville artists: “Then suddenly one sees Löwy, who seemed to have disappeared, pushed toward a door by the head-waiter, R., with his hands, perhaps also with his knees. He is simply being thrown out. This head-waiter, who before and later stands before every guest, before us as well, like a dog, with a doglike muzzle [wie ein Hund dasteht, mit hündischer Schnauze] which sags over a larger mouth closed by humble wrinkles on the side, has his—[.]” Kafka’s description of the headwaiter remains unfinished. The black humor, however, anticipates the last line of The Trial, where Josef K. regrets that he must die “like a dog” at the hands of “second-rate actors” in the novel’s concluding scene. In this diary passage the headwaiter at the Yiddish theatrical performance represents a similar form of arrest. The “dog-like muzzle” imposed here, like the one mocked in The Trial, is the censorship that would condemn every species of national identity to perform a stereotype of itself. To wear the “muzzle” is thus not to squelch the animal—whether coded as Jewish, African, or Irish, or any other national type—but to transform the canine voice into a murderous singularity of form. “The dogs” (die Hunde), as Robinson puts it to Karl: “what kind of junk [was haben sie mir dort für ein Zeug] have they poured down my throat [eingegossen]!”85



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Robinson here speaks for the filial position in any tradition—and the Jewish son as talking animal developed in Chapter 1—by articulating nationality as a vaudeville stage where national stereotypes can be ingested or expelled. This “ethnic” role is also a linguistic one, as the character Gregor Samsa suggests in “Die Verwandlung,” a work that Kafka finished shortly after the writing of his New York novel was complete. When he awakes “one morning to discover that he had been transformed into a monstrous beetle” (ungeheures Ungeziefer), Gregor Samsa also brings a classic German term to the fore. As we saw in Chapter 1, “Ungeziefer” was the word Wilhelm Grimm used at the founding of Germanistik as the discipline of German studies in 1847, describing the foreign words scuttling about the page of an ancient tome.86 Gregor’s “Verwandlung” thus comes at the price of engaging such narrow German perspectives, including those applied to Jewish tongues—one reason Kafka showed “so little interest” in the story after writing it, unlike “The Judgment,” which became his benchmark for the feeling of creative release in his future work.87 The “transformation” of Jewish language in this sense actually takes place before the beginning of “The Metamorphosis,” as Gregor’s meal already includes “a few raisins and almonds” among other discards (ein paar Rosinen und Mandeln), the name of the Yiddish classic that Kafka saw performed in Prague.88 While the figurative son as talking animal longs for this nourishment—“his wounds must have healed completely,” the text observes—these German Jewish pleasures are treated as trash by his family and remain impossible to separate from the vaudeville stereotypes that Gregor is seen to perform. “Der Mistkäfer” (the dung beetle), as the charwoman calls Gregor—“look at the old dung beetle!” (seht mal den alten Mistkäfer!)—was also the name of a “humorous but coarse poem” that was a standard opening act in Berlin’s fin de siècle cabaret.89 Kafka’s diary critiques Goldfaden’s Shulamith—where “Raisins and Almonds” (Rozhinkes mit Mandlen) appears—in terms that reject this animalistic portrayal of the Jewish linguistic voice, by objecting to what he calls this “European” emphasis of the play. It might be accurate to say that Kafka objects to the “occidental” cast of the production, since it was New York where Goldfaden’s shund, or exploitive production, of the Jewish voice vanquished much of the competition. The crossing point from Kafka’s diary and the Yiddish theater in Prague would be the figure of the headwaiter, who appears with his “dog-like muzzle” at the Café Savoy and who returns for a cameo role as the arbiter of taste governing the elevator boys and much else in the Hotel Occidental of Amerika. In his analysis Kafka thus criticizes the production of the Jewish voice according to the “taste” that markets such stereotypes, calling to mind the

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animal dilemma of Gregor Samsa that gets played out in similar terms: “Oct. 14 [1911] Yesterday an evening at the Savoy. Sulamith [sic] by A. Goldfaden. Really an opera, but every sung play is called an operetta, even this trifle seems to be to point to an artistic effort that is stubborn [eigensinniges], hasty, and passionate for the wrong reasons, that cuts across European art in a manner that is partly haphazard [zufällig].” 90 Kafka’s problem with Goldfaden is that his Yiddish drama is too “occidental,” too Western in its “European” imitations. Shulamith thus becomes bad vaudeville, displaying a canine subservience to stereotypes that emerge as if by chance. Like the “Ausstellungsneger,” or “negro on display,” Goldfaden’s play in this instance represents the worst possible style: an imitation of “European” models that turns Yiddish “raisins and almonds” into a “haphazard” kind of national minstrel show. The second voice of the dog in Kafka’s fiction is a form of Jewish vaudeville that expresses a heretical, rather than a stereotypical, form of otherness. Here the animal unleashes a more critical and authentic voice in his texts. “You know,, I’ve been pushed to the side [ganz bei Seite geschoben],” Robinson tells Karl, when both live together in Brunelda’s suburban Ramses home, “and if you’re treated like a dog [als Hund behandelt] the whole time, you end up thinking that’s what you are.”91 This heretical voice rejects the servile performance of national stereotypes, as Robinson the Irishman’s words powerfully suggest. This rejection of canine submission in turn suggests Heine’s version of a critical Jewish vaudeville whose hero is a dancing bear: ‘Was den Hund betrifft, so ist er Ein freilich serviler Köter, Weil Jahrtausende hindurch, Ihn der Mensch wie ‘n Hund behandelt. (As for the Dog—it is undeniable That he is a servile cur, Because for thousands of years, Mankind treated him like a dog.)92 Robinson’s description of canine submission thus evokes Heine’s Atta Troll and its “Disquisition on Dogs,” a poem that uses its “parody of the arguments usually put forward by the advocates of Jewish emancipation” to evoke a different form of the Jewish voice.93 Liberation for Kafka means something similar: understanding the vaudeville images of Jews and other “ animals,” then twisting



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those stereotypes with a critical energy that sometimes gets wildly out of hand. For this reason Kafka preferred the vaudeville that can be “passionate for the wrong reasons” (aus falschen Gründen heißgewordenes) to the production of stereotypical images that can easily be consumed.94 The essence (Wesen) of the “bad actor,” as he puts it, “consists not in the fact that he imitates too little . . . but rather that he imitates the wrong models,” producing uniformity, when the failure of unity (es fehlt ihm vor allem die Einheitlichkieit) exposes the more authentic form of the national self. 95 For Kafka as for Heine, the heretical challenge to national stereotypes is the sign of an authentic culture—a vision of vaudeville as the art of liberation that Amerika’s movement toward the Theater of Oklahoma will perform in depth.

Brunelda the Singer: Vaudeville as Cultural Zionism In Brunelda’s apartment, where Karl arrives after his exodus from the Hotel Occidental, the foreign is associated with dust, dirt, or clay, a substance that becomes part of her vaudeville and kabbalistic meaning in the text. The same substance will reappear in the name of “Clayton,” where the Theater of Oklahoma will recruit.96 In a novel partially set in Ramses, New York, such dirt or clay comically recalls the substance of creation from the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Genesis and becomes part of the effect of her presence in the text. As Kafka develops this figure for national housekeeping, Brunelda is unable to keep her apartment clean—literalized in Robinson’s inability to “wipe up the dust” (den Staub wegzuwischen) that infiltrates her dwelling and by Delamarche’s elegant effort to have her look beyond the immediate sights of the New York streets. “Don’t disturb Brunelda,” Robinson tells Karl about the prima donna; “she hears everything, it’s probably because she’s a singer that she has such terribly sensitive ears.”97 With this sort of “deadpan humor,” dirt suggests a kabbalistic notion of creation, marking the foreign traces present to the artist, and becomes part of the vaudeville effect of Kafka’s cultural Zionism—his own way of bringing the multiple sources of national tradition to light.98 According to Iris Bruce, Ahad Ha-Am was one of the “formative influences” that “led Kafka to become engaged in Zionist activities.” As Bruce observes, engagement with his thought led Kafka “to compare and contrast his practical, cultural Zionism with the beliefs and convictions of other contemporary Zionists.”99 Ahad Ha-Am—a Hebrew pen name meaning “one of the people”—thus allowed Asher Ginzburg to argue that a national center in Palestine could be

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complemented by cultural work, with other languages filling in until Hebrew had been fully revived. The mystery surrounding Brunelda invokes this problem less seriously. Where in Ahad Ha-Am the diaspora looked forward to renewal by Hebrew in the Palestinian center, Brunelda’s power suggests Kafka’s open notion of tradition, in which Ramses’ multiple voices play a larger role. As critics have often observed, Karl and his fellow immigrant retainers suffer a comic servitude toward this artist, as if imprisoned by a weighty notion of national tradition that makes their exodus unable to proceed.100 Such is the Wagnerian horror of Brunelda. In this vaudeville of cultural Zionism, her glory appears as she reimagines tradition in performance, by portraying the multiple sources on which artistic and national originality depend. Brunelda’s apartment in this way represents Karl’s escape from the larger “Western” pressures of the Hotel Occidental, prefiguring his vision of the Theater of Oklahoma. There, Kafka told Max Brod, Karl would find his home (Heimat) and family in a magical form.101 Like the angels who will play a form of American jazz on their trumpets, Brunelda’s earlier singing in the text lays bare her multiple national sources, which turn out to be European and Jewish at once. The Irishman Robinson therefore battles Delamarche for her affections, though her craving for elegance demands a set of “opera glasses” (Operngucker) that looks down at the working-class city at a distance and which only the Frenchman can provide. At the same time the singing of Brunelda the Singer performs a kind of prophecy, speaking as if possessed by multiple forms of a distant and originating voice: and when you’re making the least amount of noise, she suddenly sits bolt upright [Aufrecht], bangs the sofa with both hands so that you can’t see her for all the dust [daß man vor Staub sie nicht sieht]—I haven’t been able to beat the sofa in all the time we’ve been here, after all how can I, she’s always lying on it—and starts this terrible shouting like a man, and goes on for hours. The neighbors have stopped her from singing, but no one can stop her from shouting, it only happens quite rarely nowadays by the way.102 Here, in an urban form of prophecy that “happens quite rarely nowadays,” Brunelda performs a vaudeville image of tradition. The Jewish sources she evokes come into contact with Irish and the French influences in her Ramses apartment, where literary and religious purity are far from the rule. Robinson the Irishman is under her spell; the student on a facing balcony, who goes by



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the name of Josef Mendel, has at the same time treated her with a quasiMaimonidean potion, bearing a name that echoes Mendele Mocher Sforim, the Yiddish writer whose style Kafka described as a “lyric, subdued gaiety” (lyrisch, gedämpft lustig) combined with “confused arrangement” (verschwommenen Kompositionen). The account, in fact, captures the New York singer quite well.103 Brunelda’s performance, as her motley entourage suggests, deflates any kind of nationalistic pretension. In her “shouting like a man,” her literal lack of self-possession undermines any claim to Wagnerian majesty, while suggesting the ribald humor of a cross-dressing vaudeville stage. The presence of Jewish linguistic sources multiplies these meanings. Brunelda thus alludes to a less intelligent but nonetheless dramatic “Mrs. Klug,” the male impersonator whom Kafka saw perform in Yiddish and who was described by the Prague Zionist newspaper Selbstwehr as follows: “[her] art, though she obviously amused the audience, resembled a not entirely tasteful cabaret style.”104 Violation of gender as well as national boundaries thus becomes the artist’s norm: the divorced singer with Wagnerian ambitions attracts an Irish “Wächterhund,” or “watchdog,” and is attended to by a “student” named “Mendel” in a Ramses, New York, tenement that evokes a wry form of the Talmudic principle that “a widow should not rear dogs, nor accommodate a student as a guest” (Avodah Zarah 22b).105 Canine adulation and the “student” who visits this married but separated woman construct a parable of comic origins, as a Talmudic warning against illicit forms of mixture describe the Germanic diva in this scene, as if only a Jewish proscription could describe German culture in the end. As Walter Benjamin observed, “many of Kafka’s shorter studies and stories are only seen in their full light when they are, so to speak, put on as acts in the ‘Nature Theater of Oklahoma,’” with the singer here failing to enjoy the vaudeville origins that Kafka suggests.106 In the Jewish tradition of thinking about parables, such humor was already implicit. Benjamin’s notion that Kafka represented the aggadic, or story-telling, aspect of Talmudic commentary without the “Law,” or Halakha, represents a modern version of what we could call the ongoing exodus of tradition, where multiple, often overlapping strands that create the voice of a singular singer or the strands of a single people—whether Hebrews in Egypt or Germanic opera singers in New York—find redemption and release from notions of the nation and their aesthetic or doctrinal constraints. Brunelda’s vaudeville girth and gestures suggest a model of cultural growth and transmission in which national expression in its exilic form is more than slender, as Gila Safran Naveh’s account

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of the Jewish parable tradition suggests: “Exiled from their once native land, parables also suffered a linguistic transformation, or a ‘discursive exile,’ namely, parables no longer ‘spoke natively,’ so they put on an exotic, kabbalistic or metaphysical garb. Their ‘body’ changed and the once slender (to indulge this metaphor) tight-lipped rabbinic parable becomes a heavy, medieval matron (the notion of a matrona appears frequently in these texts who talks of old times ‘with an accent’).”107 In this vivid description of tradition as transmission, the “tight-lipped rabbinic parable” and its “kabbalistic” or secret sources are exposed when staged by the female, who stands for the exilic accretions of national form. Brunelda’s size dramatizes this multiplicity of origin, in a comic display that suggests tradition’s different accents and forms. This vaudeville selfpresentation becomes a parable of cultural Zionism that revises the idea of national identity as static and original, as her native origin is revealed as a performance that is constantly subject to change. “I used to swim the Colorado every morning on my parents’ estate,” the singer thus reminds her audience, “the most fluid [beweglichste] of all my girlfriends.”108 The dust that Brunelda raises from her couch is thus both a sign of poor national housekeeping and a vaudeville version of cultural Zionism in this expansive sense. In the terms of the traveling parable that Safran Naveh suggests, such “Staub” links Brunelda to a form of Hebrew prophecy, in which the foreign seer blesses Israel in terms that recall the multiple powers of Uncle Jakob, whose biblical relation with Esau—and generative meaning for other religious and national traditions—is powerfully suggested earlier in the text. “Who can count the dust [Staub] of Jacob,” as Balaam declares in Luther’s version of his prophecy: “Number the dust-cloud of Israel? / May I die the death of the upright [Gerechten], / May my fate be like theirs!” (Num. 23:10– 14). The Brunelda who suddenly sits bolt “aufrecht” and raises a cloud of “Staub” produces a version of this original prophecy, following the prophet who tried three times to curse the people of Israel and then produced his final blessing of the “dust of Jacob” instead. Balaam became the “virtuous foreign seer,” in Ronald Hendel’s description, only after whipping the ass that carried him—then listening to the Bible’s original punch line as self-defense.109 “What have I done,” the talking animal responds in the name of Israel, “that you have beaten me these three times?” (Num. 22:28). Brunelda’s “banging with both hands” (schlägt mit beiden Händen), raising the “dust” (Staub) from her New York sofa, thus alludes to the promise of Jacob and the biblical curse as a blessing in disguise, where the talking animal defends the right of all downtrodden nations to seek a more human voice.



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Karl’s exodus to the Theater of Oklahoma proper makes this vaudeville version of tradition more explicit, as Amerika makes this comedy of redemption explicit in a number of ways. In “Imitation and Assimilation,” Ahad Ha-Am had argued that Hebrew could both imitate and assimilate other voices, crossing the linguistic boundaries between the Jews and other nations to bring foreign treasures into a new national voice.110 In his own twist on this theme of imitation, Kafka uses the lobby of the Hotel Occidental to imagine the cultural West as a theater of translation, transforming a Hebrew image of revelation into a vision of continuous contact between different tongues: Ten questioners, who were continually changing, spoke in a babel of different languages [ein Durcheinander von Sprachen], as though each one had been sent from a different country [von einem andern Land abgesendet]. There were always some asking their questions at the same time, while some others were talking amongst themselves. For the most part, they wanted to collect something from the porter’s lodge or leave something there, and so you could always see hands waving impatiently out of the mass of people. Now someone wanted a newspaper, which was abruptly unfolded from above and briefly covered everyone’s faces. And the two under porters had to stand up to all this [standhalten].111 In Ahad Ha-Am’s sense of Zionism as imitation of other national sources, the Theater of Oklahoma could rightfully be said to begin in this madcap translation scene. The goal of this bureau thus suggests the desire to build the national resources of the “ten questioners,” as if each one represented a separate theatrical performance “command” of the revelation from Sinai. Kafka would stage the danger of national stereotypes that accompanied this promise of Zionism when he published his most explicit story on Palestine in 1917. When he wrote to Martin Buber about the appearance of his “Jackals and Arabs” and “Report to an Academy” in the premier German Jewish journal of the period, Kafka thus expressed a certain surprise. “So I shall be published in Der Jude,” he wrote on May 12, 1917, “and always thought that impossible. May I ask you not to call the pieces parables; they are not really parables. If they are to have any overall title at all, the best might be: ‘Two Animal Stories.’”112 The story “Jackals and Arabs” borrows some of its theatrical imagery from Amerika in particular, performing a sly rethinking of the vaudeville stereotypes of national identity in which Zionism was often

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conceived. As in “The Hunger Artist,” these starving jackals (schlanke Leiber) are trapped by their language before all else. When asking the narrator to brutalize the Arabs—“Dear Sir, by means of your all powerful hands, slit their throats with these scissors” —the canine creatures beg for their national “other” to be tailored to stereotype. “We’re not proposing to kill them,” the jackal tells the narrator; “all the water in the Nile couldn’t cleanse us of that.” As in the Hotel Occidental, Kafka associates this kind of theater with racial vaudeville. “You’ve been treated to that entertainment [dieses Schauspiel] too, sir, said the Arab laughing,” while contesting this stereotype, “as gaily as the reserve of his people [Volk] permits.” 113 “It’s common knowledge,” the Arab spokesman of Kafka’s story tells the narrator: “so long as Arabs exist, that pair of scissors will wander with us,” and “every European is offered them for the great work” (jedem Europäer wird sie angeboten zu dem großen Werk) 114. These scissors are thus an “oppositional figure” in Scott Spector’s formulation: directed at “cutting the throat,” and thus depriving the other of his own voice in the theater of nationalism that “every European” would create.115 The vaudeville of cultural Zionism, however, makes the jackals’ scissors resemble the “double-edged butcher knife” (beiderseitig ­geschärftes Fleischmesser) of The Trial, reminding us that the imposition of national stereotypes is a weapon that cuts both ways.116 “They have the most lunatic hopes, these beasts,” the Arab thus declares of the jackals; “they’re just fools [Narren], utter fools. That’s why we like them: they are our dogs [unsere Hunde]; finer dogs than any of yours.”117 The European vaudeville that turns every Arab into a killer thus produces an equal and opposite reaction, as the jackals are rhetorically reduced to stereotypic Jews. The Arab “caravan leader” thus becomes an ironic national performer, a figure whose positive, transnational identity makes him quite similar to the wandering “jackals,” whom the vaudeville of European racism teaches him to condemn.118 These political concerns were widely discussed in Kafka’s Prague circle, enlarging his critical vaudeville of cultural Zionism in ways that the Theater of Oklahoma also suggests.119 In “Comments on the Arab Question,” for instance, Hugo Bergmann expresses a concern quite similar to that of the “caravan leader” of “Jackals and Arabs,” arguing that in Palestine the Zionists might end up treating the Arab population “the way the Europeans related to the blacks” (Schwarzen). In this essay of 1911, Bergmann’s notion of an “Ausweg” from the “Arab Question” prefigured the language of Kafka’s African ape in “Report to an Academy” (1917), who famously stated in the pages of Buber’s Der Jude that he was not in quest of ultimate freedom but “only a way out” (Ausweg). The



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similar escape clause that Bergmann sought as a Zionist would view cultural nationalism from a position that would oppose the Hebrew revival to Arabs who would be treated as “blacks” (Schwarzen), preventing the Zionists from appearing in Palestine like “colonizing bandits” (Raubcolonisatoren) or the running dogs of Kafka’s “Jackals and Arabs,” when he hoped they would appear as “bearers of culture” (Kulturträger) in a beneficial sense instead.120 Kafka’s escape from this Zionist vaudeville of Arab and Jewish identity makes itself felt in the “nickname” of “Negro” that Karl uses in Clayton, when he signs up at the Theater of Oklahoma recruitment desk. Ritchie Robinson points out the ostensible source: in Holitscher’s Amerika Heute und Morgen, which Kafka owned, a picture of an African American lynching victim appears hanging from a tree, captioned with the tragically ironic description that undercuts the American dream “Ein Idyl aus Oklahama [sic].”121 Kafka’s manuscript, in fact, retains this misspelling for the name of his “Theater,” and Brod regularized the name when the novel first appeared. The critical edition has retained Kafka’s incorrect spelling from Holitscher. Whether or not Kafka recognized the error, the mistake conveys a recognition that is reflected in the text—that in the stereotypical vision of the “Negro” as a victim, something is surely amiss: “He gave them what had been his nickname [Rufname] on one of his last jobs. ‘Negro.’ ‘Negro?’ [English in ms.] asked the department head [Leiter], turning his head and making a face, as though Karl had reached the heights of preposterousness. The secretary [Schreiber] looked at Karl a while, but then he repeated ‘Negro’ and wrote it down.”122 Karl’s impulse is to identify with a people who have not yet been liberated in the expanses of Ramses, albeit with a difference that goes one step farther than the position of Bergmann’s earlier text. Where Bergmann hoped that Zionists would not “treat the Arabs” in the same way “Europeans had treated the blacks” (Schwarzen), Kafka imagines a national identity in which such transnational identifications between equal partners are both biblical and a contemporary necessity, especially if the theatrical exodus from Ramses imagined in Amerika is to succeed. The Theater of Oklahama makes this exchange between Jewish languages and African American culture part of its hidden openness in this vaudeville theater, recalling a history behind the name of the “Negro” performance and music in New York whose near-forgetting gets signified in Karl’s use of the term. Karl is therefore portrayed as “having kept his name secret for too long to betray it now,” while the theater’s representatives are eager to record it and the transnational principle it represents. As Amerika Heute und Morgen points out,

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“Neger” (Negroes) and “Juden” (Jews) were regularly engaging in such crossidentifications on the streets of New York, in a manner quite different from the vaudeville stereotypes playing in the Tin Pan Alley of the time. “We are in the same boat, my friend said to me” (English in original), Holitscher describes a “young Negro” (Neger) saying to him on 53rd Street in New York: “our fates really do have a lot in common. And don’t we both come from Africa, the Jews and us negroes” (Unsere Schicksale haben ja viel Ähnlichkeit miteinander. Und dann kommen wir beide aus Afrika, die Juden und wir Neger).123 Karl’s renaming himself as “Negro” can be understood as a return of this kind of New York encounter as he tries it out for the first time, prefiguring Kafka’s later depiction of the African speaker of “Report to an Academy” with a similarly open concept of the nation in mind. In what is actually one of Kafka’s concluding “Fragments” to the novel, cultural Zionism in the Theater of Oklahoma becomes more comic as these translations between national identities come to the fore. The “trumpets” played by the recruiting “angels” in Amerika in this ultimately pleasurable sense figure both Jewish and African American traditions in their sound. The fact that Karl calls himself “Negro” and then borrows a “trumpet” from an angel-costumed woman called “Fanny” evokes the prospect of jazz in this New York context and the angel as a malakh, or Hebrew translator figure, as well.124 In Kafka’s source, Amerika Heute und Morgen, it is precisely the exchange between “Jewish” and “Negro” sources that Holitscher sets out to explain. “There is no American music,” as he describes jazz, the canonical American instance of cultural translation in this respect: “its ancient forms [die alten Weisen] have their origins, when not in English versions of the Psalms, then in Africa (just as ‘Hungarian’ music is actually a possession of the gypsies [Zigeuner], who hail from Africa as well) . . . and what charms the American ear is the rag Tempo [zerfetzte Tempo], rag-time [Eng. in original] an imitation of Negro dance rhythms [Negertanzrhythmen] which has been fabricated by Russian Jews, albeit with a legendary talent and musical ability.”125 Irving Berlin’s appropriation or stealing of Scott Joplin’s tunes, in fact, is a matter much discussed in contemporary jazz scholarship. The notion of a singularly Jewish or African American “origin” of the music that Karl produces on the “trumpet” he borrows, however, is just what his sound is meant to replace.126 Karl’s trumpet is a way of reentering New York harbor in this respect. In taking the instrument from Fanny on her “pedestal” (Postament), Kafka rewrites the “Goddess of Freedom,” suggesting the music that translates between national groups such as Jews and African Americans as a more authentic glimpse of paradise instead. Wolfgang Jahn therefore calls this



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theater a “travesty of the last judgment,” as it suspends the court that presides over the sins of popular art and places the value of transnational music in its place.127 In this culturally Zionist sense, Fanny is indeed both a biblical figure and a New York showgirl, a woman whose trumpet translates several figures in the novel from old to new. Kafka’s Statue of Liberty, the Freiheitsgöttin had been holding a sword on the first page of the novel. Now a chorus of female angels appears in costume with others angels, with Fanny recalling Fanny Brice, one of the stars of the world-famous 1911 Ziegfeld Follies that played on the New York stage, and thus a vaudeville performer who is both ancient and modern at once.128 Whereas in Gen. 3:24 the “cherubim” guard the Tree of Life and thus the return to paradise in the presence of a “fiery, ever-turning sword,” Fanny replaces this obstacle to redemption with a chorus of trumpets, one of which is picked up by Karl and put down immediately, as the sound is not yet to his taste: “‘You do all play badly,’ said Karl. ‘Let me have a go.’ ‘Sure,’ said Fanny, and gave him the trumpet, ‘but don’t spoil the chorus or I’ll lose my job.’ Karl began to play, he had imagined it would be a crude version of a trumpet, really just for making noise, but it turned out to be an instrument that was capable of almost infinite expression [fast jede Feinheit ausführen konnte]. If all the instruments were like that one, then they were being seriously misused.”129 If jazz cannot be played on a pedestal—even when the “billowing robes of the angel costumes completely covered them”—the reason that Karl as “Negro” gives is that the constant translation between the equal and different national traditions is the “essence” of its form. These almost infinite shades of expression of the trumpet are in this sense both jazz—“Karl played a tune he had heard in a bar somewhere”—and a message from Uncle Jakob at once: that for the voice of people to echo the sounds of paradise, it must be comprised of more than a single voice.130 Fanny therefore warns Karl not to “ruin the chorus” (verdirb den Chor nicht), though she plays the trumpet terribly herself. As she hands the instrument to Karl and the “Negro” he represents, the woman with a name from the crudest vaudeville tradition is looking for a better translation of its sound, for what is beautiful on the “pedestal” of any national art, as the trumpets already suggest, is not just that it is “an old theater” and being “expanded all the time,” but the ultimate beauty of internal difference that its drugstore “angels” represent: “As the pedestals were very high, as much as six feet, the figures of the women looked gigantic, only their little heads looked somewhat out of scale, and their hair, which they wore loose, looked too short and almost laughable

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[hieng zu kurz und fast lächerlich], hanging between the big wings and down the side of them. To avoid uniformity [damit keine Einförmigkeit enstehe], pedestals of all different sizes had been used.”131 Kafka’s messianism in the Theater of Oklahama is expressed in the emergence of such multiplicity from “uniformity,” a fact that, given his knowledge of the Jewish mystical tradition, could be understood as an image of the openness of cultural Zionism as well. In his own rewriting of the Golem legend, Kafka thus refers to the “Rabbi” who let “everyone into the house” to see the “clay” from which his figure was created, just as in the theater that departs from Clayton, “everyone was welcome” as well.132 “Its taste,” as Kafka wrote of the Golem figure, “was bitter,” and he then proceeded in this 1916 diary with an observation that reflects back on this messianic desire for a writing that would welcome such differences of national perspective midpoint in his writing career: “bitter, bitter, that is the most important word. How do I intend to solder fragments together into a story that will sweep one along?” Such bitterness is not the mark of failure but Kafka’s recognition of the difficulty of creating a work of art that remains open to the “fragments” and the foreign voices that comprise the nation, like a rabbi trying to control the secret pieces of his own Golem, an artist free to articulate the different pieces from which that savior of the nation would be formed. Karl therefore takes the “Untergrundbahn,” meaning “subway” but literally the “underground railroad,” to Clayton, Kafka’s gesture to the connections beneath the earth between peoples such as Jews and African Americans, like the deeper language of liberation marked by the “Denkmälern” (tombstones) that Kafka’s diary mentions when he writes of the minstrel show.133 Fanny’s trumpeting of the “infinite potential” of the artistic endeavor that Karl joins as “Negro” is therefore also an expression of cultural Zionism at its best, with the kabbalistic substance of “clay,” like the “Staub” that earlier obscured Brunelda, unveiling the redemptive material from which all nations are created and whose common ties are often hidden from view. “Hence the graves will open themselves,” as Kafka puts it in his aphorism on the coming of the messiah: “this, perhaps, is Christian doctrine too.”134

Chapter 4

Kabbalah and Comedy The Trial and the Heretic Tradition

I was minding my own business . . . listening to a lovely Hebrew mass. —Mel Brooks, History of the World Part I

According to Max Brod, the “kernel that gleams, or rather beams” through the “dark husk” of Kafka’s fiction was inseparable from its comedy and a model of tradition that, Brod argued, was best exemplified in Kafka’s novel about the Law.1 Though perhaps not aware of Brod’s use of the allusion in reference to his own writing, Kafka was privy to the Talmudic source his friend would later use to describe the “laughter” behind many scenes in The Trial. In Jakob Fromer’s Der Organismus des Judentums, a work that Kafka reported reading while spending “a lot of time with the Jewish actors” of the Yiddish theater he had brought to Prague, a traditional image of “kernel” and “dark husk” also appears.2 Where Brod had made “kernel” of the nut humor in Kafka’s style and the “dark husk” the frightful seriousness of The Trial, the Talmudic source in Kafka’s possession saw the darkness as a heresy that was already in contact with the Law. Fromer thus observes that “although he was reviled as the worst sort of heretic and hated,” Elisha ben Abuya had found “many supporters and defenders” among the “pious scholars” of the rabbinic tradition and cites the parable of Hagiga 15b to describe the hermeneutic attitude that contact with the sinful sage inspired. Heresy in this Talmudic parable is described as if it were the filthy husk of the Law, which allows the hidden good humor at its “Kern” to be preserved: “pious scholars are like a nut. When it has fallen into the filth and mire [Kot], its kernel nonetheless remains a pleasure to enjoy [genießbar].”3

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Walter Benjamin sensed this same connection between Jewish heresy and comedy, defining Max Brod for a generation of Kafka critics as the all-too-serious presence who hid this humor in his texts. “Concerning friendship with Brod,” Benjamin wrote to Gershom Scholem in 1939, “I think I am on the track of the truth when I say: Kafka as Laurel felt the onerous obligation to seek out his own Hardy,” referring to the vaudeville duo of the silent-film era.4 Benjamin thus cast Brod as the dour straight man, or rather, saw Kafka being forced to use Brod as his overly serious promoter, who would eventually offer an “edifying interpretation” of Kafka that “the Zionist ought to be the first to view with suspicion.”5 Benjamin thus defines Brod as the overly nationalistic, bumbling Hardy in his reading of Kafka and positions Scholem as the more plural reader of his text—the same Scholem who, in his “A Candid Word about the True Motives of My Kabbalistic Studies” (1937), declared himself in search of the lost “key” to Kafka, in a letter important for contemporary Zionism and Jewish philosophy.6 In these many senses of Jewish tradition, Benjamin’s letter on the humorous reading of Kafka awards himself the role of front man and invites Scholem to finish the act. “However that may be,” he told Scholem, “I think the key to Kafka’s work is likely to fall into the hands of the person who is able to extract the comic elements from Jewish theology. Has there ever been that man? Would you be such a man?”7 As Benjamin’s remark hints, part of the comedy of his letter to Scholem was that there can be no single “key to Kafka.” The reason is that the many mansions of meaning in his novels are already heretical, especially if “Jewish” is considered to be a singular theological, linguistic, or national term. A hidden aspect of the first sentence of The Trial—“someone must have slandered Josef K.,” as the dapper banker is placed under arrest by two strange-looking “guards”—is humorous in just this translinguistic manner, placing both heresy and the Jewish comic tradition at the center of Kafka’s text. “If this was a farce [Komödie],” as Josef K. observes after being accosted by these two “Wächter”—whose “wachen” in English and German suggests watching and waking up—“he was going to play along [mitspielen].” Josef K. proceeds to do so in a way that directly suggests the Yiddish theater that Kafka so deeply enjoyed.8 Part of the “Komödie” for Kafka in this scene was thus both theatrical and Yiddish in origin. As Evelyn Tornton Beck points out, these “guards,” or “Wächter,” as they are called in the text, are dead ringers for two figures for Zygmund Faynman’s play The Vice-King, which Kafka saw in Prague on January 6, 1912; their role in the Yiddish original is to root out crypto-Jews during the Inquisition and bring them before the high court for



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punishment once their identity has been revealed. “It is not to be thought,” as Beck observes, “that Kafka transformed a piece of straight tragedy into a comic idiom” in The Trial, rightly observing that the tone of The Trial consists precisely in its picture of the high seriousness of the Law—portrayed in the broadest social and theological terms—which Kafka proceeds to combine with a subtle send-up of the tragic Yiddish text.9 Like the “Jewish theology” Benjamin connected to Kafka’s sense of humor, The Trial evokes Maimonides, whom Scholem mentions in his letter on why he took up the study of the Kabbalah.10 For Maimonides, a “trial” is defined by incongruity: between the absolute claims of a divine justice that rains calamities upon the world, or its representatives who claim to lay down its law; and figures such as Josef K., who on the first page of the novel are not aware that they have committed any crime. “The subject of trial is also difficult,” Maimonides therefore writes after his analysis of the Book of Job; “it is one of the greatest difficulties of the Law”: “The Torah [Law] mentions it in six passages, as I shall make clear to you in this chapter. What is generally accepted among people regarding the subject of trial is this: God sends down calamities upon an individual, without their having been preceded by a sin, in order that his reward be increased.”11 This classic formulation helpfully points out the disparity between the Law and its “trial” and the innocence of the accused—“calamities” sent down “upon an individual, without their having been preceded by a sin”—and thus precisely the space in Kafka’s novel where humor and heresy begin to merge. Where for Maimonides the subject of the “trial” in the purest sense of the Law is innocent—tested by calamity in the brutal bet God makes with the devil to test the patience of Job—the court of The Trial produces an active system of persecution that Josef K. is unable to accept with utter seriousness: “perhaps all he had to do was laugh in the guards’ faces, and they would laugh with him.”12 Unlike Maimonides, The Trial takes a much less serious view of the Law, by presenting its accusatory representatives through a translated version of a Yiddish theater text. The underlying comic effect remains considerable, even when the reader is unaware that the two “warders,” or “Wächter,” who arrest Josef K. are borrowed figures from a Yiddish play about the Inquisition that aimed for a tragic effect. Kafka, in fact, was repulsed by the seriousness of the particular play on which he based The Trial and its beginning: the players were “too monotonous,” like other performances of the Yiddish theater Kafka watched, in a play that “degenerates into a wailing that prides itself on isolated, violent outbreaks.”13 Kafka’s own dramatic reading of the powerful

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opening pages of the novel gave a lighter touch to this Yiddish sense of tragedy, as Max Brod’s report of Kafka’s oral interpretation suggests: “Thus, for example, we friends of his laughed quite immoderately when he first let us hear the first chapter of The Trial. And he himself laughed so much that there were moments you couldn’t read any further. Astonishing enough, when you think of the fearful earnestness of this chapter. But that is how it was.”14 Josef K.’s statement about laughter and the “guards” has a larger resonance in this regard: as Kafka’s critique both of a Yiddish theater that took itself far too seriously and of Josef K’s desire for justification by a court that hardly deserves his respect. As a way of establishing his distance from Faynman’s sense of persecution as an ineluctable fate, Kafka’s laughter in performance points to a text that “undermines the seriousness of K’s arrest and makes the hero look slightly ridiculous,” as Beck suggests, as if the sense of his guilt and the excess sentimentality of the Yiddish theater production of Jewish guilt and accusation were precisely what needed to be displaced.15 The Trial’s Frau Gruber indicates this subtle shift in the focus of its comedy. After his arrest she therefore tells Josef K. that he “mustn’t take it so seriously,” since it “involves your happiness after all,” indicating part of the meaning of the novel’s German title as Proceß.16 At the level of Kafka’s reflection on the Yiddish theater that is encoded in the novel, her advice is also a warning against accepting the stereotypes of Jewish identity that the theater could also convey to Kafka. In German he observes that the Yiddish performance of Der Vizkönig and of the Spanish Inquisition could be “gleichförmig”—literally the reduction of identity to a single level or monotone—and reduce the Jewish voice to “Jammern,” without the multiple linguistic pleasures coming through. Kafka’s diary entry on his source for The Trial thus goes on to praise the actress “Mrs. Klug,” whose Yiddish singing had the following effect: “Only her opening song held me wholly under her influence, [and] after that I had the strongest reaction to every detail of her appearance, to her arms, stretched out when she sings, and her snapping fingers, to the tightly twisted curls at her temples. . . to her lower lip that she pursed once while she savored the effect of a joke (‘Look, I speak every language, but in Yiddish’) [alle Sprachen ken ich, aber auf jiddisch].” 17 Rather than a stereotype of the Yiddish theatrical voice, Mrs. Klug—whose name means “clever” in both German and Yiddish—allows Kafka to define the “effect of a joke” (die Wirkung eines Witzes) in distinctly non-Freudian terms as he gathered material for The Trial. The Yiddish here described is a counterweight to the “gleichförmig,” or “monotone,” sounds that the subsequent play on the Inquisition and guilt produces, as if reproducing a stereotypic sense of



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identity under paternal control. The Yiddish that Kafka values, by contrast, is humorous in the way it releases “many languages” in the speaker, while she sings—much like “Josephine the Singer” will later—in what is only grammatically a singular voice. Leni, the “maid” (Dienstmädchen) and “female caretaker” (Pflegerin) of the lawyer “Huld” in The Trial, helps point to this humor in The Trial. Her portrayal alludes to Jewish linguistic material, underneath the “Law” in different national forms. Working for a lawyer whose name in archaic German can mean “benevolence,” or “a gentleman or lady’s grace,” Leni casts the “guilt” of the defendants in a different light, the first and foremost example being that of “Rudi Block.” As Ruth Wisse has observed, “Block” the “Kaufmann,” or merchant, as he is called, bears a name that makes him “one of the few identifiably Jewish characters in Kafka’s fiction,” though it will be his mode of reading the Law that becomes Kafka’s concern.18 Leni therefore does not refer to any essence of Jewish identity; to be “Block” in The Trial represents the potential to be unblocked in a Jewish and nonessential sense. Kafka’s Jewish figure with a foreignsounding name—“Block” is a Fremdwort, or foreign word, in German—is at the same time a “Kaufmann,” or merchant, an occupation suggesting the metaphoric commerce with other nations that a Law full of interpretive riches would undertake, and thus a model of “Jewish” tradition nominally present in the full figure he represents. Leni thus engages in a mockery of Block’s own blockage about these plural sources of his identity, recommending a gesture from Arthur Schnitzler’s Der Weg ins Freie (1908)—“küß die Hand—a novel about assimilated Jews in Vienna, where a German nationalist named “Josef” performs the same attempt at graceful self-insinuation she models for Block: “she pointed to the lawyer’s hand [sie zeigte auf die Hand des Advokaten] and pursed her lips as if for a kiss. Block immediately kissed it [gleich führte Block den Handkuß aus] and at Leni’s prompting, did so twice more.”19 Unlike Schnitzler, Kafka playfully uses “Hand” in The Trial to produce an allegory of German-Hebrew relations as the depiction of the “Kaufmann” as character proceeds. The scene of reading staged in the lawyer’s apartment thus alludes to the apparently traditional texts he studies as if they were the Law as a source of Jewish self-definition, and then shifts its focus to the mode of reading this defendant is used to portray. Block’s mode of studying the Law thus takes place in the apartment that belongs to “Huld,” precisely the site where the “benevolence” signified by his name would suggest the blessings of textual study for all concerned. In Leni’s description, Block the “Kaufmann” could thus very well be seen as reading the Hebrew scripture or

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its sacred commentaries, albeit with a canine persistence that makes her glad to be rid of him, as she tells “Huld”: “I’m glad to hear it,” said the lawyer. But did he understand what he was reading? Block moved his lips constantly during this conversation, apparently formulating the replies he hoped Leni would give. “Of course, I can’t really say for sure,” said Leni. “At any rate I could see he was reading carefully. He spent the whole day reading the same page, and would move the fingers of his hand [den Finger] along the page as he read. Whenever I looked in he was sighing, as if he were finding it hard to read. The texts you gave him are probably hard to understand.”20 Block’s fingers fail to literalize the “Yad,” of course—Kafka never mentions the word “Hand” in this passage—comically blocking him, in an unavoidable way reflected in the language, from the deeper Hebrew meaning of Kafka’s German text. The narrator remarks as much by stating, as this scene of reading is introduced, that Block the “Kaufmann,” or merchant, “was no longer a client [Klient], he was the lawyer’s dog [Hund des Advokaten]. If the lawyer had ordered him to crawl under the bed, as into a kennel and bark, he would have done so gladly” (195, 265). Kafka’s canine reference here is to Block’s less than literal mode of reading the Law, as the nominally Jewish figure as “Hund” looks forward to Josef K.’s death on the last page of the novel. At the same time the scene of reading that Leni describes evokes the simplest level of pardes, the fourfold model of the interpretation of Hebrew scripture that was also important to the Zohar, that “Bible of the Kabbalists” that Kafka refers to in his diary.21 As Elliot Wolfson suggests, the “pshat,” or literal level, remains the lowest mode of interpretation, where interpretation remains stuck when unable to uncover the multiple “sod” or “esoteric” meanings within the simple and literal scripture as law.22 Kafka’s “Block,” in this hermeneutic sense, remains unable to acquire even this “pshat,” or simple level, with his obedience to the letter standing for his utter lack of such playful openness and comedy, making it impossible to read the secrets of the text. In the scene that Leni describes, the “Block” who reads the same page over and over, “moving his fingers along the [same] lines,” becomes a vaudeville dunce of interpretation. His “fingers” figuratively follow the literal sense of the text—its ­letters—in Hebrew or “Yad” fashion across the page, with Leni giving us no hint whether he knows even the “pshat,” or simple meaning, of the left or direction in



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which it should be read. In Kafka’s careful construction of this scene, the word “Hand” never appears, making Block a “Hund,” or slavish figure, in the most canine and implicitly stubborn sense. To read with “Finger” only—and thus with “pshat,” or simple obedience—makes Block a less than human reader. He appears not as an essentially Jewish figure but as “Kaufmann,” or businessman, who is not Jewish enough—lacking the “Yad,” Hebrew for “hand”; the human animal needs to read the Law’s most difficult “Zeilen” or lines. We know, in this instance, that Kafka was aware of this Hebrew-German meaning of “Hand” and “Yad,” which refers to Maimonides and the reading of the Jewish Law that his most famous Hebrew work constructs. In Der Organismus des Judentums, Fromer describes Maimonides’ now-canonical recapitulation of the Talmud in terms of a German and Hebrew “Hand,” which he transliterates into German, suggesting the kind of translinguistic tradition underlying The Trial as a text. “The Maimonidean codex,” as Fromer puts it, “is called the Mishne Torah (the second Torah), or the Jad ha-Chazaka [in Hebrew, meaning] ‘the strong hand.’” He then proceeds to cite the famous Maimonidean dictum on openness of the Talmud to everyone, given its importance as the tradition’s compendium of the oral tradition of Jewish Law: “I have composed this work with the intention of compiling the oral Torah [Law] in a way that will make it accessible to everyone [damit die mündliche Tora geordnet und jedermann zugänglich sei], so that no other work of reference on any question of Jewish legal norms will need to be consulted [und kein anderes Werk zur Auskunft über irgendwelche jüdische Rechtsnorm mehr herangezogen zu werden brauche].”23 In Fromer’s German rendering of the Maimonidean Hebrew, Kafka had access to “the strong Hand,” or “Jad Ha-Chazaka,” reading of the oral Law in principle in which accessibility to “jedermann,” or “everyone,” was key. To read with a “strong Hand,” or “starke Hand,” thus meant a canonical reading in which strength was aligned with the openness of the oral law— received at Sinai along with the written scripture, according to the Jewish tradition—just as the Law was seen to benefit from the commentary of numerous voices so that the full voice of its revelation could be heard.24 Unlike Maimonides and his “Yad Ha-Khazaka,” or “strong hand,” of figuratively Hebrew reading, Leni initially attracts Josef K. by using her far weaker but “beautiful claw” (hübsche Kralle). With it she breaks the “Porzellan,” or elegant dishes, a grating sound that evokes the Yiddish expression for the interminable experience of “having one’s ear chewed,” also known as “having my teakettle smashed” (gehákt a tshaynik).25 The narrator thus introduces Leni as if she were an interruption—“then a sound came like breaking

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porcelain [zerbrechendem Porzellan] from the hall”—though the figurative act of breaking into pieces linguistic entities such as German and Hebrew is a continuous gesture that Kafka performs throughout The Trial as a text. “Nothing happened,” she therefore tells Josef K. when he harkens to the sound of breaking porcelain, “I just threw a plate against the wall [Mauer] to bring you out [herauszuholen]”; she then repeats, “nothing has happened at all.”26 Whereas in German the idiom “to break the porcelain” (Porzellan zerschlagen) means to speak clumsily or engage in awkward action in a manner that would unleash a “calamity” or literally the “unholy” (Unheil), Leni performs her act intentionally against the “wall.” 27 Her gesture evokes the solid boundary between German and Hebrew, at the same time producing a sound that “haks a tshaynik,” or rattles the china, of a silent contact zone. Leni’s breaking of the “Porzellan” is in this way a redemptive parable for the hidden “porcelain” sounds that every official tradition contains. Where the overly observant study turns Block the Kaufmann into a canine figure of interpretation, Leni’s “Kralle,” or “claw,” points to the audible linkage between Hebrew and German languages. In linguistic terms, German and Jewish speakers are all held in Leni’s hand. Joined by the “Verbindungshäutchen,” or “connective tissue,” invisible to each of its speakers, as Kafka said of the “Verbindungen” between “Jargon” and German, Leni in this way points to the delicate connections between seemingly discrete and opposite realms.28 A biblical passage that Kafka consulted helps capture some of this heretical humor. A psalm Kafka brought to Martin Buber for explication states that “they know not, neither do they understand; they go about in darkness,” and Leni appears for the first time in the novel “holding a candle in her hand” (Ps. 82:5).29 More than any secret truth in particular, Leni’s “candle” resembles the “Lampe” carried by Mr. Pollunder’s servant in Amerika—“wouldn’t you care to light your candle [Kerze] at my lamp?”—who exposes the corridors that riddle the “Country House” in New York, as if they were the unknown passageways of tradition waiting to be explored.30 While that Law is drawn to guilt in this novel—“our department . . . as the Law states, is attracted by guilt and has to send guards [Wächter] out,” a figure named “Franz” states early on—comedy emerges in The Trial when “guilt” becomes an opportunity for heretical laughter, especially at the idolatry that mistakes men for gods. Laughter can destroy self-exaltation and mock the subservient, especially when their reading practice becomes canine and inattentive: “Block, said Leni in a tone of warning, lifting him up a bit by the collar, ‘leave that fur alone and listen to the lawyer,’” whose words have a humor all their own.31 If heresy is defined by the ability to enjoy



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the comedy that exposes the false desire for human conformity, laughter is Kafka’s secret antidote that “kills” the reading of the Law as singular and takes pleasure in the realm of human difference instead. “I had taken you for divine beings,” states the biblical “Gnosis” that Kafka brought to Buber as a source for The Trial, “but you shall die as men” (Ps. 82:6–7).32

Kabbalah as Comedy: Josef K. as Jewish Humorist The two guards “Franz” and “Willem” are “Wächter,” or awakeners, in the sense of offering a switch of perspective: from the guilt of the accused to the more humorous perspective that focuses the reader’s attention on the hidden plurality of the Law and its officials. In this hidden respect, Josef K. learns a great deal from the Kabbalah, albeit in the practical manner that Leni’s “hand” as an alternative and secretly humorous mode of looking at the Law and its judges suggests. According to the Zoharic passage that Kafka possessed in German translation as “Das Licht des Urquells,” or “The Light of the Original Source,” redemption means to grasp this hidden plurality of creation where it can be a surprise; or as Ritchie Robertson summarizes the text that Kafka owned: “God concealed the primal light from the eyes of sinful mankind and will reveal it only when the diverse worlds, into which the creation has disintegrated, are again united.”33 The potential for humor, as Josef K.’s trial, or “Proceß,” begins, is thus the chance to discover the forms of hidden identity so that a later, fuller redemption of experience becomes possible. Josef K.’s guilt creates a radical shift in focus, allowing Kafka to judge the Law more than have it judge him, exposing humor as the omnipresent Jacob’s ladder that exposes official culture’s plural forms, as his entrance to its court suggests: K. turned to the stairs to find the room for the inquiry, but then paused as he saw three different staircases in the courtyard in addition to the first one . . . he was annoyed that they hadn’t described the location of the room more precisely; he was certainly being treated with strange carelessness or indifference, a point he intended to make loudly and clearly. Then he went up the first set of stairs after all, his mind playing with the memory of the remark the guard Willem had made that the court was attracted by guilt, from which it actually followed that the room for the inquiry would have to be located off whatever stairway K. chanced to choose.34

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These multiple “stairways” represent the bridges between the high claims of the Law and the lower sexual and linguistic realms that appear within its halls. Accompanied by the wife of the court usher, Josef K. soon observes “how dirty everything is” and opens a book entitled The Torments Grete Suffered at the Hands of Her Husband Hans, provoking him into a reflection on humor that is of both Jewish and larger linguistic concern. In its resemblance to a Talmudic passage on cherubim engaged in “sexual intercourse” (Vereinigungsakt) atop the Ark of the Covenant, these “law books” resemble a Jewish tradition reduced to Germanic stereotype, with Josef K.’s satire directed at this Hänsel and Gretel reduction of the Jewish tradition as a manual for spousal abuse. “‘So these are the law books they study,’ said K. ‘I’m to be judged by such men.’ ‘I’ll help you,’ said the woman: ‘Do you want me to?’”35 The comedy for Josef K. is not what “Grete” suffered, of course, but the absurdity of self-enslavement to stereotype. This “staircase” comedy uses the Jewish linguistic tradition to explore its own theory of “ludicrous,” or “lächerlich,” which Kafka first encountered in Schopenhauer’s terms.36 As Malcolm Pasley notes, however, Kafka’s source in The Trial was Salomon Maimons Lebengeschichte, which gives a version of the Talmudic passage Kafka uses to link humor and the Law. Pasley draws our attention to the passage where Maimon deals with the obscene and the absurd, and thus a view of tradition that would link Kafka with Beckett as his comic successor, as exploders of the myth of a static literary or religious canon or law. In Solomon Maimon’s terms, the “absurd” (Lächerliche) is an index to the hidden content of tradition, with the “repugnant” (Widrige) requiring a hiding of potential comedy, since direct laughter would expose the differences within the law that are hiding in plain sight, and of which “small” and “great” mysteries are made: The secrets of a religion consist of subjects [Gegenstände] and activities [Handlungen] which, while congruous with its concepts and principles and possessing an inner significance are of great importance, bear something of the lewd, the absurd [Lächerliche] or otherwise repugnant [Widrige] in their outward form. These must of necessity remain hidden [verborgen] to the common eye that is unable to look within, or to see the outward form, for that matter, and thus remain a twofold secret for it. Such subjects and activities and practices themselves form the small mysteries and inner significance of which great mysteries are made.37



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We need only substitute literature for the Jewish tradition of commentary to understand the connection between humor and the secrecy that tradition enjoins, both in Maimon’s account and in Kafka’s later use of the straightfaced humor in his texts. That which is “lächerlich” is the stuff of “small mysteries” in Kafka, not because the meaning is “verborgen,” or hidden, but because that which is “repulsive,” or “widrig,” is completely open to observation. “Small mysteries” are formed, according to Maimon, when what could literally be a source of pleasurable laughter, or “lächerlich,” is transformed into the “great mysteries” of tradition. These, he suggests, could be openly humorous and pleasurable if tradition, in a less authoritative fashion, allowed these “repulsive” differences to emerge in their plural sense. In Maimon’s version of the “lächerlich,” comedy must therefore be hidden within the overly serious face of tradition, as the Talmudic passage Kafka took from his Lebensgeschichte suggests. In Kafka’s version of Maimon, the “secret” or mysterious content of tradition can appear as “ludicrous”—the way Schopenhauer uses the term “lächerlich”—only when approached, as Kafka suggests, “superficially” (oberflächlich)], and thus in the mode dramatized by Josef K. The Trial therefore represents this “outside” reading of the Talmud’s Yoma 54b—The Sufferings of Grete at the Hands of Her Husband—as both a serious and a canonical perversion in several respects, especially when Solomon Mai­ mon’s own redaction of the Talmudic passage is brought into view: For instance, I have found a passage in the Talmud that refers to the Ark of the Covenant of the Second Temple built after the Babylonian Exile [Gefangenschaft] that is too remarkable for me not to cite it here. According to this story, the enemies [Feinde] who seized the Temple discovered, in the Holy of Holies, the effigy of two people, one of each sex, depicted in the act of copulation [Vereinigungsakt]— they then desecrated this shrine through a crass interpretation of its inner meaning. The effigy was meant to offer a lively, sensual representation of the unification of the nation [Nation] with the deity [Gottheit], and had to be removed, solely to prevent its misuse by the eye of the common people [des gemeinen Volkes].38 An obscene reading of the Law is made possible, Maimon argues, only through the “misuse” of an “interpretation” that stands outside the “Nation.” The perversion or literal overturning involved in this “crass” reading of the “law books” and their sacred tradition is therefore also one that Josef K. grasps right away:

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“how dirty everything is,’ said K. shaking his head, and before K. could reach for the books, the woman wiped at least some of the dust off with her apron” (57, 76). The “crass interpretation” of tradition as a figurative form of sexual submission to the more powerful (male) interpreter is thus viewed as an external encrustation of the “law” by “the woman,” who removes some of this filthy hermeneutic before these books can reach Josef K.’s hand. The Trial opens the door to a satiric reading quietly, in a kabbalistic sense in which comedy and secrecy become linked. As Maimon suggests in Kafka’s source passage, it is only the “common eye” (gemeine Auge) that sees sexuality as submission to the Law; secrecy is in this way the effect of an uninformed and “outside” but also stereotypically serious reading of the Law that also makes comedy possible, part of Kafka’s depiction of Grete, whose trials signify the fairy-tale origin of classical tradition, as suggested by the light allusion to the German Hänsel and Gretel. According to Northrop Frye, comedy in the Western tradition occurs in the “low mimetic mode,” which he defines according to Aristotle’s Poetics as “the imitation of people who are worse than average” (1449a).39 The “imitation” of those “below”—like the “borogroves” of Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky,” which he glossed as meaning “to parrot”—is a kind of intercourse with what is “worse ” in Aristotelian terms. “Jabber,” as this gloss suggests, becomes the sign of forgotten borrowing—“borogrove. An extinct kind of Parrot”—now treated as primeval, with the sources acquired through such intercourse fully integrated into the tradition’s sacred groves.40 In the sexual imagery of The Trial, the Law’s violence represents the attempt to impose a brutal mastery over such origins—obscenity signifies the perverse will to power of the male interpreters who create Grete’s “agony,” where females in the novel represent a love for the Law that could release ever-new meanings from the Jewish scripture they represent. “Kafka’s Law,” as Moshe Idel puts it, “like the maiden in the Zohar parable, is intended for everyone who dares,” and thus is a multiple voice that is hardly meant to be ravished, with such violence more likely to expose the weakness of the reader whose violence fails to love the authentic mystery of the text.41 The Law courts in this way foreshadow the nationalism that Kafka would examine in relation to Zionism, and the more open version of modern Hebrew and its multiple sources I examine in Chapter 5. The figure of Amalia in Kafka’s Castle was based on a nationalist heroine from a popular Czech novel, though she suggests sources in Jewish mystical interpretation as well. As a woman who rejects the advances of the Castle official who demands her sexually, Amalia thus raises the theme that Solomon Maimon called “the



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unification of the nation with the Godhead,” with kabbalistic motifs serving to mock the notion of sexual mastery as interpretive control of the female, whose spirit resists any singular national or religious form. Thus in the Kabbalah, where the “Shekhinah,” or female emanation of the divine spirit, is supposed to provide access to the “true meaning of the Torah . . . those words to which not a syllable or a letter may be added and from which none can be taken away,” the official “Sortini” never attains his Amalia. In The Castle he remains comically unable to distinguish himself from “Sordini,” his brother, in failed conquest of the female as a singular national or religious text.42 The fact that “Sortini” leaves the Castle in pursuit of an unmarried “maiden” and fails to attain her suggests a satire on the mystical “Torah” as falling under the command of any national scripture, as the female figure eludes any final form of masculine as well as interpretive control. That “Sortini” resembles “Sordini” in what Kafka calls a “Namensähnlichkeit,” or “similarity of name,” suggests a “sourd,” or deaf ear, to multiple meanings—a potential humor that first emerges in The Trial’s interpreters of the Law.43 Josef K. points out this comedy of official culture to the “Priest” in just these terms, though his reactions can be seen as more humorous once his sources in the Kabbalah are brought to light. In the Jewish mystical tradition of the Zohar, the “castle” or palace must be entered to approach the “beautiful damsel” who represents “the true meanings of the words of the Torah” in the fullness of their meaning, which “reveals from within its concealment” with the slightest of hints, as if it were “an eyeless text.”44 The Law book entitled The Torments Grete Suffered at the Hands of Her Husband Hans satirizes male control as what the Shekhinah must escape, especially where female figures catch the masculine eye in The Trial. Kafka therefore portrays the “Priest” in the “Cathedral” chapter—the high point of the novel’s action—as either foolish or childish or devious and malicious when he treats Josef K.’s female helpers as foreign figures in the text. “You seek too much outside help [fremde Hilfe],” the priest tells him disapprovingly, “particularly from women. Haven’t you noticed that isn’t true help?”45 The priest’s disparagement of women as “foreign” is already subject to quiet commentary from a Hebrew perspective. The female Shekhinah—in terms of the interpretation of the Law—means “literally in-dwelling, namely of God in the world,” and thus a spirit as internal as possible to his text.46 In this Hebrew sense, much of the suffering that constitutes Josef K.’s trial, before his execution by two “second-rate actors” (alte untergeordnete Schauspieler), results from his inability to laugh at the ignorance of the Law’s official interpreters, a perspective implicitly present in The Trial nonetheless.47 In this quiet fashion,

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the priest’s discourse can be shown to be shot through with kabbalistic sources, most importantly in his final words—that the court “receives you when you come, and dismisses you when you go”—while discounting the female, or what Karl Erich Grözinger calls “the feminine element in the hierarchies of the court.”48

The Pleasures of the Shekhinah “Confess the first chance you get,” Leni tells Josef K. after exposing the “judge” portrayed in the portrait as “ridiculously vain” (unsinnig eitel), as if his potential for humor first depends on an awareness of the false divinity of the court. In religious terms, Leni is thus one of the “female helpers” that Josef K. “recruits” (ich werbe Helferinnen) as his stalwart supporters in his interpretive endeavors. “Helpers” in The Trial are women who help him see the difference between claims to singular mastery and a more plural truth that resists the seductions of priestly power.49 Later “In the Cathedral,” when the “Geistliche,” or “Priest,” “nodded slightly” (nickte er ganz leicht mit dem Kopf), the fact that K. in response “crossed himself, as he should have done earlier,” produces a gesture that portrays Josef K. in multiple possible ways at once: as a forgetful convert, a recalcitrant among the faithful, or a participant in the priestly tradition in an imitative way.50 As is the case with Red Peter, the ape of “Report to an Academy,” Josef K.’s response to the “Gefängniskaplan,” or “prison chaplain,” helps The Trial perform a multiple imitation of the choices in which he seems trapped. While Red Peter inhabits a cage whose “construction was too low for me to stand up in and too narrow for me to sit down in”—producing a spectrum of possible readings of his text—the priestly tradition sees women staging a similar pair of theatrical extremes: as either a lascivious apparition of the “fremde,” or foreign help, Josef K. solicits; or as the virginal “Marienbild,” or image of Mary, that appears next to an “old woman” (einn altes Weib) in the text.51 In accord with this priestly structure, Josef K. first sees the wife of the court usher as a kind of prostitute “like all of them” who flock to the court: “‘so that’s all it is,’ thought K., ‘she’s offering herself to me; she’s depraved’” (sie bietet sich mir an, sie ist verdorben).52 Soon after, however, the same woman will be portrayed as what her husband accurately calls “the most beautiful woman in the building,” a version of the Kabbalah’s “beautiful damsel secluded in the palace,” as Moshe Idel calls her, and a source of secret wisdom



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from the Jewish linguistic tradition of a more multiple kind.53 Kafka prepares for this emergence of the “Shekhinah,” understood as the more plural spirit of the Law, using the priest as well as Josef K. to construct the cage of confining attitudes toward women that cross the social and religious spectrum—the “way out” that passes through the “zoo,” or “Tiergarten,” of stereotypes the text proceeds to enact. “Do your utmost to get onto the “varieté stage,” the animal therefore tells himself in a later incarnation of this spirit: “the Zoological Gardens means only a new cage” without the spirit of such variety in mind.54 Thus while the court reflects an architecture of interpretive confinement, where “people were forced with their backs and heads pushing against the ceiling” (wo die Leute nur gebückt stehen konnten und mit dem Kopf und Rücken an die Decken stießen), they occupy a posture of neither debasement nor full elevation. The false choice between the “Virgin Mary” and seductively “fremde” female helpers in The Trial opens up a similar space where such freedom confinement appears. “It turned out, that there was indeed a narrow path free [ein schmaler Weg frei] through the swirling crowd, one that possibly divided the two parties (möglicherweise zwei Parteien schied)”: a room the “woman” (Frau) allows Josef K. to enter—“I have to lock it after you” (nach Ihnen muß ich schließen).55 His remaining task in the novel consists of discovering the rest of the way through by himself. Part of the pleasure of reading The Trial comes from the wit of self-discovery, experienced as a sense of freedom from false alternatives that are self-imposed: “these are only proceedings,” as Josef K. tells the court in one of his better moments, “only if I recognize them as such [denn es ist ja nur ein Verfahren, wenn ich es als solche anerkenne].”56 The pulpit from which the priest will deliver “Before the Law” to Josef K. resembles this stage of interpretation, where comedy begins to release the Shekhinah as the plural spirit of the Law. This “niche” (Nische) that was “intended for a statue of a saint” (die für die Aufnahme einer Heiligenstatue bestimmt war) contains a much more lively self-presentation, as the priest who warns Josef K. against the influence of women is portrayed as the victim of his own, freely chosen interpretive structure: the stone vaulting of the pulpit began at an unusually low point and rose, bare of any decoration it’s true, but curved inward so sharply that a man of average height could not stand upright [aufrecht] there, but instead would have to bend forward over the balustrade the entire time. The whole arrangement seemed designed to torture the preacher [das Ganze war wie zur Qual des Predigers bestimmt]; there

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was no conceivable reason why this pulpit was needed at all, since the other large and finely decorated one was available.57 “Qual” as “torture” takes on its first meaning in Kafka—before “In the Penal Colony” and its writing machine—as the suppression of a comedy that finds partial expression nonetheless, since it is the priest’s self-confining approach to the Law that is the subject of the scene. “You don’t have to accept everything as true, you just have to accept it as necessary”—the final wisdom of the “Geistliche”—is thus a statement that comes at his own expense.58 As his interpretive posture suggests, the priest cannot stand “aufrecht,” or “upright.” Nor can he do justice to the parable of the Law within this structure, since “das Ganze,” or the “whole,” torturously prevents him from seeing the beauty of its parts, or the multiple meanings of the Law “itself.” That Zionist aspect of “Before the Law”—as it recovers a different national tradition within the cathedral—thus suggests the plural potential of this ostensibly serious and churchly text. This pronouncement of a form of a Jewish parable within a churchly setting suggests Felix Weltsch’s point about Kafka’s comic perspective: that humor in his works has the effect of opening up apparently singular entities—“false unities” (falsche Einheiten)—that can take both religious and national forms, using the Christian setting of the parable as well as a subtle form of Jewish nationalism to expose their interlocking strands.59 The priest’s suspicion of women has the effect of widening the discourse of his parable, and of foregrounding the importance of female and minor traditions of interpretation in unlocking meanings he himself discounts. Josef K. therefore does not disagree with the priestly depreciation of women but is instead inspired to offer a female-centered qualification of his words: “‘sometimes, often even, I’d have to say you’re right,’ said K., ‘but not always. Women have great power.’”60 Through such commentary the priest comes to represent any religious or national tradition that ignores the unheard voices of a Law that give it a hidden force. In his diary entry of December 25, 1911, on small literatures, Kafka credited the “Jewish writing” of Warsaw as possessing this kind of critical perspective—another aspect of his own ability to “portray national mistakes,” like the suppression of such multiple perspectives, “in, as it were, a particularly painful, but forgiving and liberating way,” a definition of The Trial’s portrayal of suffering as a potential stage in a process of increasing awareness, rather than an end in itself.61 The national “mistake” Josef K. makes with the priest is comically suggested by the remark that “women have great power,” invoking a perspective on



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the Law that satirizes his “ex cathedra” discourse and allows a more plural viewpoint to emerge. As early as 1911 and through 1915 as his composition of The Trial was under way, Kafka’s diary traded in images that seemed equally serious and priestly: a division between the clean and the filthy that seems both to Jewish culture in particular and to women in general throughout his fiction, which turns out to be the falsely Christian overlay of “virgin” and “whore” in a different form.62 In Kafka’s writing, the relevant parallel is the structure of Mr. Pollunder’s house in Amerika, where a “new” entrance is described as a “Church,” imposed on an “older” structure of the “Landhaus,” and Karl Rossman opens up hidden passages that resemble the kabbalistic tradition of interpretation that Gershom Scholem described. In Josef K.’s response to the priest, the “Cathedral” view of women is viewed from a similarly kabbalistic perspective, in which the “Shekhinah,” or the “divine presence,” is an immanent and multiple presence to be approached with gentle caution as the inner spirit of the Law. The “priest” who calls women “outside help” is thus quietly humorous from the standard perspective that Gershom Scholem calls “Talmudic literature and non-Kabbalistic Rabbinical Judaism.” The term “Shekhinah” as female indwelling of the divine spirit—and thus a tradition prior to the “priestly” one—appears in Maimonides, who glosses the Hebrew root of the priest’s “fremd,” or outside presence, as signifying “a permanent stay in a place of one’s abode.”63 The priest of The Trial in one sense represents a “cathedral” knowledge in Mr. Pollunder’s sense, where overwritten Hebrew meanings have been forgotten. In another sense he suggests an orthodox Judaism as well as a Christian tradition, dismissive of an older mystical tradition where the feminine can signify the divine emanation of the Law. In the priestly statement that women are “outside help,” Kafka in this way engineers a return of what was never actually repressed in both Christian and Jewish tradition and commentary. In this return to the fuller meaning of the female spirit that was never actually forgotten, The Trial quietly and comically puts limited notions of gender to a certain trial, as Elizabeth Boa aptly suggests.64 To look more closely at the Maimonidean definition on which Scholem’s own formulation may rely, the Hebrew “shakkon” is related to the infinitive “to dwell,” which Maimonides goes on to relate to the notion of “essential” being as involving a connection to the other, as in Elliot Wolfson’s notion of the “Shekhinah” as the spirit of hidden connections between entities otherwise imagined as discrete.65 “This verb,” Maimonides writes, “is also figuratively applied to things that are not living beings and in fact to everything that is permanent and attached to another being,” an extension of the concept of “dwelling” with the other that

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also echoes the genesis of woman in the standard account of creation, according to which “it is not good for man to be alone” and a man “clings to his wife, so that they become one flesh” (Gen. 2:18, 24).66 This spirit of attachment suggests a presence dwelling next to the Law, or between its lines. In this spirit, Leni’s fingers suggest a “Yad,” or Hebrew hand, that points to the text’s hidden links, and thus to a different and more pleasurable—because more plural—reading of the text that connects disparate realms. It should therefore come as little surprise that according to Gershom Scholem, canonical authority and its interpreters were hardly amused by the Shekhinah as a female tradition of the Kabbalah: “Often regarded with the utmost misgiving by strictly Rabbinical, non-Kabbalistic Jews, often distorted into inoffensiveness by embossed Kabbalistic apologists, this mythical conception of the feminine principle of the Shekhinah as a providential guide of Creation achieved enormous popularity among the masses of the Jewish people, so showing that here the Kabbalists had uncovered one of the primordial religious impulses still latent in Judaism.”67 The cross-cultural move from the latent to the all but comically voiced is apparent in the cathedral that Josef K. enters; there “a tomb of Christ in conventional depiction” (eine Grablegung Christi in gewöhnlicher Auffasung) looms in utter seriousness, though a kabbalistic sense of in-dwelling of the Law remains figuratively by his side.68 As Karl Grözinger points out, Kafka’s diary refers to the synagogue he visited in Prague as having a “kirchenmäßiges Innere,” or “Church-like interior,” as a similar burial ground of tradition, where the Shekhinah as the creative force of the Law waits to come alive.69 While the sanctity of the self-sacrificial son presumes the notion of the virgin mother, the Hebrew “Shekhinah” or indwelling, signifies a female presence who “cleaves” to her husband—without domination by him—as the liberation of tradition through a setting free of the multiple spirit of her text. Thus when the priest declares that women are not “die wahre Hilfe,” or “true help,” Josef K. suggests the female, when properly treated, to be the image of his own redemption as he comes before the Law: “Sometimes, often even, I’d have to say you’re right,” said K., “but not always. Women have great power. If I could get a few of the women I know to join forces and work for me [gemeinschaftlich für mich zu arbeiten], I could surely make it through [müßte ich durchdringen]. Particularly with this court, that consists almost entirely of skirt chasers [Frauenjägern]. Show the examining magistrate [Untersuch­



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ungsrichter] a woman even at a distance, and he’ll knock over the courtroom table and the defendant to get to her first.”70 To be a “skirt chaser” in English idiom is more literally a “woman hunter” in Kafka’s terms, suggesting interpretation as domination. In this passage the female as indwelling of the Law is violated and treated like an animal to be laid to rest. The ability to “get through” (durchdringen) with the help of “women” has been already achieved in this passage, as Josef K. differentiates multiple female spirits working together from a “justice” resembling a pack of wild beasts. Earlier in The Trial, Titorelli’s pseudo-Renaissance painting recalled “the goddess of Justice, or even that of Victory,” and then looked like “goddess of the Hunt,” endorsing an assault that “attracted Josef K. more than he wished”; here a singular lust for the literal suggests a lack of interpretive acumen on the part of the court’s most illustrious interpreters, and an ability to see the plural meanings that dwell within the female spirit.71 Josef K. is at the same time describing a comic form of the Law and its hermeneutic. Here a lust for the literal meaning of a metaphor leads the judges exalted over humanity into a perversion of the “Shekhinah,” understood as a female emanation of the divine Hebrew word. In this interpretive context, the literal desire for the female by the court appears as a frustration of multiple meaning, shedding light on Kafka’s later diary comment that metaphors made him “despair of writing,” understood as the transformation, or “Verwandlung,” of such a lower or “animal” sense that depicts the court as “women-hunters” (Frauenjäger) into some more ethereal or spiritual sense.72 Literalizing ­metaphors—as a way of restoring multiple meanings to such a deadly language—has long been discussed as Kafka’s response to this predicament of singular distortion, from Günther Anders to Walter Sokel and to Stanley Corngold, who argues that for Kafka, “Kabbalah is truthful writing”; in this interpretation wordplay—play that opens up the multiple senses of literal meaning, as well as the meanings of the letter—releases hidden meanings of the text.73 “Womenhunting” (Frauenjagen), as Josef K. describes the procedure of the “magistrates,” is perverted Kabbalah in this sense. The “power of women” signifies the creative force of a text with multiple meanings, rather than a single figurative reading that can be hunted down to a singular sense. Unchained to a single metaphor, those sound similarities released by the letter—often called puns—set multiple meanings free in this sense, casting doubt on the figurative “law” that would rule over meaning, making its “Jäger” after women look like simpletons obsessed by the dirty, or “schmutizg,” instead.74

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Such “Schmutz,” as Kafka names it in his “Letter to His Father,” names an array of hidden suggestions. These are well conveyed in the German and equally Yiddish suggestions of the word that are also carried in the English idiom of “dishing the dirt” on noble men.75 These plural meanings of the filth that encrusts the Law in Kafka’s Trial model a false form of interpretation rather than literal behavior, though in a figurative sense it is the “Shekhinah” as the multiple meanings of the Law whom the “Herren,” or the “Lords,” of the court fail to know in their biblical sense. The literal sex that the “gentlemen” of the court seek with the “Washerwoman,” for instance, represents the desire for a fixed and therefore false meaning, while the “Shekhinah” figures the multiple, female indwelling of the Law as the highest meaning that can be attained. Her name is deeply comic in this critical sense: the woman who is first introduced as the “Wäscherin,” or “cleaning woman,” of the court, protects precisely these mysteries of the text. In the process she exposes the filthy and singular desires of the suitors, whose filthy desire to penetrate her mystery makes them miss the deeper beauty she suggests. “How dirty [schmutzig] everything here is,” Josef K. thus observes in a critical sense, “and before K. could reach for the books, the woman wiped at least some of the dust away.”76 The “Gerichtsdiener” is therefore right in calling his wife “the most beautiful woman in the building” (allerdings die Schönste im ganzen Haus), though the aspersions he casts on her character suggest his failure to understand the meanings she represents. When seen as a version of the Shekhinah, the washerwoman’s assault by an unknown assailant becomes a satire on his ambitions, and nothing else. Josef K. is therefore correct in telling the priest that “women have great power,” since no individual interpreter is able to conquer or literally master the multitude of meanings she suggests.77 In Moshe Idel’s redaction of this tradition of kabbalistic interpretation: A beautiful damsel secluded in the palace hints to her lover to approach her, and after a sequel of disclosures and discussions, he becomes her husband. This state is seen as tantamount to his possessing the palace and all its beloved secrets. The significance of the parable is offered by the Zohar itself: the damsel is the Torah, which is dressed in four, perhaps even five, levels of meaning that must be penetrated by the perfect student of the Torah in order to reach its ultimate layer, the Kabbalistic meaning—a state portrayed as having overt sexual undertones.78



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From his Diaries, we know that Kafka possessed a version of the traditions of the “Shekhinah.” “On Friday, according to the Kabbalah,” he wrote on November 29, 1911, “the pious get a new, more delicate soul, entirely divine, which remains with them until Saturday evening,” a tradition of the visit of the Shekhinah as the coming of the Sabbath Bride—“L’kha Dodi” in the Sabbath hymn—that Gershom Scholem describes.79 With this background in mind, it is easy to see how the washerwoman escapes the filthy fixity of meaning imposed on her by her would-be lovers, who in The Trial parallel those readers or “husbands” who would falsely claim her as their own. What makes the court seem foul and corrupt to Josef K. is the notion of the washerwoman as giving herself to a single love. As a stand-in for the Shekhinah, what makes the washerwoman beautiful, by contrast, is her ability to find a figurative groom in every reader, without ever having her honor besmirched. “I’m the only one in the building who doesn’t dare protect himself,” her husband therefore declares.80 The kind of creativity suggested by the Shekhinah allows her to give herself to many, without the “Korruption” many would-be lovers might suggest. This plurality is what makes the washerwoman” beautiful without being seen in clean and virginal terms. “There’s no way to protect myself,” she tells Josef K; “even my husband has to come to terms with it”: she is “married” to a “Gerichtsdiener,” a servant of the court or usher, who refuses to defend her against other suitors and the Law’s hierarchy of interpretation. “He has to put up with it,” the washerwoman thus tells Josef K. of an attempted assault on her virtue, “because the man involved is a student and will presumably become even more powerful; he’s always after me; he left before you arrived,” though her tone leaves it open whether self-instruction in brutal mastery learned from his superiors or a more subtle relation to the Law is involved.81 The Trial conveys this potential in the image of “Wäsche,” or “laundry,” a reminder of the theme of the “damsel” as “Torah,” or Law, who must be garbed in four or five levels of meaning, albeit in a comic sense. While Kafka may have drawn the sense of the garb, or “levush,” as “supernal illumination” from Rav Nahman of Bratislav, the washerwoman’s work within the confines of the Law is an ironic attempt to escape the attributions that her crude interpreters would force her to accept.82 Where sexuality promotes a vision of controlling authority in The Trial, these tales from which Kafka learned of the Kabbalah were far more open and plural, producing what Arnold Band and Joseph Dan, “parodying Frank Kermode— would like to call the ‘sense of a non-ending’” for tradition’s texts. Kafka’s sources therefore describe “utterances . . . regarded as scripture by their audience,” yet

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which undermine any sense of conquest, final ending, or limit to reading of the garments of the Law.83 The washerwoman uses clothes in just this expansive and ultimately liberated interpretive sense. The rule of Kafka’s text could read as follows: where the “student” and other readers of the Law assault her, there the dirty laundry of the court shall be. “Wäsche,” or forms of laundry or clothing, in The Trial in this way stand for the far too limited readings of the Law she represents. The fact that women are openly assaulted and subjected to what looks like the early stages of rape (Entführung) in the court is the farthest thing from funny in this sense. At the same time, the washerwoman escapes such subjection through comedy, making her feelings known as a Shekhinah with a wardrobe sense of her own. “A great deal of wash is hung out here to dry” (hier auch vielfach Wäsche zum Trocknen ausgehängt wird), she tells Josef K. after he has begun to feel ill; “the tenants can’t be forbidden from doing so—it will come as no surprise that you feel a little sick” (das Ihnen ein wenig übel wurde) 84 Josef K. is not immune to this nauseatingly “übel,” or “evil,” desire to possess her, imagining that “there was no better way to revenge himself upon the examining magistrate and his retinue than taking this woman away from them for himself.”85 Scenes of sexual violence are therefore portrayed as an ironic path to justice in the court; seeing a “confirmation of the tyranny [Tyrannei] the student exercised over the woman” makes Josef K. long for a different model of love for the text. “Every sinner,” according to Gershom Scholem, “may be likened to a man who robs the Shekhinah of her garments; but a man who carries out the commandments of the Torah is as one who clothes the Shekhinah in her garments.” Such an interpreter brings a “new interpretation of the Law” into the “earthly world” and does so precisely by refusing to reduce her to the object of his pleasure, figuratively treating her like a piece of flesh. 86 False clothes are thus more than maculate garments for the washerwoman in The Trial ’s image of the Law. Filth and the otherwise soiled laundry that are strewn throughout the court of interpretation comically suggest the exploitive readings of the “gentlemen,” even as a “young woman” directs Josef K. otherwise. Exposure to pornographic readings of tradition thus recommends his own submission, like a grim “Grete” to the “Hans” of his suffering, while the spirit of the washerwoman has him looking for a “way out” in Kafka’s specific terms: he was too embarrassed that this sudden weakness had placed him at these people’s mercy; moreover, now that he knew the cause of



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his nausea he didn’t feel better, but a little worse. The young woman noticed this right away, picked up a hooked pole leaning against the wall and, to give K. a little fresh air, pushed open a small hatch directly above K. that led to freedom [ins Freie] outside. But so much soot [Ruß] fell in that the young woman had to close the hatch again immediately and wipe the soot from K.’s hands with her handkerchief, since K. was too tired to do it himself.87 As she wipes the signs of disuse from the aperture that leads to freedom, Kafka’s figure for the Torah in feminine form uses a piece of clothing to cleanse Josef K.’s hand. The filth she removes is soot that blocks the light of revelation— Zohar means “illumination”—and thus encourages degraded readings of the Law. The “young woman” thus figures redemption from such deadly readings. Resembling the “Jewish maiden” who of the later Kafka parable “I Was a Visitor among the Dead,” this version of the Shekhinah locates a “hatch” (Luke) that lets in light to her living grave, allowing a fuller interpretation of the language of the Law to come to life.88 With a comic Shekhinah pointing to a more illuminating mode of reading, scenes of seduction are transformed in The Trial. Kabbalistic justice depicts the “student” and the judges allied with his hermeneutic as foolishly ignorant of her tradition, where coming to a deeper understanding of the Torah means the opposite of violence and requires that she be provided with the proper garments or clothes. “These garments,” as Moshe Idel explains, “serve as a defensive armor,” and more for the interpreter than the Shekhinah herself, “enabling the Kabbalist to survive the dazzling light of the high worlds,” as the infinite forms of the Law are revealed.89 The washerwoman thus does not complain when the clothes she receives are sexy; like lingerie, they eloquently expose what the figurative husband, and not necessarily his bride, desires. Proper garments would display the multiple meanings of the Shekhinah as the key to her beauty, and thus might displease an interpreter interested in only one thing. “The examining magistrate is interested,” she therefore tells Josef K., “and now I have other indications that he sets great store by me,” though his clothes turn out not to be the ones she prefers: “Yesterday he sent me silk stockings [seidene Strümpfe] through the student, whom he trusts, and who is his colleague. Supposedly because I tidy up the courtroom, but that’s only an excuse, because after all that’s my duty and my husband gets paid for it. They’re pretty

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stockings, see”—she stretched out her legs, pulled her dress up to her knees, and viewed her legs herself as well—“they’re pretty stockings, but really they’re too fancy [fein], and not suitable [geeignet] for me.”90 These “silk stockings,” or “seidene Strümpfe,” as garments for this “female image of the Torah” could not be more comically precise. The scroll of the Law is of course dressed in silken garb in synagogues throughout the world, giving this seductive gesture a satiric effect. Silk stockings are indeed not “geignet,” or suitable, in this respect. The root “eigen” of the washerwoman’s protest portray the “student” and magistrate as wanting to have their own way with the spirit of the Law, rather than clothe her in a manner that brings out the secrets of her realm. The right reading, like the right clothes for the Shekhinah, “bestows by discovering what is latent,” releasing her light with garments that, like careful language, disclose the beauties that are already there.91 Although this potential seems to die a brutal death on The Trial’s final page, Josef K.’s murder cannot be called a fully serious reading in this Jewish mystical sense. The knife that kills the protagonist need not turn against the “second rate actors” (untergeordnete Schauspieler) who enforce their guilty interpretation; instead they provide murderous evidence that the “Herren” who pursue the Shekhinah throughout the court remain unable to master the multiple interpretations of her text.92 In a kabbalistic reading, it is the spirits of murderous and brutal interpretation who are ultimately dispatched. Josef K.’s dying declaration—“like a dog!”—uttered when it “seemed as though the shame was to outlive him” (Wie ein Hund! Sagte er, es war, als sollte die Scham ihn überleben), thus recalls a mystical ritual, directed at submissive spirits who must be purged.93 In the version quoted by Gershom Scholem, the final hymn sung in kabbalist ceremony bidding farewell to the Sabbath Bride celebrates an “exorcism” of the canine spirit of obedience that would prevent her authentic spirit from flourishing in the world: The insolent dogs must remain outside and cannot come in. I summon the “Old of Days” at evening until they are dispersed, Until his will destroys the shells. He hurls them back into their abysses, they must hide deep in their   caverns. And all this now, in the evening, at the festival of ze’ ir anpin.94 From the references to the Zohar in his diaries, we do not know if Kafka received the tradition of the ze’ ir anpin, which in Zoharic terms means “the



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impatient one,” though Josef K.’s distaste for dying “like a dog” clearly expresses a separation from the “actors” (Schauspieler) who obediently place the knife at his throat. At the conclusion of the “Flogger,” Josef K. accepts Franz’s punishment by telling his assistants that it was nothing but “a dog howling in the yard” (es schreit nur ein Hund auf dem Hof); a different attitude toward suffering emerges at the novel’s end.95 The execution of Josef K. is both an exorcism of the indifferent spirit and an allusion to “the patient one” of kabbalistic practice, that harbinger in Kafka’s later aphorism of a return to the pardes, or paradise, where the fullness of interpretation reigns.96 “Like a dog,” in this ultimate moment of dark humor, signifies the end of the Law’s most brutal reading, and the hope that through patience the multiple voices of the human animal will be released.

Hebrews in the Cathedral: The Yiddish Theater of the Law Seen from the perspective of the Shekhinah, scenes of sexual seduction and violence in The Trial appear as distortions of the messianic light, or what the passage from the Zohar that Kafka possessed called “the light of the original source” (Licht des Urquells).97 The distortion of violence often proves darkly humorous in Kafka, as it reflects a mode of reading and interpretation that his texts quietly place onstage, a comic effect of the forms of punishment for which they are famous. Thus in “In the Penal Colony,” the writing-as-torture machine performs its torture by inscribing “Honor Thy Superiors!” (Ehre deinen Vorgesetzten!) on its victims, while the writing modeled succeeds only in destroying the “superior” operator of the machine in the tale.98 The “officer” and his conception of the original text, handed down from the “Old Commandant,” reveal themselves as murderous but unaware forms of overwriting in many senses of the word. The “harrow” that performs the torture that kills the officer is called the “Egge” in German, a word derived from Latin (occa), as the Grimm Dictionary holds, and is thus hardly a singular form of language in its effects.99 The superiors to be obeyed meanwhile—the “Vorgesetzten”—suggest “Vor dem Gesetz,” or “Before the Law,” in the undercutting sense of multiple linguistic sources that existed “before” the Law itself. “I am still using the guiding plans drawn for the former Commandant,” the officer tells the narrator. While critics have seen everything from Leibniz to the Devil’s Island punishment of Colonel Dreyfus to the “traditions of Orthodox Judaism” in the “Commandant” and his writing-cum-torture machine, the dark humor of this punishing text and its

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satire on the “Offizier” come to the fore only when tradition’s formation from equally multiple sources is perceived.100 Roy Pascal was therefore correct in calling the story a “disturbing parody of religious faith”; the blindness of the officer to the multiple sources of the Law, including what Evelyn Beck calls the story’s version of “the Torah and the commentaries surrounding it,” only adds to the comic setup.101 The “Offizier’s” blindness has been well captured by Stanley Corngold, who points out that utter seriousness of the text’s surface appearance was “no laughing matter” when Kafka in 1916 read it aloud in Munich, where “three women are said to have fainted.” The events in “In the Penal Colony” contain the apparatus of vaudeville in all but name, in a story where, as Corngold observes, “any amount of stage business is permissible.”102 The “Offizier” describes the writing machine as “not intended to kill immediately [sie soll ja nicht sofort töten], . . . so there have to be lots and lots of flourishes [Zieraten] around the actual script,” saving the “body” of the condemned for “embellishments [Verzierungen].”103 A stage routine is set up for what becomes a literal punch line, which—like the machine itself—he never commands. While the officer lays down the Law with his German textual machine, he also alludes to the Yiddish drama on Gnostic heresy that Kafka saw in Prague—Elishe ben Avuya. There, Shimon cries out to the dying heretic that “the only jewel and sign [Tsirung/Zierung] of repentance [tshuve] is a garment,” and that redemption is purchased only through pain. “Yes of course you should be judged,” Rabbi Meir then concedes, with an acerbic question that turns the focus back onto the judges, “but by whom?”104 “Honor Your Superiors!” (Ehre deinen Vorgesetzten!), given this Yiddish pretext, suggests heretic meanings of guilt in the “Kolonie” of Kafka’s story, a text composed at the same time he explored the fate of Josef K.105 The officer’s declaration that “guilt is never to be doubted” (die Schuld ist immer zweifellos) at the same time suggests his own guilty reading, as he misses the multiple meanings of the Law he inscribes with such murderous avidity, like the simplistic reading of the “Kaufmann” and other halting interpreters in Kafka’s Trial.106 Kafka learned of these hidden senses of the Law from the Yiddish theater. While Karl Erich Grözinger is likely correct that “there can be no doubt that Kafka questioned his friend, Jiri Langer, the mystic” about the “gatekeeper tradition,” it was the Yiddish play Elishe ben Avuya that exposed him the day before to the pardes passage on Rabbi Akiba; Kafka then recorded his own version in his diary on October 29, 1911.107 In both The Trial and “In the Penal Colony,” this sense of guilt—of interpreters imposing a



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singularity on the Law and missing its many meanings—gives Kafka’s satire its subtle and far-reaching force. The same Rabbi Akiba whom Kafka mentions was famous in Talmudic tradition for drawing meaning from every “tittle” and “crown” of the Law—its “Zieraten” in the officer’s comic “murder” of the Jewish linguistic tradition (Menahot 29b). The “Tsirung” in the Yiddish play that Kafka saw in Prague and the “Verzierungen” imposed by his “Offizier” are both comic keys to the multiple meanings missed by such unaware and, in the officer’s case, literally self-destructive and ultimately selfpenalizing readers of Kafka’s texts. In a letter to his publisher Kurt Wolff, Kafka admitted that the style of “In the Penal Colony” was excessively nuanced, making its kabbalistic content as well as comedy hard to grasp. “I have never been entirely wholehearted in asking for it to be published,” Kafka wrote to Wolff in 1917; “there is a worm somewhere which hollows out the story, dense as it is.”108 As this image of hidden passageways suggests, those who represent master of the Law in “In the Penal Colony” and The Trial—the officer and the priest respectively—remain unaware of the liberating holes in their own interpretations, those silent doorways where sources from the Jewish tradition come into the text. The officer who calls upon the “New Commandant” to justify his writing machine can be called a structurally Christian interpreter, though his murderous certainty and the French spoken on the island evoke the Inquisition more than the deadly rigidity of Parisian French. In the Hebrew pretext suggested by the older writing he struggles to decode, the officer is portrayed as a bumbling reader of an older testament, seeking to overwrite the still-vibrant scriptural meanings of the “letter of the Law,” as reference to the “embellishments” (Verzierungen) suggests. In a Talmudic tale about Rabbi Akiba, the Law is said to grow by superseding the intention of its putative author—“things were revealed to him that were not even revealed to Moses,” according to the version of the Talmud’s Menahot 29b that Kafka read in Fromer.109 This multiplicity of meaning is traditionally linked to the ornamentation of the letters. As Gershom Scholem renders this tale of Hebrew’s riches: When Moses ascended onto the Heights [to receive the Torah], he found the Holy One, blessed be He, sitting there tying wreathes [or crowns] to the letters. He said to Him: “Master of the Universe, who is holding You back?” [That is, why are You not satisfied with the letters as they are, so that You add crows to them, i.e., the little flourishes which occur on certain letters of the Torah scrolls?] He

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answered him: “There is a man who will arise after many generations by the name of Akiva ben Joseph; he will expound heaps and heaps of laws on every tittle.”110 As this parable continues, Moses as “original” and determining author becomes part of the joke. Transported to the future, he sits “eight rows” back in Akiba’s future, the place where dullards sat in the Talmudic academies.111 Despite having received the original revelation of the Law, he is asked to “turn around” in the classroom, at which point he “did not understand” what the students were talking about, though Akiba tells the students that “it is a teaching given to Moses at Sinai.” Any attempt on the part of Moses to make the Law his own property or to insist on the letter of his Law is thus defeated by his own parabolic voice. Thus when Moses defers to the interpretations that Akiba will derive from flourishes and the crowns of the literal text, he produces a comic version of the commentator’s despair. “Master of the Universe,” the giver of the Law declares of his later interpreter, “you have a man like that and you give the Torah to me?”112 (283). As befits a master teacher, Moses answers his own question with a question in the Talmud. This parabolic style echoes the forms of black humor that animate “In the Penal Colony” and the cathedral scene of The Trial, where Josef K. will listen to the priest expound the Law. “Master of the Universe,” Moses inquires after listening to interpretations of the Law that surpass his wisdom, “you have shown me his knowledge of the Torah, show me also his reward.”113 Kafka was familiar with the torture Akiba underwent from Fromer, who drily describes the Talmudic narrative as follows: “he is said to have been torn limb from limb while still alive, using tongs,” in a grisly physical parody of the multiple meanings he derived from every “tittle” and crown of the Law.114 Kafka’s “Penal Colony” describes death by writing as a similar process. Torture in both texts is defined as the murderous imposition of a singular, authoritative interpretation that kills the living multiplicity of meaning symbolized by the human body—a “New” and imperial reading that kills the many spirits of the letter, as well as the infinite possibilities of revelation: “Then Moses said: ‘Master of the Universe, You have shown me his knowledge of the Torah, show me also his reward.’ He answered: ‘Turn around.’ He turned around and saw that Akiva’s flesh was being weighed at the market stalls [his flesh was torn by the tortures of the executioners]. Then he said to Him: ‘Master of the Universe, this is the Torah and this is its reward?’” (Menahot 29b).115 A “tortured interpretation,” or “gequälte Auslegung,” as it would be understood in Kafka’s German, becomes a



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reason for dark laughter in the end. At the same time the incongruity between the potential for future interpretation and the dead certainty Akiba claimed for his reading of the letter serves as a humorous caution to what Wittgenstein would later call the quest for “certainty,” as Kafka learned from Fromer firsthand: “then said [Rav] Ishmael [to Akiva himself]: ‘because you read the [Hebrew letter] ‘vav’ [ ‫ ] ו‬this way, we are supposed to burn this man to death?’” (Sanhedrin 51b).116 This disparity between the life-giving possibilities of the letter of the Law and the imposition of an authorized reading was familiar to Kafka from the Yiddish theater as well. In Elishe ben Avuye, for instance, the sinful sage and “other” in the Jewish tradition cites the Talmudic parable of tortured meaning. In his own defense, Elisha thus cites the fate of Rabbi Hutzpit the “Meturgeman,” or the translator, whose tongue was torn out by the Romans and who suffered a brutal death. “After Rav Hutzpit,” as Elisha ben Abuye declares in despair, “spent his entire life expounding and clarifying the meaning and significance of the Law [Torah] and making it accessible, when the Romans ripped out his tongue and threw it to the dogs, why didn’t he [the Lord] send his thunder and lightning crashing down to punish the hangmen and murderers himself!”117 Roman rule in this Yiddish drama cuts short the life of a virtuoso translator, with torture and murder foreshortening the textual meaning represented by “Hutzpit” and his eloquent voice.118 It takes chutzpah, or nerve, as this Hebrew name suggests, to translate these multiple, metaphoric meanings of the letter, another sense in which Kafka’s diary refers to metaphors as “both a joke and a despair” (Spaß und Verzweiflung).119 In the Yiddish drama that Kafka attended, the “tongue” of the translator defines this humor as implicitly present in the heart of every tradition and its texts. “Despair” thus occurs when imposition of authoritative interpretation becomes a torturous inscription, while allowing such “Roman” readings to be seen as a brutal joke.120 “In the Cathedral,” as Max Brod named the chapter in which the “Priest” delivers “Before the Law,” we see this humor of Jewish and other sources emerge in the quiet fashion Kafka preferred. The “Priest” either remains unaware or chooses not to mention the traditions that are, as the name of his parable suggests, “Vor dem Gesetz,” or “before the Law” in the temporal sense; the kabbalistic “doorkeeper” tradition cited by Grözinger, with its multiple points of entry to the Law, imagines plural modes of access to the same text.121 This disparity between the Law’s threatening closure and its openness—and thus the potential comedy of the doorkeeper function—extends to Kafka’s framing of

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the parable. The scene begins with Josef K.’s boss, who sends him to the cathedral to meet an Italian business associate. Before the meeting, K. bones up on his Italian with “a small dictionary” (Wörterbuch), only to discover that the Italian speaks “some kind of dialect” (irgendeinen Dialekt) inaccessible to speakers who rely on the official language and its version of tradition alone. The priest’s ostensibly Western and Christian discourse, “which the more informed among Kafka’s earliest readers recognized as Talmudic in style,” represents a similar parable of tradition, framed by the kabbalistic wisdom that Leni offers to Josef K.:122 “At nine-thirty, just as he was preparing to leave, he received a phone call; Leni said good morning and asked how he was doing; K. thanked her hurriedly and said he couldn’t possibly talk now because he had to go to the cathedral. ‘To the cathedral?,’ asked Leni. ‘Yes, that’s right, to the cathedral.’ ‘Why the cathedral?’ asked Leni. K. started to give a brief explanation, but he’d hardly begun when Leni suddenly said: ‘they’re hounding [hetzen] you.’”123 Leni’s advice is to avoid taking the priest’s official discourse at face value; her reference to K. being “hounded” at the same time makes reference to the kabbalistic doctrine that Iris Bruce has identified as the gilgul ha-nefashot, or transformation, of the soul into animals in Kafka’s writing, albeit in a subtle linguistic sense. “Hetzen” in German thus recalls the idiom “to hound with dogs” (mit Hunden hetzen) suggested by the English translation, since what Leni warns against is the stereotypic obedience with which the “second-rate actors” put Josef K. to death.124 This level of interpretation recalls the Yiddish theater, with the death of Hutzpit the interpreter resembling Josef K.’s in this regard. In Elishe ben Avuye, the Roman and an incipiently Christian textual order become the figurative death of “Hutzpit,” as the tongue that translates the Law into multiple meanings is literally thrown “to the dogs,” representing the docile mode of interpretation that Leni hopes Josef K. will escape.125 Leni, however, does not provide an answer to her own question “Why the Cathedral?” The priest comes onstage as a kind of answer. As a representative for the overly serious voice of tradition, the “Geistliche” remains unaware of Leni’s webbed hand, suggesting the multiple connections of the Law to sources outside the cathedrals of learning. Leni thus speaks against the “canine” reading that the narrator will later describe as the practice of “Kaufmann,” or businessman, “Block” as she suggests an attentiveness to the complex voices of Kafka’s more articulate animals. In a sense that begins with this “Cathedral” chapter, Kafka’s writing is indeed catholic enough to include Rabbinic Judaism within the priestly domain of official traditions, where the strands of heretical reading can be found. In “The Animal in the Synagogue,” the “Marten” who lives close



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to the “women’s section” thus suggests the noncanonical prophetess “Hulda,” whose Hebrew name meant “Marten,” when Kafka’s study of Hebrew in Berlin sought out this more open version of Jewish tradition in its own linguistic terms.126 Kafka’s animals are not just “like a dog” in the “headwaiter” sense of Amerika discussed in Chapter 3; they also voice countertraditions that live within the cathedrals and synagogues of national identity and sometimes enliven the official discourse of its priests. “The animal,” as Grözinger points out of the tradition of Gilgul in Jewish mysticism, is therefore “a symbol of a trans-generational sin for which the community as a whole must answer.”127 The Trial goes out of its way to identify these linguistic “animals” that frolic within the language of the nation and the venerated forms of its “Law” and the kind of greatness they acquire in laying them to rest. The pseudo-halo (eine unmerkliche Tönung hell) that Josef K. notes around the head of Titorelli’s painting of “Justice” (Gerechtigkeit) thus “looked just like the goddess of the Hunt” (sie sah jetzt vollkommen wie die Göttin der Jagd aus).128 As hunters of these kabbalistic voices, these judges resemble Kafka’s “Hunter Gracchus” (1917), who kills a “Chamois” (Gemse) on the border of the Black Forest in Germany—“stürzte ich im Schwarzwald, das ist in Deutschland”—while seeking to be dead and buried in vain.129 “Gracchus” is a failure as far as his own pomposity goes, since wandering can never lay his “guilt” (Schuld) to rest; only an ability to laugh would enable him to recognize that he himself is the wandering animal, as a symbol of national identity with roots that cross the Rhine of his text.130 “A footrace began in the forests [Wäldern],” Kafka says in an aphorism on this game preserve of national identity; “everything was full of animals [Tiere]. I tried to bring order to the scene.”131 In the legal spirit of The Trial, it is the killing of the wandering animal by such “justice”—rather than enjoying the difference sources of “German” identity—that creates the hunter’s torturous and selfpunishing sense of sin. Traveling thus keeps the “Jäger” alive, though he seeks to be dead and buried instead, as he remains estranged from his “Yiddish” vitality in the dark forests of German self-knowledge.132 The priest of The Trial is a more comic figure, albeit with a Zionist slant that is often forgotten whenever “Vor dem Gesetz” is considered the apex of Josef K.’s travails. Later published in Selbstwehr: Unabhängige Jüdische Wochenschrift, the weekly of the Zionist organization of Prague, on September 7, 1919, the parable portrays a different sense of the nation than the “Deutschland” of the “Hunter Gracchus” mode. A certain pleasure thus results from the priest’s discourse, launched from a minor pulpit of the cathedral, which

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remains guilty in a German respect. While the priest resembles Gracchus in his inability to savor the different sources of his discourse, the Talmudic and Yiddish strands, the priest’s parable of the amoretz, or “man from the country,” gives attentive readers much enjoyment.133 Though Christianity is one object of this satire of Western tradition, nationalism can also be guilty as charged. Kafka is therefore careful not to cast the first stone at the priestly parable, treating it as a serious claim to an “original” tradition in broader and more ecumenical terms. The fact that the German word for “guilt” is “Schuld,” which also means “debt,” is thus broadly biblical and “Hebrew” in a linguistic sense. Historically all traditions are “schuldig,” or in debt, for having appropriated scriptural sources from other languages and nations while claiming to possess a singular identity; “it is a peculiar [eigentümlicher] apparatus,” as the “Offizier” of the “Penal Colony” thus declares of his writing machine.134 The priest will level his accusation of guilt from a similarly lofty perch in The Trial, in a parable that is torturous on its surface but ultimately a far more pleasurable text.

The Guilty Pleasures of an Am Ha-Aretz Like one of the many passageways to the Law that are visible to the “Man from the Country” in the priest’s parable, the “Mann vom Lande” bears a name that Kafka coined to translate a Hebrew expression for “ignoramus,” available to him as early as 1911. While the priest treats Josef K. as a figure ignorant of his guilt—“at least for the moment, your guilt is assumed proved”—such ignorance proves to have multiple references in this passage, including a lack of full disclosure of the sources of his text on the part of the priest 135 Kafka possessed a full account of the Talmudic provenance of the Hebrew term am ha-arez in Fromer’s Organismus des Judentums, though such a “country bumpkin,” as the English idiom suggests, can figuratively be found even in the great Rabbi Akiba, whom Kafka mentions in his version of the Talmud’s pardes passage on interpretation. In his diary Kafka observes that Akiba—the scholar who achieved “full knowledge”—had “not begun his studies until the age of forty,” thus preserving a perspective from “before the Law,” or at least from before his own studies began. In this respect, the question of precisely who the ignoramus is could be one that Kafka brought to his reading of this text: “Rabbi Meir says: ‘An Am ha-arez is he who does not perform the morning and evening prayers according to Talmudic prescriptions.’ Other scholars say: ‘whoever does not lay



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Tefilin (leather prayer straps).’ Other scholars say: ‘even if he studies the Torah [Law] and the Talmud, but does not have to do with [sich abgeben] pious scholars [frommen Gelehrten], is he an Am ha-arez.’”136 Rabbi Meir in this source passage defines the “ignoramus,” or “Am ha-arez,” as the person who does not follow the letter of the Law according to Talmudic prescription. The same Meir defends Elisha ben Abuya, the “sinning sage,” or “unfromme Gelehrte,” called the “Freidenker,” or “heretic,” in Kafka’s redaction of pardes where, as we saw in Chapter 3, Kafka gives the heretic the name of Rabbi Eliezer with critical effect.137 The cathedral scene in The Trial expands this notion of ignorance, continuing Kafka’s shift in focus from those outside the Law to the meaning of the court instead. Marthe Robert thus sees the “am ha aretz” as “lost, because he does not dare put his individual law above the collective taboos” and enter the doorway,” while suggesting the failure of such attempts at interpretive control. In Moshe Idel’s reading, “Kafka’s Law” is even broader in the messages it conveys: “like the maiden in the Zohar parable,” such insights are “intended for everyone who dares,” as the “radiance that shines inextinguishably from the door of the Law” in the parable, refracting the multiplicity that shines from within the priestly tradition. The priest, as Ritchie Robertson notes, speaks in a “calque on the Hebrew ‘am ha’arets,’” pointing out the linguistic depth that exists within the very word that signifies foolishness in his text. In kabbalistic terms, the concluding message of the doorkeeper in the priestly parable—“this door was meant just for you. I’m going to shut it now”—exemplifies the comic fate left to such canonical doorkeepers. The tradition of “600,000 interpretations of the Torah,” one for each of the “souls of Israel who went out of Egypt,” suggests the impossible task left to priests who would control the almost infinite openings—the doorways— and hence the traditional permeability of the Law.138 In Gordin’s Yiddish drama, the heretic’s ability to expose such meanings is condemned by scholars of lesser wisdom, whose judgments elicit comment on just this doorkeeper effect. “My Rabbi and My teacher,” Rabbi Meir thus declares to Elisha with reverence, “I cry to the heavens and ask them: can they judge you guilty [schuldig] without a trial [mishpat]!?”139 In a more darkly humorous sense, a “trial” of the sinful sage is impossible to entertain as a serious possibility, since Elisha has already exposed the hidden comedy of heretical sources alive with the schools of the Law. His crime is therefore not bringing “foreign books” into the halls of the Yeshiva, but indulging in the guilty pleasure of getting its master to expose his own ignorance of what transpires within its walls. “I am the last one to know,” the Yeshiva head thus

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declares, “to know what is happening in my own house!”140 In a similar turn of the inquisition, the priest of The Trial offers Josef K. a trial that is all-­ encompassing—“the court receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go”—as the text focuses on the “Herren,” whose lust for women casts their desire for control in a similarly suspect light. Like all avatars of tradition who see “Law” as a static set of precepts, the priest becomes a mechanical operator, jamming all evidence of human difference into the same preexisting grid. “‘But I’m not guilty,’ said K. ‘It’s a mistake. How can any person in general be guilty? We’re all human after all, each and every one of us.’ ‘That’s right,’ said the priest, ‘but that’s how guilty people always talk.’”141 Guilt as a self-confirming artifact thus portrays the priest as a Christian figure, as he overwrites the Jewish scriptural interpretation in the passage to conform his “original” sense of sin. This ignorance of the scholarly tradition is precisely the sense in which Kafka used the Hebrew term am ha-aretz in his diary, with the latter inflection emphasized by the fact that he received his definition of the word in a theatrical sense as well. “From the Talmud,” Kafka recorded in his diary on November 29, 1911, “when a scholar goes to meet his bride, he should take an amhorez along, he is too deeply sunk in his scholarliness, he would not observe what should be observed.”142 This passage on the scholar has little to do with sexuality, of course, which is precisely where the guilt of the scholar could be said to lie. Here the “scholar” who does not observe what needs to be observed also evokes the tradition of the Law as “Shekhinah” and thus its multiple spirit. Without the “ignoramus” or “man from the country” who remains open to experience, the scholar would be too fixated on his bookish and preexisting construct of tradition, and thus unable to see the splendor of the “bride” right in front of his nose. In this diary entry Yiddish plays an unspoken role as a theatrical language that stages the scholar (Gelehrter) as it does the priest (Geistliche) later in The Trial: as the figure who misses the human and textual richness of his tradition, falling in love with his own intellectual framework instead. Where the “scholar” is enraptured by priestly order— whether of linguistic, national, or religious doctrine—there, as any am ha-aretz can tell him, stands the unique beauty of a creation whose differences he remains unable to see. “The Law,” as one of K.’s “watchers” who awakens him to such comedy declares early in the novel, “is attracted by guilt. That’s the Law. What mistake [Irrtum] can there be?”143 The logical comedy here is not just that the priestly tradition misses the differences of the world as something human and beautiful. Rather the priestly tradition regards the different as a mistake and an irritation in the first place, a



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brutal error Josef K. fails to commit. Thus when Leni shows him her webbed fingers early in the novel, Josef K. calls her hand a “Naturspiel”—in the literal sense, a “play” that occurs within the order of “nature”—and as he “looked over the entire hand carefully, added ‘what a beautiful claw [Kralle]!’”144 The am haaretz is likewise necessary to the scholar, since the Law of the pious values the systematic and previously established, treating such variation as a “freak of nature,” as the English translation insists. In this world only a “man from the country” could see the beauty of the human animal that consists of such original differences, free as he is from scholarly view. In Leni’s world—where “defendants are indeed the most attractive”—one cannot be a “Gefängniskaplan,” or prison chaplain, and achieve authentic revelation in this sense. Controlling the “door” of insight with preestablished certainties does indeed turn interpretation into a self-confirming prison, by treating the “cathedral” as if it encompassed the entire world.145 The scholar or his prison chaplain becomes a fool, or am haaretz, in this situation, blind to the differences of the actual world that sits right in front of him and so unable to make the Law and its multiplicity his bride. Here the “Cathedral” where the “prison chaplain” offers his interpretation of the parable suggests his ironic status as master of the house. Kafka’s diary records a kabbalistic tradition that runs parallel. In Yiddish the Balabusta, or the “Bal Bayit” (Hebrew: “Baal Ha-Bayit”) that Kafka read about in Fromer was translated into “Hausherr” in the following parable: “on Friday evening, two angels accompany each pious man from the Temple [Tempel] to his home [nach Hause]; the master of the house stands while he greets them in the dining room; they stay only a short time.”146 Such is the authentic wisdom that accompanies any “Master” of the “Cathedral,” or a “Temple” in the traditional sense: that the “master of the house” attains his blessing only through the visits of strangers, whose gifts are a blessing and not a guilty curse. Like the priest, Kafka’s “country doctor,” or “Landarzt,” resembles Mr. Pollunder and his “Landhaus,” or “country house,” in New York in this respect. Each of these would-be masters owns a “Temple” or house that needs the perspective of the am-ha aretz or “man from the country” to realize how much of his dwelling comes from others, and to perceive the differences that form the structure of his house. In its incorporation of kabbalistic, Hebrew, and Yiddish sources, “Before the Law” is a comic text in this translinguistic sense. The “cathedral” of any tradition is most fully alive when open to its multiple origins, just as the parable’s many strands are a source of power waiting to be discovered as a healing source. “A Country Doctor” (1917) makes this redemptive humor explicit when the “girl” (Mädchen) swings her lantern and discovers magic horses in the long-unused pigsty. “You

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never know what you’re going to find in your own house,” she tells the doctor, “and we both laughed.”147

The Other and the Radiance of the Law Kafka wrote highly of “A Country Doctor” in his diary, describing it as the summit of his purest writing, portraying what critics now recognize as his most Jewish and traditional sources, as these “horses” emerge once the doctor kicks open an unused door of his house. The “pigsty,” that ultimately unclean and of course unkosher hiding place, is the site where the redemptive meaning of the alien appears at the moment of greatest frustration, in magical horses that suggest the Baal Shem Tov, or the “master of the holy name,” and the Jewish tales that Kafka read.148 The horses of a tradition that is also marked as despicable thus inhabit the writing Kafka saw as “the pure” (das Reine), pointing back to the meaning of the “Law,” and a dynamic accurately portrayed in Frank Kermode’s summary of the text:149 “a man comes for and begs for admittance to the Law, but is kept out by a doorkeeper, the first of a long succession of doorkeepers, of aspect ever more terrible, who will keep the man out should the first one fail to do so. . . . the outsider has what appears to be a reasonable, normal, and just expectation of ready admittance, for the Law, like the Gospel, is meant for everybody, or everybody who wants it. But what he gets is a series of frivolous and mendacious interpretations.”150 Kermode helpfully identifies the very site—the doorway—from which redemption potentially emerges with that frustration with interpretation—the “mendacious”—for which Kafka is all too well known. Often called the simultaneous solicitation of and refusal of final readings in his fiction, the comedy of redemption appears in different guise for Kafka’s “Country Doctor” at the moment of his greatest desperation, as the difference within his own house. “I could see no way out [es war aussichtslos],” he declares; “in my confused distress I kicked at the dilapidated door of the yearlong uninhabited pigsty,” as the disregarded and impure part of the dwelling produces magical animals and the laughter that results. A position “outside” the Law is thus not the problem in this vision of tradition, since it is the “pigsty” already inside the doctor’s domain—like the material within the priestly parable—that provides the redemptive horses needed for his mission of healing to proceed.151 The redemption that emerges from frustration with the “Priest” in Kafka’s most famous parable also finds its lineage in hidden, multiple sources of tradition. The “mendacious” interpretations of the priest, as Kermode suggests, thus



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have a broader application in the realm of national identity: another doorway opened by the fact that Kafka published “Before the Law” in the Zionist newspaper Selbstwehr, run by his friends in Prague. The denunciation of the priesthood that Kermode rightly discovers in the parable was thus also Yiddish in one of its origins, launched by the heretic Elishe ben Abuye against scholars who practice a rigid and foolish application of the Law: Every last one of you wants to be a learned man, a profound scholar, a man of erudition, a sage! There you sit, breaking your head over judgments, the proper path of the law [halakha], the fence around the law, the law’s literal meaning, its interpretation [d’rasha], hints of its secret and allegorical meaning [remezim], and numerology. What that is useful can possibly come from that? They would do better to learn a trade and become tailors, shoemakers, or blacksmiths . . . I’d rather my people had a few more healthy workers and fewer carpers from the bench and experts at dialectic [pilpul].152 This heretical dislike of Jewish interpretation voices a deeply Yiddish satire of Hebrew learning, while becoming more than a Zionist speech in a narrow, secular, back-to-the-people sense. The “other” here speaks on behalf of nonagricultural labor—tailors, shoemakers and blacksmiths, all figurative “men from the country” in their standing outside the scholarly world. Together they enable the scholar formally outside the tradition to distinguish what is good for the “Jewish people” from the merely acrobatic art of pilpul, and thus to critique an ignorant manner of remaining inside.153 The Yiddish rage that Kafka saw performed in this scene unlocks the boundary-crossing capacity within the tradition of commentary, making a quiet mockery of solemn declarations of the Law’s singular power. “You can study the literal meaning [pshat] so ingeniously and artistically,” Elisha tells Rabbi Meir, “that what is forbidden can be shown to be kosher, and that which is kosher forbidden,” an ironic recognition echoed in a different form by the “prison chaplain” of The Trial.154 “The commentators tell us,” the priest declares, that “the correct understanding [richtiges Aufassen] of a matter and misunderstanding [Mißverstehen] the matter are not mutually exclusive,” a confession meant to humble Josef K. but which describes the partial openness of the commentators in both senses of the word. (When subordinated to what the priest calls “the truth,” such boundary cases are used as evidence of an originally slavish nature, like the “pedantic character” (pedantischen Charakter) of the

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tartar-bearded guardian of the Law: “could there be a more conscientious doorkeeper?” the priest therefore declares. 155 The priest’s statement that “you don’t have to consider everything true, you just have to consider it necessary” thus expresses the conviction that obedience is to be preferred to a discussion of the many different passages visible in his parable: in a technical sense, suppressing the laughter that enjoys the plural strands of the Law as they emerge: a “depressing opinion” (trübselige Meinung) as Josef K. accurately observes.156 In Zionist terms—suggesting “Selbtwehr,” or “self-defense,” as an aspect of the parable—there is therefore something funny about the notion of the universal, at least where a singular notion of national or religious identity is articulated by the leader of a nation or a universal church. Josef K.’s final rejoinder to the “Priest”—“Lies are made into a universal system”—is in this respect a far from depressing statement, resembling the speech Rabbi Meir gives in Elisha ben Avuya, delivered in the play as a defense of the tradition of commentary.157 Here, Rabbi Meir addresses the despair of the “akher” who was his teacher. In this speech “otherness” can be enjoyed rather than suffered, once the tradition grasps its own humor, by understanding the doorway between inside and outside as the site where such “national” study actually occurs: What is important is not whether something is kosher or forbidden. The most important thing is the act of study and learning itself. The Jew must study, or he’ll amount to nothing as a Jew! The collective thought of the entire Jewish people is embodied in this one holy idea. Their hopes and their consolation and their conceptions of life itself have been drawn from this one national source. This was the only thing strong enough to hold them together as one in their exile among hostile peoples. It is not a goal, but a means of preserving the Jewish people from annihilation.158 “One national source,” as Meir tells the “other,” is “learning,” and that learning of the Law that occurs in the act commentary defines the ongoing interpretation of what is inside and outside the tradition as a life-giving activity in itself. “What is important is not whether something is kosher or forbidden,” in Rabbi Meir’s terms, but the act of commentary that exposes the often hidden relation between viewpoints on opposite sides of the national and religious pale. In this speech we thus hear the first echo of what Kafka called the “assault on the boundary” that Zionism made more explicit in his fiction, phrased in more humble Yiddish terms.159



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“Before the Law” provides a vision that is plural in this same respect, as the doorkeeper opens a vision of multiple points of entry to what Rabbi Meir called “one national source.” Even when the beauty of the “Law” is conceived of as the Shekhinah in the more mystical traditions with which Kafka was familiar, perceiving it means changing one’s perceptions so that the outside can already be seen within. In this sense, the “man from the country” does not have to be on his deathbed to acquire his radiant insight in the parable, when “in the darkness he perceives a radiance [Glanz] that streams forth inextinguishably from the door of the Law” (im Dunkel einen Glanz, der unverlöschlich aus der Türe des Gesetzes bricht). 160 Insofar as the doorkeeper conveys a mystical tradition when he tells the “man from the country” that “this door was meant just for you,” the perception remains important in the broadest national terms. According to Gershom Scholem, the notion of an almost infinite and linguistically literal point of entry to the tradition is envisioned in the Kabbalah as hailing from “before the Law”: “every word of the Torah has six hundred thousand ‘faces,’ that is, layers of meaning or entrances, one for each of the children of Israel who stood at the foot of Mt. Sinai; each face is turned toward only one of them; he alone can see and decipher it.”161 Kafka’s comic sense of this notion reverses the doorkeeper function, representing the redemptive meaning of the position outside the door of official traditions as one that escapes its guardians and priests. The “radiance” of the Law appears in Kafka’s parable only when one no longer wishes to enter, when its infinite corridors refract the multiplicity of that original revelation from which tradition first emerged.

Chapter 5

Open Boundaries The Castle and the Origins of Modern Hebrew

Bailiff: an official surveyor, who fixes the boundary lines of the ­different owners, and thus may increase or limit one’s property. —Rashi’s commentary, Talmud Bavli Sanhedrin 98b

Kafka’s messianic concern with modern Hebrew in The Castle was first noticed by Evelyn Torton Beck in Kafka and the Yiddish Theater (1971). The would-be occupation of K. as “land surveyor,” or “Landvermesser” in German, she observes, also points us to the Hebrew term for “surveyor,” lacking only a single letter to become the Hebrew word mashiakh, or “messiah,” a form of Hebrew wordplay hinted at in the Talmudic commentary by Rashi cited above.1 Such is the warning about his Jewish sources that Kafka embedded in the German. A “Landvermesser,” or “land measurer” in the literal sense, would indeed be “vermessen,” or “foolhardy,” as Erich Heller points out, since the verb vermessen means “to survey” or in hubris “to take the wrong measure,” in the sense of “sich vermessen”—certainly the case if the standard modern Hebrew dictionary is surveyed as the singular meaning of Kafka’s text.2 In the Hebrew that Kafka textured into The Castle, a sense of Jewish tradition and its diverse linguistic texture and sources are allied. The three-letter Hebrew root that means “to anoint with oil,” “M-SH-KH” (‫ח‬-‫ש‬-‫)מ‬, and produces the word for “messiah” (‫ )מש’ח‬also produced the Aramaic-Hebrew word for “land surveyor” that is one letter apart (‫)משוח‬, suggesting the playful differences from which linguistic traditions are formed. Adding one letter to the end produces “mashikha” (‫)משיחה‬, or the noun for “land surveying” in the Even-Shoshan Hebrew Dictionary, that Grimm Dictionary of the modern Hebrew tongue.3 This Hebrew “Wortspiel,”



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or “play on words,” as Kafka used the word in his diary entry of October 29, 1911, on the Talmud’s most famous passage on interpretation, “Pardes” in ­Hagiga 14b, thus suggests Hebrew’s many meanings to be one of the keys to Kafka’s German, in the comic sense that his multilingual playfulness also means that tradition can have no single key.4 The multiple meanings of modern Hebrew in The Castle helped Kafka break the “lock,” or “Schloß,” of his imagination of tradition in this final novel, as the humorous use of Jewish mysticism so prevalent in The Trial turns to questions of Zionism in a linguistic sense. Compared to his love of Yiddish, of course, Kafka’s diaries and letters give almost no sense of his devotion to the modern Hebrew language, and he wrote “not one word about Hebrew writers and intellectuals, whose work had been translated into German,” though he did comment on Bialik and Y. H. Brenner, coding his approach to cultural Zionism into his texts, as Iris Bruce has shown.5 Kafka “shied away from any ideological agenda” and was dryly comic in his famous evaluation of the “Jews.” The nationalism that left him cold made him love a Hebrew that, as it drew from different sources in its renaissance, exposed the comedy of establishing a single origin for any language or individual.6 “What have I in common with the Jews,” as Kafka once emphasized the differences that constitute nations as well as individuals; “I have hardly anything in common with myself.”7 In late 1921 the arrival in Prague of Puah Ben-Tovim, “among the first of the new generation” in Jerusalem “to grow up with Hebrew as her native tongue,” provided Kafka with invaluable information on the modern Hebrew he had been working away at since 1917.8 Ben-Tovim was the daughter of Zalman Ben-Tovim, a “Hebraist in his own right who happened to be [Eliezer] Ben-Yehuda’s neighbor”; Ben-Yehuda was the legendary “father of modern Hebrew” who helped to coin much of its new vocabulary. “As one of his pupils,” Puah Ben-Tovim was aware of just how many foreign sources Ben-Yehuda and his cohort were drawing upon to re-create Hebrew as a modern language, such as the German Bahnhof (literally “court of the train”), which through Hebrew loan translation becomes Beit Takhanot, or “house of the stations,” Hebrew for what in English is known as the “railway station.”9 As Mordechai Georg (Jìri) Langer reports, Kafka took comic pleasure in such coinages when he spoke Hebrew in Prague.10 The implicit humor of the transnational sources of the reborn national language gave him a crucial distance from a certain Zionist moroseness in this regard. Such excessive seriousness, in fact, became the crucial aspect of the contemporary Hebrew writer he read seriously toward the end of his life, and whom he singled out for special

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critique. At the time of his death in 1924, Kafka was reading the revolutionary gadfly, critic, and novelist Y. H. Brenner, a writer whose Zionist nationalism at the same time brought European inflections into the modern Hebrew tongue. Famed for his seriousness and fierce polemic, Brenner had a style nonetheless that contained a comic element, at least insofar as the other national literatures helped shape his fierce commitment to a new, modern Hebrew style. According to Robert Alter, Brenner was “thinking novelistically (say, Dostoevski, Zola, George Eliot) while writing Hebrew”; he was thus a Zionist, Palestinian version of the writers Kafka had described in his entry on “small literatures,” who engage in “the accepting of what is foreign only in reflection,” albeit without the humorous sense of national origin that perspective entails.11 Such was the hidden comedy of Brenner in Kafka’s eyes. While he was treated by his Zionist contemporaries as a “martyr who bore upon his shoulders the burdens of Judaic humanism,” his style made Hebrew “modern” and literary precisely by opening his novels to the languages of other nations, as Gerson Shaked observes: “Brenner preferred flexible ‘natural’ diction, for which he virtually invented a colloquial speech sprinkled with English, Yiddish, Arabic and Russian words. He opened the Hebrew language to foreign vulgarisms, incursions of words and phrases from outside standard Hebrew vocabulary. . . . This not only introduced new forms into the language, but like the use of Aramaic, it helped to diminish the excessive pathos and to produce irony instead by breaking up the linguistic homogeneity.”12 “There has always been talk of his sadness,” Kafka wrote to Max Brod about Breakdown and Bereavement, “sadness in Palestine?”13 In Kafka’s eyes, the openness to foreign sources that Brenner was bringing to Hebrew prose should produce joy rather than despair. Kafka’s muted appreciation of Brenner can be understood as a kind of competitive gesture and a ­critique of the “sadness” that served as a kind of prophetic mask that disguised its own comic force. What Kafka downplayed in Brenner was his dour nationalism—“sadness in Palestine?”—while valuing Hebrew’s comic reliance on foreign voices in the period, a sense of linguistic texture that becomes apparent in Kafka’s fluent letter to Puah Ben-Tovim in the same language as Brenner’s work. Though written after the composition of The Castle, Kafka’s letter of June 1923 to Puah Ben-Tovim provides a window to its vision of the foreign as a constituent element of tradition, and thus the open vision of the language in Kafka’s final works. This was not any Hebrew teacher; having come from a Hebraist family in Jerusalem closely associated with Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, BenTovim was “familiar with the whole new terminology by which Ben-Yehuda



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had transformed the language of Talmud and Torah into a contemporary idiom of daily discourse,” giving Kafka a kind of direct line to the rebirth of modern Hebrew and to a hidden comedy shaping the new national language as well.14 As a flagship for the national project, Ben-Yehuda’s newspaper and his allied dictionary aimed to create “as pure a Hebrew as possible” and return the Jewish people to its ancestral linguistic roots. At the same time Puah Ben-Tovim’s childhood neighbor spent much of his time importing foreign words into modern Hebrew via the process of loan translation to fill in lexical gaps, producing new “Hebrew words on the basis of European languages, in particular, on the basis of Latin and Greek words” that had passed into Jewish languages centuries before.15 In the imagery of The Castle, a kind of endless linguistic survey overtook Ben-Yehuda, one that the surveyor’s assistants in the novel bring into focus for its Catch-22; the same “assistant” languages required to achieve this messianic task made it impossible for Ben-Yehuda to draw a straight line between “national” and foreign sources of the renascent Hebrew tongue, especially since this transnational contact was in itself hardly new. Looking at The Castle with this linguistic history in mind, it becomes easy to see how modern Hebrew’s emergence from a vaudeville of national sources finds a humorous reflection in Kafka’s late German prose, a process that, in turn, reflects the linguistic and human difference crucial not just to Hebrew’s rebirth but also of standard “national” languages as a whole.

Franz Kafka, Hebrew Writer: The Vaudeville of Linguistic Origins Kafka’s letter of June 1923 to Puah Ben-Tovim, then living in Berlin, was addressed to a twenty-year-old, Jerusalem-born, native speaker of modern Hebrew who had recently been living in Prague. Having arrived from British-ruled, mandatory Palestine in 1921 at the completion of secondary school, Ben-Tovim had enrolled in a mathematics course at the University of Prague. All evidence points to her having come into contact with Kafka in early 1922; by late 1922 and early 1923 she had become Kafka’s Hebrew teacher, helping him with the emerging form of the language whose classic form he had laboriously acquired from 1917 forward.16 Ernst Pawel, who interviewed Ben-Tovim for his Kafka biography of 1984, reports that this participant in the revival of modern Hebrew visited Kafka frequently, as she was living in the family home of Hugo Bergmann, Kafka’s friend who was shortly to

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become a founder of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Ben-Tovim was thus not just any visitor from what was then called the “Yishuv,” or settlement in Zionist parlance. As “[Eliezer] Ben-Yehuda’s friend and neighbor,” Puah Ben-Tovim was one of “the children who have no time to be children” (die Kinder die keine Zeit haben, Kinder zu sein), to borrow a phrase from Kafka’s “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” and who grew up where there were “no schools” (keine Schulen)] to acquire the modern Hebrew that was then being born.17 Ben-Tovim learned Hebrew words and loan translations from the horse’s mouth, as Ben-Yehuda created many of the new coinages, based on both Arabic and European languages, that allowed the vocabulary of the Bible to emerge in a renascent form. “From the fall of 1922 through the spring of the following year,” as Pawel notes, Ben-Tovim visited the then-ailing Kafka twice a week, helping the writer who learned Hebrew from Moses Rath’s older grammar by “initiating the would-be immigrant into the subtleties of her native tongue.”18 Kafka’s “would-be immigrant” status while composing his Hebrew letter, sent to Puah in Berlin rather than Jerusalem, is thus one register of the openness of native Hebrew to foreign voices that shaped his texts. Though a native speaker of Hebrew, Puah Ben-Tovim had attended a “German Lutheran gymnasium in Jerusalem, since no Hebrew secondary schools existed under Turkish rule” in the “Old City” of Jerusalem of her youth.19 Kafka “certainly dreamed of going to Palestine,” as Iris Bruce notes, though the language to which he was exposed through his Hebrew teacher’s bilingual education in Palestine suggests a transnational influence rather than cultural Zionism of a more nationalist stripe.20 Kafka’s Hebrew letter can thus be read as the voice of the Kafka who could dream of himself as a Hebrew-speaking immigrant, not as an avatar of cultural nationalism but as the writer who imagined all his writing as an “attack on the boundary” between national languages and cultures—an “Ansturm gegen die Grenze” that was hermetic in his writing and would have remained “a new Kabbalah if Zionism had not intervened.”21 The subject matter of Kafka’s Hebrew letter touched on a similar theme: Puah Ben-Tovim had recently crossed boundaries without official permission by venturing from Prague to Berlin, pursuing a course of studies that enabled her to become an educator in British Mandate Palestine, a field in which she later achieved prominence in the State of Israel.22 In June 1923 she awaited a letter from her parents in Jerusalem regarding the journey she had made to Berlin on her own. Given that Puah’s father, Zalman Ben-Tovim, “was a Hebraist in his own right who also happened to be Ben-­ Yehuda’s friend and neighbor,” Kafka’s Hebrew teacher was expecting a letter



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that could be called a form of permission to continue her transnational project: to continue to educate her form of the native Hebrew voice amid the accents of the German tongue.23 Kafka’s only extant Hebrew letter— at least until the documents now emerging in Tel Aviv are sorted out—formulates her situation comically. It uses terms that recall the predicament he had just developed in The Castle, as K. waits for official recognition as land surveyor and permission to remain in the castle’s realm.24 “But I know well,” Kafka wrote to Puah in reassurance about her predicament, “what it is like to wait in frenzied panic for an important letter wandering on its way” (‫)אבל אני מבין היטב את הבהלה אשר בה מחכים ]ל[מכתב חשוב הנודדת כל ]ה[זמן‬.25 Kafka’s reading about early Hebrew in Palestine contains a similar sense of concern: the constant play of the “assistants” around the schoolhouse—if not Puah Ben-Tovim’s own status as a teacher in Prague—suggests no single center of self-determination for the Hebrew language as it emerged. As Kafka read in Ahad Ha-Am in 1911, “German education” in Palestine was engaged in a struggle with the “hebräische Schulen in Jaffa und Jerusalem” that was a serious matter indeed. 26 In 1918, for instance, Israel Cohen referred to these very transnational accents as requiring the firm hand of modern Hebrew as the national rule. “The school children,” he wrote, “according to their respective origin, spoke different dialects—Yiddish, Ladino, Arabic, Bokharan, Persian, and Grusinian, and the only way they could be taught was through the medium of the Jewish national language.”27 In a gesture that recalls his own fictional sources while he allays Puah’s concerns, Kafka’s Hebrew words of encouragement place her in the comic position of K., whose own quest for a letter of permission leads to comic encounters with a multiplicity of foreign accents: from the Slavic-named Olga, to the Bohemian garnet-wearing Amalia who refuses the advances of a castle official, to the “bitter herb” that he is called.28 As this context suggests, the “would-be immigrant” to Palestine was already thinking about the idea of a linguistic homeland in new and open ways at the time The Castle was composed.29 In 1923 Kafka described Puah Ben-Tovim’s wait for permission from Jerusalem as a kind of “b’hala,” or frenzied panic, as she awaits a letter from what cultural Zionists called the “national center” allowing her to remain in Berlin. At the same time Kafka’s soothing tone points back to his own revision of cultural nationalism that he had explored in that novel, where a kind of transnational dimension beneath the notion of native Hebrew origins was approached in different terms. “Do not laugh” (‫)אל צחקי‬, Kafka writes in parenthesis when he tells Puah in Hebrew that despite her parents’ “opposition” (‫ )התנגדות‬to her study in “Europe,” she has already decided to

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remain there no matter what the word from Jerusalem declares. Kafka thus refers to humorous disavowal to point out the secret drift that Ben-Tovim’s own intentions display. Kafka therefore understands the anxiety she has expressed over permission from Jerusalem for her sojourn in Berlin—“don’t laugh”—as kvetching, that enjoyable type of complaint, as the hidden form of pleasure she was taking in some of the very transnational accents from which her native language was then being shaped. As a covert meditation on the origins of modern Hebrew, Kafka’s letter to Ben-Tovim points to a similar drift between native origin and the multiple sources of the language. This hidden movement between singular origin and transnational influence was already reflected in The Castle, especially in the comic names Kafka gave the land surveyor’s “Gehilfen” (helpers or assistants) in the German text. “Jeremias” and “Artur,” the surveyor’s helpers who greet K. shortly after his arrival in the village, at this initial level reflect the belief in Hebrew’s native origin and its transactions with British and other cultures in Palestine—that is, the history of the rebirth of the language that Kafka was reading about at the time. According to Mark Harman, “the underground humor of The Castle” can be seen precisely in scenes “between K. and his two assistants, who may have walked in from the silent films that so captivated Kafka.”30 One strong candidate for such a film that fits this comic bill was the silent short that Kafka saw in Prague just before beginning the novel, Shivat Zion, or Return to Zion (1921), in which “famous Zionist leaders are shown on their visit to Palestine, as well as politicians involved in the Balfour declaration.”31 Artur, one of K.’s two playful “Gehilfen,” suggests the vaudeville of multiple national sources that would frustrate any accurate survey of modern Hebrew identity and its national sources. He bears the name of British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour, whose declaration in November 1917 that “His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” Kafka read about in the special issue of Selbstwehr, the Zionist newspaper in Prague, which he arranged to have sent to him in Zurau in 1917.32 Selbstwehr (Self-Defense), of course, was the same Zionist venue where in September 1915 Kafka first published “Before the Law,” another modern Hebrew parable, in German translation, of waiting for permission from the Law, permission that never arrives in a pure or timely form.33 K.’s other assistant, “Jeremias,” bears the German name of the Hebrew prophet whose “oracles” famously railed “against foreign nations” (Jer. 25:15–38).34 At this second level of the comedy, Jeremias and Artur in tandem quietly name the national (hostile to



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foreigners) and transnational (Hebrew’s dependence on foreign resources) impulses of the contemporary Zionist scene, linked in a commedia dell’arte bond. In theoretical terms, these “Gehilfen,” or “assistants,” reflect the “asymmetrical counterparts” of language that Benjamin Harshav has seen as central to the rise of modern Hebrew as a language, whose “system of general knowledge,” like that of most national languages, was not “built ex nihilo but rather translated and adapted from other languages” as well.35 The comic names Kafka chose suggest alternating linguistic poles. “Jeremias” evokes the tendency to construct jeremiads against foreign influence, such as the Ahad Ha-Am piece Kafka possessed, in which he fulminated against the “remnants of German education” (Rest deutscher Erziehung) in Palestinian Hebrew. “Artur,” by contrast, suggests the British mandate that arrived in 1918 to rule over the “Hebrew” and multilingual land that Kafka viewed in silent films.36 In the novel K.’s first lover, “Frieda,” is protective of both of these figures, and she bears a German name that suggests the Hebrew word “shalom” and hence just this kind of “Friede,” or “peace.” In Hebrew the radical of “shalom”—‫מ‬-‫ל‬-‫( ש‬SH-L-M)—is related to the word meaning “wholeness,” suggesting that the different linguistic impulses of Jeremias and Artur belong together, like a vaudeville of linguistic origins that completes the nation’s voice. “Our assistants are still children who, despite their years, still belong on these school benches,” she thus tells the schoolteacher, as if the “assistants” were the emergent, playful state of a national language that continues to exist in the schoolroom that becomes a central focus of the novel.37 Kafka’s own Hebrew has nonetheless come across to critics as far too dour to be a source of such insight in any Zionist sense. According to Dan Miron, the Yiddish that Kafka wrote so much about in his Diaries “was much closer to his heart than modern Hebrew, which he made an effort to learn but without success,” in an apparent reference to his extant Hebrew text.38 Even where Kafka’s Hebrew fails grammatically, however, his style is a reminder of the period when modern Hebrew was plumbing the depths of its own multilinguistic sources, both those carried in the mouths of early native speakers such as Puah BenTovim from Jerusalem, with her German Gymnasium education, and those in the classical Hebrew texts. As Miron’s insight suggests, the Hebrew that Kafka was learning could rightly be called closer to Yiddish in this regard: theoretically, because Yiddish for Kafka provided a window on the pleasurable dependence of emerging languages to foreign voices and contributions; and practically, because so many speakers in the Palestine of Puah Ben-Tovim had developed the flavor of their Hebrew from the multilinguistic qualities of everyday Yiddish speech. With the strong German component of Yiddish—a language also

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shaped by Aramaic and other languages—modern Hebrew, even for a native Palestinian speaker like Ben-Tovim, was inevitably influenced by a mixture of hidden and not so hidden influences on the new national voice. Kafka’s choice of Brenner as a Hebrew text to read, as Miron points out, was apparently recommended by Puah Ben-Tovim as the “‘last word’ in artistic Hebrew prose back in the early 1920s”; the fact that it was “first published in New York in 1920” suggests just how much like Yiddish—shaped by a welter of foreign influences— Kafka’s Hebrew actually was. Brenner was the figure, as Yael Chaver recalls, who fought to gain public sanction for such “unofficial” positions on modern Hebrew, having argued for “the admission of Yiddish into Yishuv culture” and a less nationalistic attitude toward Hebrew as a whole.39 If Yiddish in prestate Palestine was “what must be forgotten,” as the eloquent title of Chaver’s study states, Kafka’s Hebrew style was an example of a “memory come alive” in these linguistic and national terms.40 At a crucial point in his letter to Puah, Kafka refers to the word she is awaiting from Jerusalem, and he refers to Hugo Bergmann, then in Jerusalem, who was supposed to intercede with her parents to gain her permission to remain in Berlin. “But it is impossible,” Kafka wrote in Hebrew with a minor error, “that you have already received a letter from your parents that would give you the results of the conversation of Hugo [Bergmann] with your parents.” In Hebrew the word for “with” is one letter different from the word for “if,” depending on whether the word begins with “ayin” or “aleph,” or the word for “mother,” depending on the latter word’s vocalization, a mistake learners of Hebrew spelling can easily make. The error Kafka makes, in the technical sense, is to replace the correct word for “with” (‫ )עם‬with one that can mean “if” (‫)אם‬, or with a different vocalization that can also be the archaic Hebrew word for “mother,” like a hidden “mother may I” in the tongue. At the same time Kafka’s Hebrew mistake—understandable in a letter about parents in Jerusalem—is to bring alive the memory of a systematic series of borrowings that helped to create modern Hebrew as a “mother” tongue. As Itamar Even-Zohar has shown, a “kind of macaronic” Hebrew shaped the spoken language of this period, bringing to surface old forms of translinguistic exchange that were actually in use. Given the need for “emotivity,” as EvenZohar calls it, “familiar designations as aba for papa and ima for mama were introduced from Aramaic, since the Hebrew words ab [‫( ]אב‬father) and em [‫]אם‬ (mother) belong to the more official register (i.e., ‘father’ and ‘mother’)” and lacked the emotional charge of these more mixed forms.41 Kafka’s letter to his teacher thus does more than perform that comedy of error known as hypercorrection in linguistic affairs. In this instance what was



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likely Kafka’s attempt to write letter-perfect Hebrew to impress his Jerusalemborn teacher ended up creating a reminder of the Aramaic that, as Benjamin Harshav observes, was a marker of the “multilingual situation” in Europe and elsewhere in which Hebrew had remained alive.42 Such potential intra- and translinguistic transfers of meaning live within the surface of any standard language, even when the most correct and traditional usage is sustained. The letters “ayin-mem,” or ‫עם‬, for instance, the word Kafka should have used for “with,” can also mean, when vocalized differently, the “people” who comprise the nation, while the letters “aleph-mem,” or ‫אם‬, the word he actually did use, can be either the classical Hebrew term for “mother” or the word “if,” depending on the vocalized form. Part of the comedy unleashed by Kafka’s error was that he assigned no vowels to his mistaken ‫ אם‬while vocalizing his Hebrew letter as a whole—a lapsus linguae allowing the fluid suggestions of the words “mother” and “nation” to come into play. The mistake thus highlights the term for “mother” in its comically historic sense: a Hebrew word from the national inheritance that, as Even-Zohar points out, turned out to have little place in the language that emerged as a “mother tongue” in prestate Israel, where the “Yiddish,” mixed terms for “mother” and “father” from Aramaic, tinged with their foreign endings, became the ones that the vernacular in Palestine preferred. In this transnational spirit, Kafka’s “aleph mem,” or “‫אם‬,” could be considered a theoretically comic Hebrew usage, since the “if” it also suggests summons the potential vaudeville of linguistic origins from which every mother tongue could be said to emerge. Kafka’s erroneous use of “mother” in the Hebrew word “‫ ”אם‬is also a revisionist allusion to the nationalist spirit of cultural Zionism and its primary spokesman, Ahad Ha-Am (‫)אחד העם‬, the pen name for Asher Ginzburg that means “one of the people.” In a famous piece—one we do not know that Kafka read—entitled “Language Struggle,” published in 1910 in Hebrew, Ahad Ha-Am depicted a mother tongue as a form of boundary crossing that had to remain secret, or at least be ignored by a people that drew linguistic forms from a neighboring nation and their spoken voice. The very notion of a “national language” (‫ )לשון לאומית‬in modern Hebrew, according to Ahad HaAm, exposed an intimate “affinity” between different nations, making its defense and definition for him an exposure of the multiple languages from which a “vehicle of national expression” can emerge: It is an essential requisite of a national language [‫ ]לשון לאומית‬that it be not merely a “mother tongue” [‫]לשון האם‬, but the vehicle of

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national self-expression in successive ages. If Dutch, for example, is recognized as a distinct national language, despite its close affinity to German, that is because, over and above its use as a medium of speech, it enshrines the cultural self-expression of the Dutch people. There are many Germans who speak dialects no less remote than Dutch is from the standard German language, but they do not recognize any of these dialects as their national language. They recognize that that title belongs to the German they learnt in school—the German in which the national ideals are enshrined.43 “National ideals” in this passage are described as a defense against laughter in a specific linguistic sense. Here, Ahad Ha-Am gives the national school and its system of education the exalted mission of “enshrining” a singular national identity in language, though doing so requires that “national” education have no sense of humor about the porous boundaries of the national language. The fact that many “Germans speak dialects no less remote than Dutch is from the standard German language,” nonetheless, describes a situation ripe for comedy, where everyone knows the language has transferred lexical content from the foreign voice. That boundary zone where “German” and “Dutch” have indiscriminately borrowed from one another’s “national” languages is therefore considered the equivalent of tales told out of school. “Die Lehre der Tatsachen” (1911) (What the Facts Teach Us), the Ahad Ha-Am text that Kafka possessed in German translation, surveys the actual situation of the Hebrew schools in Palestine, making light of those who would messianically trumpet the national language and its revival as a fait accompli. “The great ideal of Hebrew education in the Hebrew language” (das große ideal hebräischer Erziehung in hebräischer Sprache), Ahad Ha-Am notes, was “carried in the hearts” of a “few teachers” when he visited Palestine during his visit eighteen years before, though its schoolrooms do not seem as immune to foreign influence, given the debt to “Deutscher Erziehung,” or “German education,” as well as Arab laborers noted in his text: “[Many] ‘honest’ Zionsts who give grandiose speeches while abroad about the redemption of the land and its people, then come to Palestine and see what they see—only to return home happy and in good spirits, full of delight and good cheer, as if they had heard the trumpets of the messiah on the Mt. of Olives [Oelberg] sounding in their ears.”44 These “Posaunen,” or trumpets, of the Hebrew revival in Palestine recall the “Posaune” that the castle provides the villagers in Kafka’s Castle, with a comic difference that enlarges the linguistic scene. Ahad Ha-Am thus refers in



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his essay to the “Turkish government,” which as the imperial power cannot afford to “inflame” the “Arabs” (kann die Araber nicht unseretwegen erzürnen) by taking measures on “our behalf.”45 With the Russian-named “Olga” telling their story, the castle trumpets suggest the interaction of Hebrew with foreign accents in Palestine before 1918, emitting hidden sounds when blown that made it sound “as if the Turks were there” (glaubte man, die Türken seien schon da).46 Though biblically Hebrew in origin, these “Posaunen,” or “trumpets,” from the castle festival comically invoke European as well as Islamic history in a more modern, canonical sense, as the German idiom “als ob die Türken seien da” suggests. These instruments, like their jazz counterparts, suggest a vaudeville of sounds waiting to be exposed within the national symphony. Here modern Hebrew’s interactions with the Arabic-speaking population in Palestine, as well as with their Turkish rulers, are also a reminder of Kafka’s awareness that the “Turks” had always been “there” for Western culture, which did not always consider itself opposed to such “Turkish” forms.47 The “humming” (Summen) resembling the sound of “countless childlike voices” (zahlloser kindischer Stimmen) that K. hears on the castle telephone line is in this sense “the only true and reliable thing that the local telephones convey to us,” as the “Chairman” tells K. in The Castle, if we consider the transnational accents of a Hebrew in Palestine recently liberated from Ottoman rule as one meaning of this “murmuring and song” (Rauschen und Gesang).48 Kafka might well have imagined a telephone connecting him to the “Hebrew schools in Jaffa and Jerusalem,” which he read about in Ahad Ha-Am. For the actual schoolchildren of Palestine’s Hebrew classrooms, a welter of different “assistant” languages were an everyday reality, acting up and speaking up boisterously when the emerging standard of Hebrew was supposed to be the rule, with “Yiddish, Ladino, Arabic, French and German” being what Jack Fellman calls the “principle rivals of the Hebrew language at the time.”49 Kafka’s contemporary Israel Cohen even went so far as to wonder whether the “Jewish national language,” as he called a renascent Hebrew, would succumb to what he called the “German attack” to promote that prestigious language of international science—the English of its day—as the language of instruction in what would become the Technion; Cohen worried that the result would be the ultimate displacement of Hebrew as the language of instruction in Palestinian schools.50 The sound of “countless children’s voices” that the land surveyor hears over the castle telephone can thus be related to more than just German, and in Kafka’s own Zionist terms.51 As early as September 1916, when Kafka wrote Felice

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Bauer about her work with Jewish refugee children, he made it clear that he preferred her to help “simple Jews from ‘Kolomea’ and ‘Stanislau’ in the Ukraine,” the latter a Carpathian region subject to Tatar invasions over the centuries and thus a region where multiple accents prevailed, a work with children Kafka connects to the issue of “national striving” (nationales Streben) in turn. “How you come to terms with Zionism is your affair,” he tells Felice in the letter, “any sort of coming to terms will make me happy (only indifference is out of the question).”52 Kafka connected childishness with the acquisition of the Hebrew language, which became part of his “coming to terms” with Zionism as well. After attending the eleventh Zionist convention in Vienna in 1913, Kafka gave Felice a description of Ben-Zion Mossinsohn, an important figure in the history of Hebrew, who saw the language making contact with actual children’s voices that hailed from many lands. In a letter Kafka gives a novelist’s eye-view of “the former director of the Gymnasium in Jaffa,” where the conflict over official Hebrew and the foreign languages that influenced it in many ways began.53 As Israel Cohen observes, it was “at the Hebrew ‘Gymnasium’ in Jaffa, founded in 1906, where all subjects were taught in Hebrew, although in most cases the teachers had no text books and had to create their own vocabulary.”54 The teachers at the school that later became the “Gymnasia Herzelia” then “published the first Hebrew textbooks in mathematics, physics . . . and coined a new Hebrew terminology” in these fields, though the accents of the children who learned this new form of the language are treated as background noise in his account.55 Kafka’s own account of the Zionist convention in 1913, by contrast, emphasizes the way adults act like children in the emergence of modern Hebrew and suggests in comic terms that it is a good thing that they do. Rather than scorn “Lise W.,” the sister of Robert Weltsch, with whom Kafka will later correspond about Puah Ben-Tovim, Kafka describes her at the convention in the role of an irreverent schoolgirl waging her pranks amid the sounds of Hebrew mixed with the “assistant” languages such as German that helped give the language its modern shape. After describing the “former director of the Jaffa Gymnasium” standing “upright on the step of a stair,” with a “smudgy beard” and “swaying coat,” Kafka treats the Zionist convention as a version of the Palestinian Hebrew classroom whence the former principal had actually come. Kafka’s letter to Felice of 1913 thus rewrites the whimsical promise his eventual fiancée made after their first meeting the year before, when “you promised to travel to Palestine, and I, the fool, let you step into the elevator,” a comic reference to the act of aliyah in Zionist parlance—emigrating to the



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land of Israel referred to in the Hebrew word meaning “going up.”56 Instead of an ascent, Kafka describes the Zionist convention a year later as a healthy descent into the chaos of an imaginary Hebrew classroom in Palestine, where Hebrew was already being spoken amid a welter of other accents. “Inconclusive German addresses,” Kafka reports his impression to Felice, “much Hebrew, most of the work accomplished in small meetings. Lise W. lets herself be dragged along without really being there, throws spitballs into the hall. Cheerless,” as if she were a schoolgirl in Palestine trying to reawaken a childish vigor in its classrooms.57 Kafka’s pleasure in recording such childish behavior in Vienna recalls the mixture of foreign voices that Hebrew confronted in actual Palestine, providing a comic version of what Gershom Scholem later called the “ghostly” (gespentisch) origins of Hebrew’s modern rebirth. In a famous letter to Franz Rosenzweig of December 26, 1926, Scholem describes the “land” in which modern Hebrew was finding its “actualization” (Aktualisierung)—the German word means “becoming contemporary”—as a “volcano” that “houses language,” as if the presence of many voices in Palestine were a disaster unleashed.58 The threatening “other” for Scholem thus was not “the Arab people” but a more uncanny, or “unheimlicher,” force in the literal sense: a language not being fully at Heim, or at “home,” unless it comes to terms with the full range of foreign sounds that shaped its childhood speech. New Hebrew coinages and borrowings from languages such as Arabic or even disputes over the land by a later land surveyor drawing its boundaries were thus not the explosion Scholem feared. “Each word that is not newly created” in Hebrew is “taken from the good old treasure [that] is ready to burst,” Scholem writes of biblical Hebrew, fearing that the modern form of the language was suppressing the magical power of the “old names” of the religious tradition. Scholem was little worried by these new words (eben neu geschaffen), signifying the openness of a language in its second childhood that did not force its foreign sources underground. Scholem did, however, fear a premature conservatism, sensing that an “Ausbruch,” or “break-out,” of “Tradition” gone destructive might result, when the secularism known as cultural nationalism would “overtake” the “most fruitful of our holy traditions” embodied in “our language,” or Hebrew.59 The “singing” (Gesang) that Kafka’s land surveyor hears on the castle telephone line evokes a similar openness to the eternal childhood of Hebrew, recalling “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” of Kafka’s final tale, whose voice has been compared to the Hebrew that Kafka learned from Puah Ben-Tovim.60 The puzzle of Josephine’s voice—sounding like normal mice piping and the

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elevated songs of her nation—becomes a comic parable of the multiple origins of the same modern Hebrew that both Kafka and Gershom Scholem knew. While the sound of Josephine’s singing seems to be nothing other than the vernacular “piping,” as if it were a version of Yiddish, the ritual flourishes and public significance of her performances come “almost like a message from the whole people to each individual” (fast wie eine Botschaft des Volkes zu dem Einzelnen) and thus evoke the claims of Hebrew as a national language, and a spirit they wish to defend.61 Josephine’s people, however, as the narrator states, “are not only childish, we are in a sense prematurely old” (unser Volk ist nicht nur kindlich, es ist gewissermaßen auch vorzeitig alt); while worshiping the dignity of their national singer, the mice-folks’ “struggle for existence” (Existenzkampf) prevents them from recognizing the unruly openness of their own, everyday language as the secret power of Josephine’s song.62 Scholem’s letter to Rosenzweig critiques the Hebrew spoken in the Palestine of 1926 as lacking just this sense of humor about the sources from which it drew. The language is a “ghostly Volapük,” as he calls it, referring to the pre-Esperanto created by Johann Martin Schleyer in 1880, whose very goal was to disguise the national languages from which it borrowed and disavow the childhood of its formation from many different tongues.63 “It’s the old joke,” as Kafka described this comic attitude toward the foreign sources of tradition, so eagerly forgotten while the outsider is being reviled: “we hold the world fast and complain it is holding us” (es ist der alte Scherz: Wir halten die Welt und klagen daß sie uns hält).64 The “prematurely old” mice people of Kafka’s “Josefine” could thus be said to be “childish” in a comic sense; thanks to their “struggle for existence” and fervent desire for a national song, they refuse to admit that the poetic singing that gives them national stature has been shaped by many sources that, like their singer, are indeed quite young. Scholem in his letter to Rosenzweig worried that a new generation of Hebrewspeaking Zionists had become prematurely old in this respect: haunted by a religious force they thought their secularism had surpassed, their modern Hebrew, he suggests, was camouflaged in a spirit of nationalism that threatened to “break out against those who speak it” at any time (gegen ihre Sprecher ausbrechen).65 Three years earlier, in 1923, Kafka recorded a diary entry that almost certainly never influenced Scholem, though it uses the same metaphor in different terms: “more and more fearful as I write. It is understandable. Every word, twisted in the hands of the spirits [Geister]—this twist of the hand is their most characteristic gesture—becomes a spear turned against the speaker [gekehrt gegen den Sprecher].”66 As the passage continues, Kafka encounters his own form of these



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“ghosts” that would twist alien voices into something fearful—“this twist of the hand is their characteristic gesture”—a distortion of the “camouflaged hybridity” that lives on the tip of every people’s tongue.67 In “Josephine” a self-deprecating irony disenchants this potentially nationalist fervor. “May Josephine be spared from perceiving that the mere fact of our listening to her,” the narrator observes, “is proof that she is no singer.” Or as Kafka’s diary humorously concludes: “you too have weapons,” where the disguised return of nationalism is concerned.68 “I am learning far less Hebrew than in Prague,” Kafka thus wrote to Robert Klopstock from Berlin on July 13, 1923, months after finishing his work on The Castle. Eight months before “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” would be composed, Kafka evoked Puah Ben-Tovim and her setting with an irony that separates him from an unreachable national ideal, one that is replaced by Hebrew-speaking children in a German-language setting: “there’s a camp affiliated with the Berlin Jewish People’s home [Volksheim] here, with many Hebrew-speaking, healthy, and cheerful children. It is a substitute for Pua[h]’s camp, which I wasn’t able to reach. I did not know that Eberswalde is almost two hours from Berlin, so it was not until afternoon that I set out (not alone) and bogged down in Bernau, halfway from there, where I wrote to Pua[h] [Ben-Tovim].”69 Kafka figures the journey from Berlin to an unreachable Puah as passing through a camp filled with “Jewish refugee children from Poland,” as Ernst Pawel reports.70 In this longing for Hebrew as a young maiden, Kafka oscillates between adoration and a pleasurable kind of guilt, as he immerses himself in multiple national sounds— elevation of the Jerusalem-born speaker of a renascent Jewish language and his recognition of refugee children as the living sources of its voice. “I have not been able to reach [Puah] for months,” Kafka thus wrote Klopstock again in December; “how have I offended her?”71 The voices of “Hebrew-speaking” refugee children and their accents were in any case closer to the situation in Palestine, where a mixture of native forms of ancient Hebrew with foreign linguistic content was an everyday affair. In a humorous version of this process, K. will take on the biblical name “Josef” when talking on the telephone, pretending to be one of the “assistants,” a gesture that does little to give his identity a native feel. The word for “telephone” in modern Hebrew was a more successful version of this project for modern Hebrew in general: “to force,” as Benjamin Harshav (Hrushovski) notes, “foreign words into a Hebrew mold: le-argen (with the Hebraized root ARG, ‘to organize’) le-talpen (with the root TLF, ‘to telephone’); le-rafrer (with the root RFR,

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‘to refer’).”72 Here the structure of the Hebrew infinitive—where the English “to” of “to give” becomes part of the verb in the Hebrew particle “L”—gives all of these verbs a sense of being native forms, when they are in fact foreign imports through and through. Because the foreign linguistic import is successfully melded with the Hebrew infinitive structure, none of these words has a comic feel—that is, none of them makes obvious the presence of a foreign “K.” in Josef’s linguistic clothing as The Castle clearly does. In this system of secret importation, the foreign source, of course, can emerge at any moment from beneath the Hebrew surface; all that is required is for the speaker to become aware of the foreign origins that have been naturalized over time in the forms of the native tongue. A potential vaudeville performance of hidden accents could be said to burst forth from between the sober lines of spoken Hebrew once these foreign imports are revealed, and the same holds true for most national languages built on the borrowing of foreign forms. To set off this hidden vaudeville performance, the speaker needs to pronounce the original forms of the lexical content smuggled into his “Hebrew,” just as any English speaker can suddenly produce a “funny,” accented burlesque of his native language by giving a foreign accent and intonation—that is, the into/nation—of the countless words that English has “borrowed” from Gallic mouths. Overt performances of such multiple national accents, played out over actual telephone lines, were in fact a common staple of the vaudeville theater in Kafka’s era, especially in the early New York vaudeville theater, where a “telephone” variant emerged. By 1912 the routine “Cohen on the Telephone,” where a Jewish speaker emits foreign accents that were considered comic in the period, “sold 2 million phonograph recordings,” helping to boost Jewish comedy into the forefront of American entertainment. Kafka was aware of this taste since in his diaryhe reports that in watching the Yiddish theater, “sometimes you believe you must stretch in order to see the play over the heads of the Jewish theater audience of New York” (manchmal glaubt man sich recken zu müssen um über die Köpfe des Newyorcker jüdischen Teaterpublikums weg das Stück zu sehen).73 While hiding such foreign accents ultimately proved as possible for Ben-Yehuda’s Hebrew as it did for English, the potential for such a vaudeville performance of foreign origins remains a part of every national language, especially in the names it has borrowed from beyond the pale. In The Castle the castle official “Oswald” voices this anxiety over the playful potential of the telephone, bearing as he does an English name from King Lear in this German-only text. The castle official therefore expresses his dislike of the telephone: “I should be greatly pleased if less use



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were made of the telephone,” he declares; “someone telephoned only a moment ago” (es wäre mir sehr lieb, wenn dortseits nicht so viel telephoniert würde, erst vor einem Augenblick ist telephoniert worden).74 In comic hesitance—and thus hesitance at the prospect of comedy—the same Oswald who speaks with an “arrogant voice” (hochmütige Stimme) acts as if the phone might expose a speech that, though treated as authoritative and native, contains vaudeville material worthy of the stage. In a letter to Milena Jensenska of March 1922, Kafka describes this foreign content of language as haunted. Posted letters as well as the linguistic content transmitted by “the telegraph, the telephone [and] the radiograph” are imagined as stolen by ghostly vaudeville performers, whose foreign mouths cannot be held at bay. “Written kisses don’t reach their destination,” Kafka tells her of their language’s potential for intimate correspondence; “rather they are drunk on the way by ghosts.”75 In Ben-Yehuda’s terms, the Hebrew that Kafka was learning at the time had to walk a fine line between fear and hospitality to such visitations: between letting too many foreign linguistic spirits inhabit the national language—“devouring” the original “kiss,” as it were—and the proper kind of loan translations, where the ghostly presence of foreign originals in words such as “l’talfen” for “telephone” would still leave the Hebrew lip and tongue [loshon] feeling original and intact.76 In walking this line, the re-creators of modern Hebrew faced impossible choices on either side. They could either transliterate “the foreign concept directly or approximately from German, Yiddish, or Russian; for example telegráf, magnet, univerzität, electrizität,” or could “employ quoted phrases lifted in mosaic fashion” out of the ancient Hebrew of the Bible. As a result Hebrew’s attempt to “become contemporary” (Aktualisierung), as Gershom Scholem called this secular revival, ran the risk of sounding haunted by too many ghosts—too audibly open to accents from “German, Yiddish, or Russian” mouths—or too stilted and archaic in using biblical terms that had to be stretched and twisted to fit the modern world.77 Though Scholem feared the apocalyptic forces these ancient names contained, Kafka saw such arrogant-sounding archaisms as providing endless comic material for ghostly foreign voices to perform. “The ghosts won’t starve,” as Kafka wrote to Milena in his own formulation, “but we will perish.” The comedy that ensues in the land surveyor’s second telephone call in The Castle nonetheless fails to stir any ghosts. Like the Hebrew language then in formation, the exchange between K.—who dubs himself “Josef” on the spot—and Oswald instead swings back and forth between the excessively correct formulations of a speaker of the official language and the crass humor

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of linguistic error: “the following conversation came about: ‘Oswald here, who’s there?’ said a severe, arrogant voice with a slight speech defect [Sprachfehler], for which, it seemed to K., the speaker tried to compensate by sounding even more severe.” Here, where the farce of the accent as disability unmasks the arrogance of linguistic nobility, the foreign voice becomes a source of comedy in The Castle, and the ghosts all disappear: K. was hesitant to give his name, against the telephone he was defenseless, the person could shout him down, lay down the mouthpiece, and K. would have blocked a path that was perhaps not insignificant. K.’s hesitation made the man impatient. “Who’s there,” he repeated, adding, “I should be greatly pleased if less use were made of the telephone there, someone telephoned only a moment ago.” K. did not reply to this remark and announced with sudden resolve, “This is the assistant of the gentleman who came as surveyor.” “What assistant? What gentleman? What surveyor?” K. recalled yesterday’s telephone conversation. “Ask Fritz,” he said curtly. It worked, to his own astonishment. Yet what amazed him even more than its working was the consistency of the official service there. The response was “I know. The eternal land surveyor. Yes, yes. Go on? What assistant?” “Josef,” said K.78 In staging himself in this originally Hebrew role, the land surveyor has placed himself in a Ben-Yehuda position, albeit in a comic sense. In place of the surveyor who could delineate what is inside and outside the linguistic tradition of the people, the surveyor of the national language is cast instead in a comic role—“the eternal land surveyor”—that K. has already accepted by taking “Josef” as his name. In the Bible, Joseph son of Jacob is a translator figure: enduring the hatred of his own brothers for his coat of many colors, he goes on to use the diverse forms of Hebrew knowledge of his own nation in order to discover the secret meaning of the pharoah’s dreams. Like Ben-Yehuda, the would-be surveyor seeks the impossible line between the claims of linguistic identity and that interchange with the foreign mind that ultimately allows Josef’s nation to grow. Thus where Gershom Scholem saw the “ghosts” unleashed by the secularization of Hebrew in the Palestine of 1926 as a fearful prospect, Kafka’s Castle envisions the land surveyor’s telephone call to the castle as summoning a vaudeville of linguistic origins instead. The sounds on the line in this way reflect not only the many different foreign accents Kafka read about in Palestine’s actual Hebrew classrooms but also the healthy appetite for foreign expressions that keeps the



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national language alive and vibrant, symbolized in the eternal childhood of children’s voices, as each generation creates the national language anew: From the earpiece came a humming, the likes of which K. had never heard on the telephone before. It was as though the humming of countless children’s voices—but it wasn’t a humming, it was a singing [Gesang], the singing of the most distant, of the most utterly distant voices—as though a single, high-pitched, yet strong voice had emerged out of this humming in some quite impossible way and now drummed against one’s ears as if demanding to penetrate more deeply into something other than one’s wretched hearing. K. listened without telephoning, with his left arm propped on the telephone stand he listened thus.79 This “song” (Gesang) is also a call to the childhood of language, where the origins that shaped its canonical form are exposed as a chorus of foreign voices that can no longer be clearly heard. These sounds echo “Hebrew” at one remove, suggesting the second childhood of the language that Kafka studied in this period. At the same time that it borrowed shamelessly in its chatter with other vocabularies, the revival of Hebrew also allowed the strata of its sacred past to become audible in modernity, like the distant sounds of its original formation detected as noise on the wire. Charles Bernheimer thus beautifully describes the “mystic dial tone” that K. hears as the “primal unconscious state of language,” though Kafka’s advice to Robert Klopstock on how to study Hebrew conveys a more playful awareness of the vaudeville of “utterly distant,” transnational voices from which it emerged: “What is Hebrew,” Kafka wrote in his letter of 1923, “but news from far away?” (Nachrichten aus der Ferne).80

Land Surveying and Modern Hebrew: Amalia’s Stories When K. first greets his English assistant Artur, and his biblically named helper Jeremias in The Castle, he is in a hidden sense encountering the “Gehilfen,” or assistant languages, both Hebrew and foreign, that Eliezer Ben-Yehuda confronted as an immigrant to Palestine. As Ben-Yehuda began his impossible project of surveying a renascent language, he encountered a Hebrew that was both old and new: “old” because the vocabulary and syntax were ancient Hebrew, but also “new” because the loan translations from modern European languages

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and the borrowings that also shaped ancient Hebrew made it hard to draw a straight line between its foreign and domestic terms. We do not know, for instance, why Kafka chose the courses he did in 1924 at the Academy for Jewish Studies in Berlin after completing The Castle. The lectures on the Book of Job he attended were given by Harry Torcyner, whose later work emphasized just this perspective, pointing out that Job had to be “translated into biblical Hebrew” in ancient times, “showing there was a need for such translations into the sacred national tongue.”81 Torcyner, who renamed himself “Naphtali TurSinai” after his immigration to Palestine, succeeded Eliezer Ben-Yehuda as the premier Hebrew linguist or surveyor of his day.82 In his later work Tur-Sinai formulated this surveying problem faced by the national language quite directly, pointing out that the same ancient word for “book” that entered modern Hebrew—“Sefer” (‫—)ספר‬was originally a biblical “loan word from [the] Babylonian shipir,” and thus not a “Jewish” or Hebrew word, much older or simply new, in any national sense.83 Kafka’s word choice in his Hebrew letter to Puah Ben-Tovim of 1923 subtly suggests this hidden humor of the open Hebrew book, by making use of an archaic form from the prophet Hosea. When writing to Puah of the letter of permission she awaits from her parents to remain in Berlin, after Hugo Bergmann’s agreement to intercede with them on her behalf in Palestine, Kafka reassures her with his unique Hebrew that no such letter could possibly have arrived, “since even his [Hugo Bergmann’s] wife, with whom I spoke yesterday, had not received a letter from her husband from Jerusalem.”84 As Yoram Bar-David has pointed out, Kafka’s usage is more loyal to the biblical sources.85 He does not use the common Hebrew expression for “her husband,” baal’a, a word which by quirk of history can mean “her master” and also carries the meaning of “idol”— Baal—in Hebrew’s biblical sense—that is, the foreign influences that the Hebrew people are advised to reject. Instead, Kafka uses an unusual, archaic form of isha, literally “her man” instead of “her husband,” recalling a well-known usage of the prophet Hosea where the voice of the Lord engages in a form of wordplay where the question of foreign influences is concerned: And in that day                —declares the LORD— You will call [Me] Ishi [my husband] And no more will you call me Baali [my husband] For I will remove the names of the Baalim from her mouth, And they shall nevermore be mentioned by name. (Hos. 2:18–19)



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As the editors of the Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures emphasize in their gloss on this passage, both Ishi and Baali mean “my husband,” but the latter also means “my Baal,” with all the foreign suggestions the word in the Hebrew Bible brings to bear. Kafka’s usage of a similar form of isha refers back to what can be called the principle of hidden expression in Hosea, one that Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed also uses the word Baal to address. Maimonides defines the principle of hidden expression as follows when discussing the word Baal in Hosea, which he links with “copulation” as code for an obscene term in the Hebrew tongue: “For in this holy language no word at all has been laid down in order to designate either the male or female organ of copulation . . . for these are things about which one ought to be silent; however, when necessity impels mentioning them, a device should be found to do it by means of expressions deriving from other words.”86 As the Hebrew of Kafka’s letter to Puah Ben-Tovim reminds us in its classical use of Ish instead of Baal, a “holy language” such as Hebrew may in fact have many baalim, or masters, as its figurative husbands, in the figurative sense that it retains illicit connections with the practices of other tongues. As the canonical passage from Hosea suggests, the essence of a “holy language” that becomes national is simply its ability—to quote Maimonides—to use “expressions deriving from other words” rather than pronounce the obscene notion—at least from a nationalistic point of view—that the national speech has been borrowed from the practices and pronunciations of foreign mouths. The text of Hosea points to a similar notion: that a “Holy language” such as Hebrew may in fact have many Baalim, or masters, in the sense that every language that eventually claims national status will have engaged in a figurative act of secret intercourse with other tongues. “For I will remove the names of the Baalim from her mouth,” the verses of Hosea declare, “and they shall never again be mentioned by name.” Like a land surveyor obsessed with a position he had never been officially granted, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda had a challenge to retain a sense of humor about the sources of modern Hebrew while constantly discovering the foreign origins of many of its forms.87 Without any official status in the Zionist movement, Ben-Yehuda sought to create just such an impossible “survey” of the movement to establish Hebrew in Palestine, a background that Puah Ben-Tovim’s 1921 arrival brought to Prague. Like The Castle’s self-appointed land surveyor, Ben-­ Yehuda experienced his own form of the strong feelings that Kafka’s K. discovers in the village: that “land surveying is an issue that deeply affects peasants,” who “scented secret deals and injustice” at the prospect of drawing such lines.88 Thus while Ben-Yehuda began creating his dictionary of modern Hebrew and

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publishing his newspaper, the conflict known in the standard histories of the State of Israel as the milkhemet ha-safot, or the “Language War,” began to rage in Palestine, a battle between those who wished to establish modern Hebrew as the language of instruction in Jewish schools and proponents of other languages spoken by students in those same schools. Thus while “the Language Wars occurred during the second Aliyah [1904–14]” and thus overlapped the period when Kafka’s dreams of going to Palestine emerged, it was linked to Kafka’s own literary and professional language, for it “broke out over the question of whether Hebrew would become the standard language of instruction in the Yishuv (German was the main alternative, especially in technical subjects)” for those same schools.89 In the story related by his son, it was Ben-Yehuda’s “outrage” that his wife had sung him Russian lullabies in the cradle that produced his first Hebrew words, though in his own account Ben-Yehuda had a much more humorous sense of the foreign origins of the national tongue.90 “There are many foolish people among our enlightened,” as Ben-Yehuda puts it, “who in . . . ludicrous and pathetic arrogance deny the foreign only because of its foreignness. We are not one of those silly persons who are satisfied with themselves alone and don’t find any need in anything belonging to others. . . . We can take from all the foreign languages everything that we lack, on the . . . condition that it be in accordance with the usage among us, that is, according to the Hebrew pattern.”91 From the perspective of language growth, Hebrew in Palestine represented linguistic history in fast-forward fashion, bringing into focus the inner comedy that accompanies all linguistic growth in what are called “native” tongues. That which is originally foreign, as Ben-Yehuda suggests, is often covered over in accord with a “Hebrew pattern,” making it impossible for a surveyor to determine with any precision what fully belongs with the nation’s linguistic bounds. According to Ben-Yehuda’s model, it is “ludicrous” and “arrogance” to presume that a language is self-sufficient and does not need to borrow foreign words to define a linguistic tradition that can become its own. The implicit irony of the native tongue must keep its borrowings a secret for a speaker to gain national acceptance. The fact that delimiting the boundaries of a national language would be like “a game of tag, where the only ‘home’ is like a tree on the far side of the ocean,” as Kafka has it, also means that a humorous, childish sense of the vaudeville of far-flung linguistic origins is always waiting to be exposed.92 The Maimonidean dictum that “the organs of copulation” have no word in Hebrew thus restates the implicit sense of humor voiced in The Castle by Amalia, the figure who refuses the crass sexual advances of the castle official



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Sortini and who echoes a figure in a Czech nationalist novel of Kafka’s time.93 “It isn’t easy to understand what she’s saying,” her sister Olga tells the land surveyor, “for one doesn’t know whether she’s speaking ironically or seriously, its mostly serious but sounds ironic,” an irony best defined in linguistic terms as the foreign pleasures that are rejected as a violent form of intercourse but which remain an enjoyable form of the national voice.94 Thus while Amalia resembles a Czech national heroine, her name is biblically Hebrew in origin, with the word Amal (‫ )עמל‬meaning “labor” or “strenuous effort,” though it is often translated in the sense of sorrow, appearing in the biblical caution that “man is born unto woe” (Job 5:7). Amalia’s manifest beauty is therefore described in Kafka’s final novel as humorous honesty about her own “foreignness” (Fremdheit) that speaks through her silence having nothing to do with the violence of Sortini—a comic reserve that leaves her national dignity intact: “Amalia smiled, and her smile, sad though it was, brightened her bleak, drawn face, made her silence eloquent, and her strangeness familiar [machte die Fremdheit vertraut], it was the surrender of a secret, a closely guarded possession that could be reclaimed, but never fully.”95 As the Czech surface of her story remains in contact with the Hebrew suggestions of her name, Amalia’s ability to make “Fremdheit vertraut,” or “foreignness familiar,” suggests a Hebrew original that is also open to the foreign voice, and so resembles a prophet who speaks with “a certain majesty” (eine Art Hoheit) in quasi-biblical tones when she is heard to speak “at length.”96 As a parable of Kafka’s Hebrew as an open form of nationalism, Amalia’s story supports Andreas Kilcher’s assertion that Kafka’s “Zionism was before all else a linguistic Zionism,” and thus a model of a national identity whose eloquence depends on an otherness that cannot be subjected to a single linguistic source.97 In terms of the “new Kabbalah” that Kafka mentioned in his diary on January 16, 1922, quoted above, Amalia quietly resists any attempt to subject her to any form of nationalism in this regard. The Sortini who demands her presence is therefore depicted as crass, as if he were a reminder of the “obscene language” that Maimonides worried would define the Hebrew tongue.98 Unlike the court usher’s wife in The Trial, whose sexual assault signifies a false ­desire to gain power over the “Shekhinah,” the Kabbalah’s “feminine principle . . . as a providential guide of Creation,” Amalia suggests a Hebrew tradition that remains open to other voices, while defending herself against the vulgar lust for sexual conquest that belongs to Sortini and Klamm in the castle’s world.99 In this Jewish linguistic context, Sortini’s summons to Amalia—“so come at once, or!”—reads as a parody of how to treat the Shekhinah, who promises to wed

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only that suitor whose attentive gestures display the proper spirit to draw her forth.100 “And when she arrives,” the Zoharic parable begins, “[s]he begins to speak with him, a first from behind a veil which she has hung before her words, so that they may suit his manner of understanding. . . . Then behind a thinner veil of finer mesh, she speaks to him in riddles and allegories, Aggada. When finally he is on close terms with her, she stands disclosed face to face with him and has intercourse with him on all her secret mysteries. . . . Now he is a perfect human being, a true husband of Torah, for to him she has uncovered all her mysteries, holding back nothing.”101 Amalia is very much the spirit of the “Aggada,” or Kabbalistic legends, as Kafka’s spirit of the Hebrew language, but whose strength exposes Sortini and suggests a parody of nationalist desire. According to Elliot Wolfson, where the “mystic” interpreter of the Torah can be interpreted “full of eyes, [and] gives sense to the eyeless text by his bestowing glance,” Amalia suggests a kabbalistic form of Zionist vision in The Castle that belongs to the female figure instead.102 Thus when K. first looks at Amalia in the novel, not far from where “a flag with the Count’s colors” flies overhead, her own gaze so “shakes the confidence” of his claim to sovereignty that he attempts to reduce the power of her “brave, fixed, imperturbable, and perhaps rather dull gaze” (ernsten geraden unrührbaren vielleicht auch etwas stumpfen Blick).103 Where the “true husband” of the “Torah” would respect the Shekhinah’s “riddles and allegories,” Kafka portrays Sortini as the “sordid,” deaf spirit of linguistic conquest, demanding textual intercourse in a crude, nationalistic sense.104 Amalia thus rejects interest in the castle of the kind the land surveyor pursues as both far too lofty and too crude, as if she were revising the nationalist spirit in critical terms. As a kind of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda figure, the land surveyor is thus too lofty in his ambitions, for example, the longing for a renewed Hebrew that would be the equal of any “castle” language in European terms. At the same time Amalia mocks the would-be surveyor for a crassness he fails to avoid, portraying his desire for recognition by the quasi-national authorities of the novel as a lust for female conquest, which in kabbalistic terms means a vulgar distortion of the receptivity of the Torah’s text: “I once heard of a young man whose mind was taken up day and night with thoughts of the Castle, he neglected everything else, people feared for his ordinary faculty of reason since all his faculties were always up at the Castle, but in the end it turned out that it wasn’t actually the Castle he was thinking of but only the daughter of a scullery maid [Aufwaschfrau] at the offices, he got her, and all was fine again.”105 This longing for a “scullery maid” is in one sense a comic reference to Max Brod’s



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novel A Tscechisches Diensmädchen (1909), whose depiction by Brod of the relations between a Jew and a Czech maid (Dienstmädchen) unleashed a storm of controversy in Zionist circles at the time. In terms of modern Hebrew, Amalia’s scorn for the “scullery maid” at the same time suggests her attempt to distance herself from a female domain in which the male expresses a crude wish for control. In these linguistic terms, K.’s “scullery-maid” obsession suggests a light satire of Ben-Yehuda, whose mania to acquire the “simple names for utensils and foods” to give the language spoken status was well known. Kafka’s Hebrew notebooks from the period he studied with Puah Ben-Tovim likewise contain “a mass of practical, everyday expressions.”106 The “fanatic pioneers” who “used Hebrew in oral communication” in this period were similarly known as meshuga le’ davar, or “crazy for one thing,” in the Hebrew of the day, while Amalia suggests such desire for the language of the “scullery maid” at any cost to be far from the deepest meaning the surveyor could possess.107 Amalia lives without the fixity of such a singular longing for the grounding of nationalism in a native language, and she possesses a dark sense of humor about the foreign origins of national identity instead. Thus when the land surveyor asks her, “are you from the village? Were you born here?” Amalia openly confesses her native birth, while showing him the foreignness that shapes her articulate elegance and which made her “muteness speak.”108 Like many readers, Olga will nonetheless exalt her sister as the essence of a tribal or national spirit, and she disliked her proud chastity in this respect. “If worst comes to worst, one can always laugh at Frieda,” Olga observes, “whereas for Amalia, all one can have, if one is not a blood relative of hers, is contempt.”109 In terms of Kafka’s reading in cultural Zionism, however, there is more subtle humor than is dreamed of in Olga’s nationalism, as Amalia’s “smile” suggests. Recalling Ahad Ha-Am’s critique of the “Eingeborenen” in the land of Israel, those native Palestinians who refused to sell their land to “foreigners” (Fremde), Amalia as a figure for Hebrew’s open tradition separates herself from a Zionist or any other nationalism that stresses the category of birth.110 Walter Sokel is therefore correct that Amalia appears “with a degree of arrogant sterility that detracts somewhat from the reader’s admiration of her brave integrity,” though the “foreignness” already “vertraut,” or “familiar,” in her appearance suggests an otherness that is already part of the nation, making a quiet mockery of the notion of “fertility” as the subject duty of the loyal national maiden herself.111 Amalia thus suggests “labor” in Palestine, in keeping with the Hebrew root of her name; the fact that amal also means “hope” in Arabic calls into question any form of linguistic nationalism in The Castle, in favor of a nonnativist vision of

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open boundaries instead. In comic terms, Amalia’s rejection of the Italianate Sortini also suggests a subtle satire of the “renaissance” as that model of cultural renewal through heroic scholarship and artistry often applied to the Hebrew revival. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s manic, lifelong quest through Hebrew and the classic texts of Western culture in search of sources to renew the language thus ­appears in the vaudeville comedy of Sortini’s—not to be confused with Sordini’s—office. There, as Morton Gurewitch observes, the official who is also allegedly responsible for calling for a land surveyor “was almost literally drowned in work; perpetual crashes of huge piles of documents—the Marx Brothers would have appreciated this—resound throughout his workroom.”112 This movement extends to Kafka’s model of the Hebrew “renaissance” as a “naissance” or reoriginating birth as a sidestepping of a previous, more authoritative origin, in favor of a continuous movement already under way. Before Amalia, Kafka created a subtle version of this model in his notebooks in 1920 in a parable on modern Hebrew that is usually entitled “Ich war unter den Toten zu Gast,” or “I Was a Visitor among the Dead.”113 There a “Jewish maiden” (jüdisches Mädchen) rejects the control of a “French nobleman” who would rule this land of lost cultures from his desk. “This is my shroud,” Kafka’s “Jewish maiden” tells her visitor as the tale concludes, “but I don’t wear it,” departing from the bureaucratic master of the underworld and his model of national rebirth, and coming to life on her own. In Y. H. Brenner’s modern Hebrew novel Breakdown and Bereavement, which Kafka recorded reading on October 25, 1923, the figure of “Miriam” shows similarly transnational and independent traits. Bearing the name of the sister of Moses and a Hebrew prophetess, Miriam also contains reminders of “Josephine the Singer,” since she is perhaps the oldest female singer in strictly textual terms that the Hebrew tradition can be said to possess. In terms of Kafka’s canon, Miriam’s song in celebration of the destruction of the pharoah’s army in the Red Sea recalls Amerika, or The Man Who Disappeared, since in the Luther translation that Kafka was using, Miriam sings the verse “Roß und Mann hat er ins Meer gestürzt” (“horse and rider he has hurled into the sea”) (Exod. 15:1), evoking a biblical play on the German name of the novel’s protagonist Karl Rossman, as Bernard Greiner suggests.114 Amalia’s Hebrew subtext recalls the biblical Miriam in her refusal to let Sortini master her, and it questions the efficacy of any final boundary between the traditional Hebrew influences that contribute to her eloquence and the Slavic, Arabic, and other transnational sources that at the same time shape her suggestive portrayal of the modern Hebrew revival. In Brenner’s Breakdown and Bereavement, a modern Miriam becomes the figure for the transnational presence of Hebrew in Palestine, and thus a female heroine to whom both Amalia in The Castle and Kafka’s later “Josephine the



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Singer” can be compared. Rather than a nationalist voice of the people who, reprising her biblical namesake, would chant the glories of Israel and its victory over exile, Brenner’s Miriam is the love interest of his wounded, sickly Hebrewspeaking protagonist who has emigrated from the Yiddish-speaking diaspora and never feels fully at home in the land. Rather than discover his love for the Hebrew tradition in a Sortini-esque conquest of its resources, Yehezkel Hefetz discovers in Miriam, namesake of the oldest Hebrew singer in the Bible, a figure who is firmly rooted in a language that is both beautifully and paradoxically created from many foreign traces from abroad: She reminded him of many things he had forgotten, many faces that were blurred in his memory and yet lived on, while at the same time always remaining true to herself. In her facial and physical gestures, he observed, there was a mixture of the local traits of Jerusalem with various features of Jewish womanhood from all the many places that he had ever set foot in: the Ukraine, Podolia, Lithuania, Bessarabia, Bukovina, the cities of inner Russia and of Western Europe—an indigenous blossom whose leaves and petals came from all over the world.115 The many things Brenner’s Yehezkel has “forgotten” in Palestine come alive in Miriam, in much the same way that the singer is described on the final pages of her tale: that Josephine’s climb to the “heights of redemption [Erlösung]” can be achieved only at the price of eventually being “forgotten like all her brothers,” as if forgetfulness of the foreign eloquence that shapes the nation were the silent precondition for her voice.116 In linguistic terms, the forgetting of the foreign origins that create the people’s song is part of the comedy of authentic ­national expression. Oblivion is precisely what allows a language to feel “indigenous,” like Miriam’s beauty with its most organic blossoms whose constituent “leaves and petals” come from “all over the world.”

Modern Hebrew, or the Threshold of Happiness As is their wont, all the children wanted to be messengers. —Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks

With this background to The Castle in mind, the situation of the Hebrew schools of Palestine unlocks some of the comic depth in the novel’s most

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vaudeville-laden scenes. In the schoolroom where K. is eventually assigned to serve as a “janitor,” the transnational sources of modern Hebrew are suggested by the adventures of an immigrant land surveyor: while desiring to draw straight lines in the service of the quasi-national authority of the castle, K. ends up living in the schoolroom, and he is charged with cleaning up the remains of his domestic life before the work of the classroom begins. Kafka read about this predicament in Ahad Ha-Am’s description of Palestine, where the German-founded schools that had begun to teach Hebrew created a battle that the teachers had won: Whoever, for instance, sees the educational institute of the German Aid Society [Erziehungsinstitut des deutschen Hilfsverein] in Jerusalem, with its classes stretching from kindergarten to teacher training, with its six-hundred male and female pupils—excluding, that is, the leftovers [Reste] of German education that can be noticed here and there—whoever sees all of this and recalls what had once been the situation: he must confess that a “revolution” [Umwälzung] in the land has truly taken place, and that victory has gone to the teachers of Hebrew themselves.117 In light of such a passage, the position of K. as janitor in the schoolroom of the castle suggests a more comic victory for “Hebrew,” with the teacher in the classroom scene Kafka portrays taking on a somewhat less victorious role. In The Castle the teacher usurps the figurative role of the “surveyor” by excluding the remains of necessary oral activity that is not permitted in the classroom, and she becomes the figure who attempts to draw a strict line in her class: “for just then, there was a loud crash, unfortunately, they had forgotten to clear the remnants [Reste] of the evening meal from the teacher’s desk [Katheder], the schoolmistress removed all of it with the ruler [Lineal], [and] everything was sent flying to the floor.”118 The messy effects of the kind of “Umwälzung,” or “revolution,” effected by modern Hebrew in Palestine, according to Ahad Ha-Am, make themselves felt in the language of The Castle as the novel proceeds. The female teacher (Lehrerin) and her inability to rule leftovers (Reste) out of her classroom give the German of the novel an evocative sense of this dilemma, with the “Katheder,” or teacher’s desk—at least in the English evoked by the assistant Artur—in which the transnational contributions of different languages to Hebrew in Palestine suggest a “cathedral” whose oral remainders



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are a comic fact of life. The schoolteacher works as a similar “Lineal,” or ruler, as an image of a standard language purged of foreign influences when K. first arrives in the village, meeting a different teacher who is described as a “domineering little man” (befehlshaberischen kleinen Mann). As a model of the kind of teacher Ahad Ha-Am described, the teacher opens up the vision of a language that would rule over its transnational influences, with the “Lineal” or line-drawing capacity performed in the borderline image of posturing that describes his physique. Kafka therefore describes the teacher: “a small, narrow shouldered young man but also, without thereby seeming ridiculous [lächerlich], quite erect [aufrecht], had fixed his eyes from afar on K., who was the only person anywhere around, aside from the teacher’s group.” The teacher thus appears “aufrecht,” or “upright,” in the same gesture that skirts the potentially “lächerlich” sense of the word, compelling respect from the immigrant that at the same time makes his seriousness a matter of attention: “as a stranger” or “foreigner” (Fremder), K. was thus “the first to say hello.”119 In the “Lineal” fashion of Kafka’s later schoolteacher Mizzi, the initial schoolteacher whom K. encounters already looks forward to the conclusion of the novel. The predicament of the “domineering” teacher of The Castle in this way resembles the position of the “victorious” schoolteachers teaching Hebrew in Palestine whom Kafka read about in Ahad Ha-Am. In laying down the law of modern Hebrew, the teachers in Palestine resembled the teacher who could avoid looking “lächerlich,” or “ridiculous,” only by keeping their eyes on the “Fremder,” not just as a visitor but as the foreign content of the new “national” language in its second childhood as the renascent Hebrew tongue. In Benjamin Harshav’s terms, this borderline situation of the Hebrew that reemerged in Palestine was one that many national languages had already undergone: English is a rich language largely because at various times, it was wide open to Latin, to French and Italian literature, to Yiddish and black slang, or to structuralist terminology from Paris. Russian made gigantic strides in the nineteenth century when it absorbed the philosophy, fiction, poetry and culture of Western Europe, including their terminologies (which were only in part replaced by words made of Slavic roots). The great Leo Tolstoy was accused in his time of writing French in Russian words; his syntax and even his prepositions followed French (which was the predominant language in the education of Russian aristocrats from an early age) but this very style became a classical example of literary Russian.120

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In Harshav’s description of linguistic maturity of a national language, the “classical example” of style for a nation may be aristocratic, but it is also childish in the way it must imitate the sources of other nations to come into its own. In Russia aristocratic training “from an early age” thus made “French” a deep substratum of what came to be known as the most elegant form of “literary Russian,” offering a serious description of what it means for a language to reach its national maturity: to integrate what comes from abroad and to hold onto this secret welter of linguistic influences that helped create the normative style. This deferral of childish voices that contributed to the national project meant deciding how much of this youthful humor the emergent standard language would sustain. A “conspicuous debate in the revival of the [Hebrew] language,” as Harshav points out, “which has continued to the present,” was thus how openly childish the Hebrew language would appear in exposing its multiple origins: “whether to use only words that look ‘Hebrew,’ saying with them only what can be said with them, or to write a text whose grammar and framework are Hebrew but which can absorb foreign words, idioms, and syntactic patterns at will.”121 At this level of linguistic reflection on Tolstoy’s “Russian” style—a writer whom Kafka, without reading Russian, deeply loved—the overly serious “schoolteacher” K. meets upon entering the village represents this Hebrew dilemma in its unavoidably comic Zionist terms. The “Castle of Count Westwest” turns out to be more “lächerlich,” or “ridiculous,” in both a Russian and a Jewish sense: the national center that considers its identity to be sovereign and self-contained—as if Tolstoy were thoroughly “Russian”—runs the risk of appearing as ludicrous as an “ancient” Hebrew formed from translations from Western and other languages, or a “Count” Leo Tolstoy whose language was formed by sources beyond the pale. This deferred humor occurs throughout The Castle, as it plays out the comedy of modern Hebrew in Palestine in Kafka’s own translated terms. In line with Ahad Ha-Am’s presentation of “victorious” teachers of Hebrew in Palestine, the would-be land surveyor’s early question to the “domineering” teacher causes the children “to go silent” (“verstummten die Kinder),” and over them this teacher, like Mizzi later with her “Lineal,” figuratively establishes the boundaries of national discourse in school.122 In terms of the “classical” style defined by Harshav as the presence of foreign influences in the childhood of Hebrew and Russian, this “stumm,” or muteness, of the children is a canonical gesture that recalls the attacks on Tolstoy as too given over to “French” and Western European influences, which K. voices in the broadest and most “Western” terms. “You must know the Count?” (Sie kennen wohl den Grafen?)—as



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K. eventually asks the teacher—is in these transnational implications a comic question for Russian and Hebrew national identity. The English translation of the German word “wohl” as “probably”—a word that also means “well,” or “in good condition”—­only raises the issue of whether the sovereign state of any language would ultimately be a healthy one to know. How “well” a teacher knows the “Count” would thus be a loaded question for a teacher in Russia, just as it would be for a Hebrew instructor in Palestine when posed in front of the children. Especially comic when raised by a surveyor, the query implicitly asks how well the teacher—such as Mizzi with her “Lineal” later in the novel—can actually draw the line between what belongs inside and what is outside the national language in the schoolroom’s terms. In Frieda’s later description of the schoolroom, the “assistants” Jeremias and Artur represent the freewheeling, border-crossing answer to this question of how plural the spirit of the classroom should be. Where Ahad Ha-Am lauded the “victorious” teachers of Hebrew as masters of the national classroom, establishing their rule over the “Reste,” or remains, of other languages, Frieda praises the “young lads” as the liberated spirits “In the Schoolhouse,” as the chapter is aptly titled, set free by the healthy entrance of the foreigner into its realm: They were young lads [junge Burschen], cheerful and somewhat simple-minded, [lustig und etwas einfältig] serving a stranger [eines Fremden] for the first time, newly freed from the severity of castle discipline, and therefore always excited and bewildered and in that state apt to fall into silly mischief [Dummheiten], and though it was quite natural to get annoyed at this, the more sensible approach would be to laugh. There were times when she herself could not keep from laughing.123 Laughter is described precisely as an alternative to punishment in this passage; in terms of Kafka’s perspective on national writing in its official form, Frieda’s reaction to the assistants describes the challenge any emerging language poses to a schoolroom standard as well. “Yiddish is the youngest European language,” as Kafka made the point in no uncertain terms in 1912. The “assistants” in the domain of Count Westwest who commit “dumbness,” as the English cognate of “Dummheiten” suggests, indicate the necessary play that allows for linguistic innovation and creation, which are retrospectively seen as foolish when viewed in strict Hebrew or other national terms.124

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As “einfältig,” or “simple” in one sense, the “assistants” suggest the vernacular openness of modern Hebrew or any other national language in transformation, when viewed with the teacher’s ruler and punishing standard in hand. The greatest sin committed by the “assistants” thus parallels the guilt imposed on dialect variety in any language—those foreign assistants whom every “surveyor” needs in order to take the full measure of the land and its speakers, but whose variations and high jinks can never be controlled. “To the best of her knowledge,” as the narrator conveys Frieda’s thoughts on the surveyor’s dilemma, “it was K. who had requested them,” in a sense parallel to Eliezer BenYehuda’s desire to resurrect Hebrew as a spoken language, which required an unstable mix of Jeremias and Artur as linguistic assistants as well. “And now that he had them,” Frieda thus reflects on the presence of the assistants in the classroom with the surveyor, “it would be best to accept them lightheartedly [leicht] as the lighthearted folk [leicht Volk] that they were; that was the best way to put up with them [so ertrage man sie am besten],” or as the German sense of the idiom “ertrage” as to “bear” or “put up with” also suggests “Ertrag,” with the sense of much profit to be acquired in the transaction with those who bear conflicting and foreign names.125 In Frieda’s terms, the richness such “assistants” bring to languages such as Hebrew or Russian may be masked by a haughty attitude that regards them as “simple,” though the word “einfältig” in German in Kafka’s literal sense evokes a healthy “falling” of national arrogance in the classroom as such assistants disrupt the janitor’s work. In Kaka’s Yiddish terms, the fact that the assistants are “lustig,” or “cheerful,” also means that they are “funny” in the schoolroom, in the most vital sense that Ahad Ha-Am leaves out of his description of Palestine’s Hebrew classrooms. Though heretical to the sense of national identity that Frieda articulates, such laughter signifies the continued openness of a national language to whatever “einfältig,” or “simple,” sources might fall into the classroom in the usages its playful speakers bring to the fore. “The people will not leave it to the grammarians,” as Kafka said of Yiddish—“Das Volk überläßt ihn den Grammatikern nicht”—with “people” or “Volk” here expressed as the “lustig” sense of those “assistants” who embody the spirit of every language that would be charted definitively, both enlivening the activity and making such a survey an impossible act.126 In this buoyant spirit of creation, K.’s initial question to the teacher—“So you don’t know the Count?”—can be read in the sardonic mode of Yiddish opposition to premature linguistic closure. Just the inflection “half in jest and half seriously” that K. uses later could be addressed to Russian, or to Hebrew in Palestine, or to any language that claims a definitive standard from which its



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determining rules can be drawn.127 The question is therefore serious, in the surveyor’s desire for a central, national point of reference from which to measure all peripheral usage, while voicing a pleasurable awareness of the teacher’s distance from the “Graf,” a noble title that can be applied to the aristocracy of other nations just as well. Like a more noble version of “Artur” and Jeremias” in their Hebrew and Palestinian meanings, the “Count” becomes The Castle’s reminder of the linguistic multiplicity that dwells within “Occidental” nations, while claiming a tautologically self-identical stature, as the name “Count Westwest” so comically suggests. In the Yiddish theater that Kafka loved, such a heretical knowledge of the multiplicity in national language was portrayed in Talmudic terms. In Elishe ben Avuye, the play Kafka saw during the period of his breakthrough to Jewish languages, the story of “Metatron,” one of the angelic ministers “serving the throne,” as his name is sometimes interpreted, provides a hint of this comic inference in the kind of questions K. asks the teacher about the Graf, or “Count.” In the Talmudic tradition of Metatron, Elishe the “other” is deemed to have sinned by seeing Metatron sitting down on the job, as it were, and thus acting in a manner that portrays differences at the very seat of scribal authority: exposing potential comedy at the center of national affairs. “What did he see,” the Talmud therefore asks of Elishe; “He saw Metatron to whom was given permission one hour each to sit and write the merits of Israel.”128 The angel Metatron thus suggests an exception to the rule that all stand in the presence of divinity—a loophole required to write the lengthy national history of Israel—proposing, as the Talmud asks, that “perhaps—heaven forbid—there are two divine powers?” When the writing of human history must be allowed in heaven, the prospect arises of a heretical multiplicity in the story of God and his people, along with all those transitional human differences and borderline cases that Metatron’s sitting and standing suggest.129 The pleasurable form of heresy thus keeps a straight face in Kafka, since it averts the open vision of such multiplicity that leads to punishment, as the “Angel of the Countenance,” or Metatron, suffers in the end. “So you don’t know the Count?” owes some of its intonation to the theater and its fluid style, just as K.’s initial query to the teacher conveys a “Yiddish” intonation— not the bitterness of the overly serious heretic Elisha ben Avuye in Gordin’s drama, but a comic awareness of the inevitability of difference that emerges in the nation’s official speech. “How could I know him,” the teacher said softly, answering the question with a question before “adding loudly in French: ‘keep in mind that there are innocent children present.’” French is

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here the language that children cannot understand in several senses at once: foreign to their German-speaking ears, but also a subtle “Hebrew” reminder that their “Count” is everyone’s Count Leo Tolstoy, the national writer whose classical voice was formed by other national sources and thus a reminder that the childhood of every language is ultimately a secret that is kept from the schoolchildren to an unsuccessful extent. The teacher’s remark about the “Count” and “innocent children” (unschuldige Kinder) therefore draws an immediate response from the land surveyor: “To K. this was sufficient justification for asking: ‘Teacher, could I call on you? ’ ”130 Though this meeting remains unfulfilled, the question does suggest some of Kafka’s passionate interest in children and the emergent Hebrew of his period, especially children who were acquiring the language enlivened by multiple national sources in a pleasurable way. In response to a letter from Hugo Bergmann that Kafka calls “the first letter in Hebrew I have received from Palestine,” Kafka produced a vision of an outdoor playground, after writing a few days earlier about the “many Hebrew-speaking, healthy, and cheerful children [vielen Hebräisch-Sprechenden, gesunde, fröhliche Kinder]” at a camp “affiliated with the Berlin Jewish People’s home.”131 To Bergmann in Jerusalem, Kafka described the scene this way: “Fifty steps from my balcony is a vacation camp run by the Jewish People’s Home of Berlin. Through the trees I can see the children playing. Cheerful, healthy, spirited children. Eastern European Jews whom West European Jews are rescuing from the dangers of Berlin. Half the days and nights the house, the forest, and the beach are filled with singing [der Wald und der Strand voll Gesang]. I am not happy when I’m among them, but on the threshold of happiness [Schwelle des Glücks].”132 These Hebrewspeaking children enact a crossing of boundaries, instead of any return to ­origin, in which German is displaced by a “song” (Gesang), and the “Schwelle,” or “threshold,” of a life-giving forest replaces the kind of guilt suffered by Gracchus in his “Deutschland” as Jägermeister, or hunting master, and his life of living death that results.133 Here modern Hebrew occupies a “Schwelle,” or threshold, position that is indistinguishable from the renewal of children’s voices and the open classroom in which they sing. Removed from “dangerous Berlin,” the language becomes a medium of exchange between “East European” and “West European Jews”; sustained by contact between speakers of different nations, Hebrew is figured in Kafka’s letter as a national voice that open borders keep alive.

Afterword

The Puzzle of National Traditions, or the Art of Nut-Cracking

He ate, as he said, the kernel of the nut [Nußkern]. The shell he threw away. —Kafka, Diaries

The beach as the “threshold of happiness” defines “Gesang” and looks forward to “Josephine the Singer” (1924) by figuring singing as a portal, not as the essence of “happiness” (Glück) or a healthy nation but as the sound of an exchange between East and West where Zionism is figured in the form of an open and traveling voice. In terms of the schoolrooms of Palestine, Josephine’s singing also resembles Hebrew as the childhood of language, recovering its ancient sources and entering its new and formative stage. “In the olden days of our people there was singing [Gesang],” as Kafka’s mouse-narrator puts it, “as our legends and sayings [Sagen] relate [erzählen], which of course none of us can sing.”1 The childish singer in this way performs the childhood of language, reviving the ancient traditions of the people while drawing her strength from a language in formation, acquiring new sources from boundary-crossing sources that nut gathering suggests. The mouse people thus have “no schools” in Kafka’s story, as if they had not yet acquired the national teachers in Palestine of Ahad Ha-Am.2 Yiddish is therefore a strong symbolic presence in the narrative. The “Gesang” and “national assembly” where the singer performs expose both the connections between the “piping” vernacular of the mouse people and the more exalted form of the singer’s voice. “Can it even be considered singing? Or isn’t it perhaps nothing more than piping,” the narrator therefore asks, evoking her singing as a shifting entity in its most authentic and lively forms.3

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Here “animal” speech has two aspects, just as human language often does, though perceiving either “Hebrew” or “Yiddish” in Josephine’s singing occludes the simultaneous presence of the other form. Ludwig Wittgenstein produced a parable of this phenomenon, albeit in a parallel form without the dimension of Jewish languages. The “Duck-Rabbit” of his Philosophical Investigations can appear as either a duck or a rabbit, depending on the aspect the viewer grasps. Wittgenstein’s animal parable thus raises the question of the secret overlap between radically different aspects of language. “I must distinguish,” as he writes, “between the ‘continuous seeing’ of an aspect and the ‘dawning’ of an aspect,” with the animal offering us a “picture” of the mutually exclusive but simultaneous presence of different linguistic forms of life.4 In similar fashion Josephine’s singing is alternately discussed in Kafka’s story as a nut-cracking that resembles Yiddish or as a completely different, more Hebrew sound to her voice. Each language makes a different “duck” or “rabbit” appearance at different parts of the tale. Rather than offering us a choice between these alternatives, Kafka’s technique emphasizes the multiple aspects that comically inhabit our picture of any language, even when we imagine ourselves discussing a singular beast. Both recent and more traditional Kafka criticisms have therefore identified the importance of both Hebrew and Yiddish to “Josephine’s” duck-rabbit form. Marek Nekula thus extends Hartmut Binder’s earlier notion that Josephine’s singing reflects Kafka’s modern Hebrew lessons with Puah Ben-Tovim, with “piping” suggestive of the Yiddish-speaking masses while missing the interaction between high and low language that this parable of the Jewish artist as human animal so powerfully suggests.5 As the practical voice of the people models Yiddish—unlike the loftiness of Josephine’s quest to represent the nation in her song—nut-cracking suggests the humble, vernacular “opening” to other languages that modern Hebrew had to practice to create its new-old form of the national voice. This relation of high art to nut-cracking, in turn, comes as only a partial revelation to the mice-people: To crack a nut is truly no feat, so no one would ever dare to collect an audience in order to entertain it with nut-cracking. But if all the same one does do that and succeeds in entertaining the public, then it cannot be a matter of simple nut-cracking. Or it is a matter of nut-cracking, but it turns out we have overlooked the art [diese Kunst] of cracking nuts because we were too skilled in it, and that this new nutcracker [neue Nußknacker] was the first to show us its real nature [eigentliches Wesen].6



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The mouse-narrator praises the singer for taking a common habit of the mouth and discovering its potential for artistic form. The artist who solves this difficult problem is the one who can take the nut-cracking of the people and then use it to portray the “actual essence” (eigentliches Wesen) of the nation. The borderline satiric tone here looks forward to the second half of the story and the “battle on behalf of her singing” that Josephine will mount. There the national singer becomes too big for her britches, as it were, by rejecting her mousy habits and her sources in the vernacular of her people—that is, the duck-rabbit past that this admiring and insouciant narrator will not let her forget.

Kafka’s Last Trial: The Tel Aviv Manuscripts The expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception and at the same time the perception’s being unchanged. —Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations How much my life has changed, and how much it remains unchanged at bottom! —Kafka, “Researches of a Dog”

In a similar linguistic comedy, a battle over Kafka’s rediscovered manuscripts has erupted in the Tel Aviv family court. As of this writing, German and Israeli national libraries are vying to become the sole possessors of additional Kafka manuscripts that were left by Max Brod to his secretary Esther Hoffe upon his death. The story of these papers begins with the invasion of Czechoslovakia, when Brod fled the Nazis and Prague in 1939 carrying Kafka’s manuscripts with him to Tel Aviv, a city then part of mandatory Palestine under British rule. After working on his Kafka edition, Brod deposited the bulk of Kafka’s manuscripts and papers in the archive of the Schocken Library in Israel. There they remained until 1961, when the German scholar Malcolm Pasley persuaded Kafka’s heirs to transfer them to Oxford’s Bodleian Library.7 Brod kept other Kafka material in his Tel Aviv flat, however, where they remained in his possession until his death in 1968. Brod willed these remaining texts to his secretary Esther Hoffe. In 1988 she sold an original manuscript of The Trial for £1.1 million; it then became the possession of the German National Archive. At her death in 2007 Hoffe bequeathed her remaining Kafka material to her daughters Eva Hoffe and Ruth Wiesler, at which point a clash

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of national interests came to be represented in the Tel Aviv court. Conducted in modern Hebrew, “Kafka’s Last Trial,” as the critic Elif Batuman aptly calls it, will soon decide which nation or nations will determine Kafka’s archival status as a duck or rabbit, in what is being treated in the press as a trial over the meaning of Kafka’s final words.8 Kafka’s last discovered papers are said to include “postcards, sketches, and letters” by him as well as notebooks and other manuscripts. The papers are currently held in a number of safety deposit boxes in Zurich, Switzerland, and Tel Aviv and are now being cataloged per order of the Israeli court. Whatever these manuscripts contain, the multilinguistic diversity of their different locations stands in sharp—and potentially humorous—contrast to the national authorities that are claiming sole possession of these texts. The National Library of the State of Israel is challenging the rights of Hoffe’s daughters, arguing that provisions of Brod’s earlier will deed the manuscripts to Hebrew University of Jerusalem. There one of Kafka’s notebooks containing his Hebrew vocabulary, donated to the library by his teacher Puah Ben-Tovim, is already open to scholars, raising the question of whether more Hebrew written by Kafka’s own hand remains to be found.9 The German National Archive makes the opposite case. Since the Marbach library already possesses substantial Kafka material—and given that Kafka wrote his classic works in German—the case has been made that Germany would better protect Kafka’s textual legacy. In Red Peter’s terms, however, this question of placing Kafka in the “Tiergarten,” or “zoo,” of one national literature or the other also describes its own “way out”: the “Varieté” of Kafka’s German as well as Jewish linguistic sources find their comic reflection in the transnational claims his writings still provoke. However the Tel Aviv court decides, this duck-rabbit courtroom scene is a fitting image of the translinguistic imagination that Yiddish and Hebrew opened up in Kafka’s German writing, which I have called the hidden openness of tradition in his work. That openness can certainly go into hiding; the Hebrew suggested by Josephine’s singing in Kafka’s story thus is accompanied by an overweening sense of pride, calling for a suspension of the folk’s mousy sense of comedy. “We admire in her,” as the narrator says of her performances, “what we do not admire in ourselves.” The dignity of national identity thus means a loss of vernacular humor in this respect. “The sight of Josephine,” the text tells us, quoting a sarcastic adage from the folk tradition, “is enough to make one stop laughing,” making it clear that their respect for the singer might come at the expense of their nut-cracking ways. The song required to “awaken the masses,” in this parable of Hebrew, will end up “teaching them not perhaps



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understanding” but “awed respect,” suggesting that the national literature of the mice-people might exact a certain cost. ­A rtistic dignity runs the risk of losing the nut-cracking wit and humor that reflect the people’s dispersion and resourcefulness, potentially depriving the noble singer of the sources of her national art.10 “Glück,” or “happiness,” is in this sense a matter of both chance and skill, with “Kunst,” or skill, demonstrated by the singer of this small nation tracing the line between high and low culture that every truly national singer must walk.11 In this respect the “nut” that must be cracked in “Josephine the Singer” is a matter of both modern Hebrew—in its exchanges with Yiddish and other languages—and the relations between different religious, literary, and national traditions that create the most lasting art. As the struggle over his “last” manuscripts suggests, Kafka’s notion of tradition asks us to keep our sense of humor precisely during such “trials”—that is, whenever the question of national literature demands that we take sides. Taking Josephine’s singing too seriously becomes deadly reverence: the cult of adulation that surrounds her as the national singer also cuts her off from the oral pleasures that suggest the Yiddish vernacular, and its nut-cracking humor that keeps her alive. In “Josephine the Singer, or the Mice Folk,” defining her national significance is therefore not the either-or question its title might suggest, for the more we read “Josephine” as a parable of Hebrew and Yiddish—those “mutually necessary” elements of her “Gesang”— the more Kafka tells us that artistic traditions remain vibrant only when our mouths and ears remain open to the most antithetical sounds.12 Nut-cracking as a form of fictional activity in this way also represents the continuing pleasure of Kafka’s art. By calling our attention to this “Nußkern” of identity, “Josephine” points us to linguistic difference as the nourishing kernel of the human animal— the secret source of the singer’s most beautiful song.

Notes

Introduction 1. Franz Kafka, “The Building of the Temple” (Der Tempelbau), in Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes in German and English (New York: Schocken Books, 1946), 46– 47, Franz Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, ed. Jost Schillemeit, Franz Kafka: Schriften Tagebücher Briefe, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, and Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt: S. Fischer 1992), 2:107–8. 2. See Michel Dentan, Humour et Création Littéraire dans L’Oeuvre de Kafka (Paris: Libraire Minard, 1961), 14. Kafka’s narrative “oscille entre le sérieux et le non-sérieux,” as Dentan observes. 3. Gershom Scholem, “Satz 10, Zehn unhistorische Sätze über Kabbala,” in David Biale, “Gershom Scholem’s Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah: Text and Commentary,” Modern Judaism 5, no. 1 (1985): 88. 4. See Franz Kafka, diary entry, November 1, 1911, in Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910– 1923, ed. Max Brod (1948; New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 98–99; Franz Kafka, Tagebücher, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller, and Malcolm Pasley, Schriften Tagebücher Briefe, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, and Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1990), 1:215: “Heute Geschichte des Judentums von Graetz gierig und glücklich zu lessen angefangen. Weil mein Verlangen danach das Lesen weit überholt hatte, war es mir zuerst fremder, als ich dachte, und ich mußte hie und da einhalten, um durch Ruhe mein Judentum sich sammeln zu lassen.” 5. Kafka, “Report to an Academy,” in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, foreword by John Updike (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 251, Franz Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, ed. Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch, and Gerhard Neumann, Schriften Tagebücher Briefe Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, and Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1994), 1:300–301. 6. On Brod’s reaction to Red Peter’s significance in Zionist terms, see Iris Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 130ff. On Maimonides’ aid to the “heimlichen Juden” (secret Jews of Africa), see Heinrich Graetz, Volkstümliche Geschichte der Juden in drei Bänden (Berlin and Vienna: Benjamin Harz Verlag, 1923), 2:463–65. Kafka’s possession of Graetz is documented in Jürgen Born, Kafka’s Bibliothek: Ein beschreibendes Verzeichnis (Frankfurt am Main: S.

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Fischer Verlag, 1990). On the necessarily transnational and multiple “varieté” of this Jewish and African figure as “cryptically insoluble” and permanently open to interpretation, see Scott Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 194. 7. Franz Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks, ed. Max Brod, trans. Ernst Kaiser and ­Eithne Wilkins (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1991), 23, Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 2:48. 8. “I Was a Visitor among the Dead,” in Franz Kafka, Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York: Schocken Books, 1954), 230–32, Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 2:227–30. 9. In this formulation I have been influenced by Ruth V. Gross, “Of Mice and Women: Reflections on a Discourse,” in Franz Kafka (1883–1924): His Craft and Thought, ed. Roman Struc and J. C. Yardley (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1986), 117–40. For an excellent account of the way Kafka’s multilinguistic situation and his deessentialized notions of gender support one another, see Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, “Kafka and Gender,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kafka, ed. Julian Preece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 169–86. 10. The “French” master of the underworld in Kafka’s story evokes the Count of Clermont-Tonnerre, who famously declared in the French national assembly on December 23, 1789: “The Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals.” See Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, 2nd ed. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 115. On Kafka’s style as his method of incorporating the “power of the adversary,” see Theodor Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” in Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), 270. 11. Franz Kafka, “Einleitungsvortrag Über Jargon,” February 1912, in Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, ed. Malcolm Pasley, 1:189: “Der Jargon ist die jüngste europäische Sprache,” English translation in Kafka, Dearest Father, 382. 12. See Felix Weltsch, Religion und Humor im Leben und Werk Franz Kafkas (BerlinGrunewald: F. A. Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1957), 93. 13. Franz Kafka, diary entry, July 6, 1916, in Kafka, Diaries, 364, Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:792. 14. On Kafka’s biblical modernity, see Hillel Barzel, Khazon v’Khizyon: Franz Kafka, Gershon Shofman, Haim Hazaz, Natan Alterman, Aharon Appelfeld, A. B. Yehoshua (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Ykhidav, 1987), 11–13. For a similar approach to Kafka’s contemporary social context that stresses his open concept of national identity, see Dimitry Shumsky, “Historiography, Nationalism and Bi-Nationalism: Czech-German Jewry, the Prague ­Zionists and the Origins of the Bi-National Approach of Hugo Bergmann” (Hebrew), Zion 69, no. 1 (2004): 45–80. 15. Kafka, Diaries, 29, Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:130. 16. Andreas Kilcher, “Kafka, Scholem und die Politik der jüdischen Sprachen,” in Politik und Religion im Judentum, ed. Christoph Miething (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1999), 92, my translation; Kafka, “Einleitungsvortrag Über Jargon,” 189; Kafka, Dearest Father, 382.



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17. See Uzzi Ornan, “Hebrew Is Not a Jewish Language,” in Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages, ed. Joshua Fishman (Leiden: Brill, 1985), 22–24. 18. See Shmuel Niger, Di tsveyshprakhikayt fun undzer literatur (The Bilingualism of Our Literature) (Detroit: Louis La Med Foundation for the Advancement of Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, 1941); Max Weinreich, “Yiddish in the Framework of Other Jewish Languages,” in Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Languages, trans. Shlomo Noble, with the assistance of Joshua A. Fishman (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 45–174; Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990); and Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). I have also been influenced by Joshua Fishman in his “Introduction” to Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages, cited above, and wish to acknowledge my debt to his work. 19. Kafka, dairy entry, January 24, 1922, in Kafka, Diaries, 405, Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:888. 20. On this matter—though not on Kafka’s “Jewishness,” where he demonstrates no similar sense of complexity—James Hawes valuably dispels what he calls “Myth 2: Kafka Wanted His Works Destroyed.” See James Hawes, Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Ruin Your Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 115–19. 21. For the best short account of Kafka’s publication history in German and English, see Arthur Samuelson, “Publisher’s Note,” in Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), vii–xiv. 22. Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography, 2nd enlarged ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1988), 132. 23. Walter Benjamin, letter to Florens Christian Rang, November 18, 1923, in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, ed. and annot. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 215; Walter Benjamin, Briefe I, ed. Theodor W. Adorono and Gershom Scholem (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978), 311. 24. Kafka, diary entry,September 25, 1917, in Kafka, Diaries, 386–87, Kafka, Tagebücher 1:837–38. On the absence of Kafka’s Hebrew vocabulary from the critical edition, see Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften II: Apparatband, 131–32; and Alfred Bodenheimer, “A Sign of Sickness and a Sign of Health: Kafka’s Hebrew Notebooks,” in Kafka, Zionism and Beyond, ed. Mark Gelber (Tübingen: Max Neimeyer Verlag, 2004), 259–70. Alfred Bodenheimer is preparing to publish Kafka’s Hebrew notebooks, which are, alas, as of this writing still officially unavailable to scholars. Kafka’s Hebrew notebook with Hebrew vocabulary from his reading of Brenner’s Breakdown and Bereavement can, however, be viewed at the National Library of the State of Israel in Jerusalem. On Kafka’s “Western and Hasidic” sources for “A Country Doctor,” see Ritchie Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 180–83. On Sander Gilman’s Jewish Self-Hatred: The Hidden Language of the Jews (1986), see the section “The Twilight of Containment” in Chapter 1. 25. See Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism, 105. 26. Max Brod, Streitbares Leben (Munich, 1960), 219–20. On Kafka, Prague German, and Grimm, see Franz Kafka, letter to Felix Weltsch, September 22, 1917: “Would

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you please decide on the basis of Grimm,” in Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 145. For the “Verkehr” between native (heimischen) and foreign (fremde) words in “every language,” see Jacob Grimm, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, vol. 1, 4th ed. (Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1880), 5. 27. Mark M. Anderson, “Virtual Zion: The Promised Lands of the Kafka Critical Editions,” in Kafka, Zionism and Beyond, ed. Gelber, 306–20. 28. See Elif Batuman, “Kafka’s Last Trial,” New York Times Magazine, September 26, 2010, 34ff. 29. Anderson, “Virtual Zion,” 306–20; Wilhelm Grimm, “Bericht über das Deutsche Wörterbuch,” Proceedings of the Germanists at Frankfurt, 24, 25, and 26 September 1846, in Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm: Werke, ed. Ludwig Erich Schmitt, sec. II, The Works of Wilhelm Grimms, vol. 31, Shorter Works 1 (1881) (Hildesheim-Zurich-New York: Olms-­Weidmann, 1992), 511: “Unsere Schriftsprache kennt keine Gesetzgebung, keine richterliche Entscheidung über das, was zulässig und was auszustossen ist, sie reinigt sich selbst” (Our literary language has no explicit rules, has no judicial body to decide what is to be allowed entry and what forms are to be shown the door: it purifies itself). 30. Cf. Graetz, Volkstümliche Geschichte der Juden, 2:479. 31. Jakob Fromer, Der Organismus des Judentums (Charlottenburg, 1909), 64. On Kafka’s reading of this work, see Kafka, diary entry, January 24, 1912, in Kafka, Diaries, 173, Kafka, Tagebücher, 360. 32. For a sense of Salomon Maimons Lebengeschichte as one of Kafka’s sources for ­Maimonides, see Manfred Voigts, ed., Franz Kafka “Vor dem Gesetz”: Aufsätze und Materialien (Würzburg: Köninshausen & Neumann, 1994). Graetz’s account of Maimonides in his Volkstümliche Geschichte der Juden also provides a rich vein of material on Maimonides that Kafka possessed, part of a Maimonidean legacy that is equally complex. Menachem Kellner, Maimonides’ Confrontation with Mysticism (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2006), has recently made the case for Maimonides as a protector of rabbinic tradition. Sarah Stroumsa, Maimonides and His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker (Princeton and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), by contrast, reads Maimonides as “bringing to bear the influence of his non-Jewish cultural context” (xiii). Kafka’s reactions to ­Maimonides give evidence of both inclinations, with his deployment of conservative Maimonidean themes often serving to expose a more open and transcultural version of traditions, as the subsequent chapters will often suggest. 33. Franz Kafka, diary entry, January 16, 1922, in Kafka, Diaries 399, Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:878. 34. Kafka’s immersion in Hebrew and its relation to these figures of the “Hebrew renaissance” are the subjects of Chapter 5 below. 35. Kafka, Parables in German and English, 37; Franz Kafka, letter to Robert Klopstock, June 1921, in Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 285; Kafka, Briefe 1902–1924 (New York: Schocken Books, 1958), 333.



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36. For an example, see David Suchoff, “Kafka and the Postmodern Divide: Hebrew and German in Aharon Appelfeld’s The Age of Wonders (Tor ha-pela’ot),” Germanic Review 75, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 149–67.

Chapter 1 1. Vaclav Havel, speech delivered at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, on April 26, 1990, in The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice; Speeches and Writings, 1990–1996, trans. Paul Wilson and others (New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 29–30. 2. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 308. 3. See Stanley Corngold, “Kafka and the Dialect of Minor Literature,” College Literature 21, no. 1 (February 1994): 90–91. 4. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 353. 5. In Konrad Adenauer’s West Germany the situation was little different. Kafka was canonized as a universal, not a Jewish, writer, alienated from the Western Enlightenment and thus excluded from the historical and transnational questions that obsessed a Germany divided in two. On Kafka’s cold war canonization, see David Suchoff, “The Liberal Imagination and Its Discontents,” and “New Historicism and Containment,” in Suchoff, Critical Theory and the Novel: Mass Society and Cultural Criticism in Dickens, Melville, and Kafka (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 9–25. For an analysis of Kafka’s German canonization that follows this approach, see Stephen D. Dowden, “Kafka and the Cold War,” in Dowden, Kafka’s Castle and the Critical Imagination (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1995), 19–56. 6. Marthe Robert, “Kafka en France,” in Le Siècle de Kafka, ed. Yasha David and Jean-Pierre Morel (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1984), 15–20. 7. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, foreword by Réda Bensmaïa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 18. 8. Walter Sokel, “Two Views of ‘Minority’ Literature: Deleuze, Kafka, and the GermanJewish Enclave of Prague,” Quarterly World Report 6 (1983): 7. 9. See Suchoff, “Cold War Cultural Theory,” in Suchoff, Critical Theory and the Novel, 9–10. 10. Max Brod, “Der Dichter Franz Kafka,” in Gustav Krojanker, Juden in der Deutschen Literature (Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1922), 60; Marthe Robert, Seule, Comme Franz Kafka (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1979); Marthe Robert, As Lonely as Franz Kafka, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 3. 11. See, for instance, Mark Anderson, ed., Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics and the Fin de Siècle (New York: Schocken Books, 1989). 12. Jameson, Postmodernism, 308. 13. Mark Anderson, “German Intellectuals, Jewish Victims: A Politically Correct Solidarity,” Chronicle of Higher Education 48, no. 8 (October 19, 2001): B7; Scott Spector,

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“From Big Daddy to Small Literature: On Taking Kafka at His Word,” in Evolving Jewish Identities in German Culture: Borders and Crossings, ed. Linda E. Feldman and Diana Orendi (Westport, Conn. and London: Praeger, 2000), 80. 14. Ruth Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Language and Culture (New York: Free Press, 2000), 86. 15. See Robert Alter, “Franz Kafka: Wrenching Scripture,” in Alter, Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 64. Chana Kronfeld thus faults Deleuze and Guattari for ignoring “not only [Kafka’s] works’ links to the textual practices of Hebrew and Yiddish, but also the very possibility of producing such oppositional critiques in the nonmajor languages.” See Kronfeld, “Beyond Deleuze and Guattari: Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism in the Age of Privileged Difference,” in Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies, ed. Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 268. Following Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), Alter alludes to Kafka’s Zionism and Yiddish as part of his “wrenching scripture.” 16. Cf. Frederic Jameson, “Conclusion,” in Jameson, Postmodernism, 308; and Harold Bloom, “Kafka: Canonical Patience and Indestructibility,” in Bloom, Western Canon, 449. 17. See David Damrosch, “Kafka Comes Home,” in Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 189. 18. Jameson, Postmodernism, 308. 19. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” lecture delivered in 1966, in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 251. 20. Jameson is quoting from “the little hunchback” section of Benjamin’s Kafka essay, on “at least two current interpretations of Kafka we needed to get rid of for good” (Jameson, Postmodernism, 308). See Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. with an intro. by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (1968; New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 127. 21. See Walter Benjamin, letter to Gershom Scholem, February 20, 1939, in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem 1932–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem, trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere, intro. Anson Rabinbach (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 244: “I suggested to Hannah Arendt that she make the manuscript of her book on Rahel Varnhagen available to you. . . . The book made a great impression on me. It swims with powerful strokes against the current of edifying and apologetic Judaic Studies.” On Arendt, Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, and Benjamin’s philosophy of history, see Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), 160–62. 22. Walter Benjamin, letter to Gershom Scholem, June 12, 1938, reprinted as “Some Reflections on Kafka,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, 142.



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23. Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 147. 24. See Yuri Slezkine, “Isaac Babel’s First Love,” in Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 165. 25. Walter Benjamin, “Über Sprache Überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen,” 1916, in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980), 2:145–46: “There is no such thing as a meaning of language; as communication, language communicates an intellectual essence, i.e. the medial itself”; Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Walter Benjamin: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 320, translation modified. 26. Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” 131–33; Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: Zur zehnten Wiederkehr seines Todestages,” in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 2:430, 431. 27. Franz Kafka, “Die Sorge des Hausvaters,” in Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, ed. Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch, and Gerhard Neumann, Franz Kafka: Schriften Tagebücher Briefe, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, and Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1994), 2:349, 1:282–84. “Hausvater” was also Kafka’s German translation of the Hebrew term Bal Bajit (Heb. Baal Bayit) in this dual sense—which meant “pious but unlearned” in Kafka’s source, evoking the Yiddish balabusta—in a piece that opens this orthodox desire for a singular tradition in many ways. See Jakob Fromer, Das Organismus des Judentums (Charlottenburg, 1909), 12: “IV: Der fromme Ungelehrte, Bal Bajit (Hausbesitzer genannt).” 28. The name “Odradek,” according to Werner Hamacher’s insightful reading, was in this sense “Kafka’s signature.” See Hamacher,“The Gesture in the Name: On Benjamin and Kafka,” in Hamacher, Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, trans. Peter Fenves (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 326ff. For an account of the different meanings of the name, see Hartmut Binder, Kafka-Kommentar zu Sämtlichen Erzählungen (Munich: Winkler Verlag, 1982), 232; and Hamacher above. 29. See Scott Spector, “Linguistic Borders,” in Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 74–75, 262n25. 30. Walter Benjamin, “Schemata, Dispositionen, und Aufzeichnungen (bis ca. August/ September 1934) zum Kafka-Essay von 1934,” in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 2:1209. 31. Heinrich Heine, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland ” (1834), in Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Briegleb (Munich: Karl Hanser Verlag, 1971), 2:583: “daß man den Menschen nicht nach seiner äußern Erscheinung, sondern nach seinem inner Werte schätzen sollte.” 32. Walter Benjamin, “Juden in der Deutschen Kultur,” in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 2:807. 33. Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” 140. For different versions of that legend, see Gordon Craig, “Germans and Jews,” in Craig, The Germans (New York: Putnam, 1982), 130; Amos

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Elon, The Pity of It All: A History of Jews in Germany, 1743–1933 (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2002), 1–4; and its origins, detailed in Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1973), 764–65. 34. Franz Kafka, diary entry, January 26, 1912, in Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910– 1923, ed. Max Brod (1948; New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 174; Franz Kafka, Tagebücher, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller, and Malcolm Pasley, Franz Kafka: Schriften Tagebücher Briefe, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, and Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1990), 1:362–63. 35. See Dan Miron, “Language as Caliban,” in Miron, A Traveler Disguised: The Rise of Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1973), 43–44. 36. Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” 134. 37. See Yuri Slezkine, “Mercury’s Sandals: The Jews and Other Nomads,” in Slezkine, Jewish Century, 4–39; Franz Kafka, letter to Max Brod, June 1921, in Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 289; and Franz Kafka, Briefe, 1902–1924, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken Books, 1958), 338. 38. See Moritz Goldstein, “Deutsch-jüdischer Parnaß,” Der Kunstwart 25 (1912): 281–94; and Hannah Arendt, “Walter Benjamin, 1892–1940,” “I: The Hunchback,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, 1; Goldstein, 30; and Gershom Scholem, “Zehn unhistorische Sätze über Kabbala,” Number 1: “Echte Tradition bleibt verborgen; erst die verfallende Tradition verfällt auf einen Gegenstand und wird im Verfall erst in ihrer Grösse­ sichtbar,” repr. in David Biale, “Gershom Scholem’s Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on ­K abbalah: Text and Commentary,” Modern Judaism 5, no. 1 (February 1985): 67–93, here 71. 39. See Gershom Scholem, “Jews and Germans” (Juden und Deutsche), a lecture delivered at the plenary session, World Jewish Congress, August 2, 1966, first published in Gershom Scholem, Judaica 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Bibliothek Suhrkamp, 1970), 20–46. Arendt would have encountered the English translation by Werner J. Dannhauser, published in Commentary (November 1966), a journal in which she published. 40. Arendt, “Introduction” to Benjamin, Illuminations, 32. 41. “Das Mauscheln an sich ist sogar schön,” Kafka wrote and should be “im weitesten Sinne genommen.” See Franz Kafka, letter to Max Brod, June 1921, 289; Kafka, Briefe, 336– 37; and Hannah Arendt, “Introduction,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, 32. On these connections, see David Suchoff, “Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt and the Scandal of Jewish Particularity,” Germanic Review 72, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 56–76. Arendt’s 1968 “Introduction” reprints sentences from her earlier appreciation of Kafka first published in Partisan Review 11 (1944): 412–22, while adding her appraisal of “mauscheln” as a central, Jewish linguistic dimension of Kafka’s “perfection” as a writer. See Hannah Arendt, “Kafka: A Revaluation; on the Twentieth Anniversary of His Death,” in Arendt, Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), 80. 42. Scholem had already delivered the work as a series of lectures in New York in 1938.



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43. Raluca Eddon, “Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and the Paradox of ‘NonNational’ Nationalism,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 12, no. 1 (2003): 55–68; David Biale, “Scholem und der moderne Nationalismus,” in Gershom Scholem Zwischen den Disziplinen, ed. Peter Schäfer and Gary Smith (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1995), 259. 44. Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 161, 187, 189. 45. Gershom Scholem, letter to Hannah Arendt, December 16, 1945: “I’m . . . sending you a friendly gift in today’s mail . . . it consists of Walter’s works [Arbeiten]: the piece on Hölderlin’s poems ‘Dichtermut’ and ‘Blödigkeit,’ and the one on Franz Kafka”; the letter refers to “unpublished” works of Benjamin and thus not the 1934 Jüdische Rundschau essay. Elsewhere, Scholem explains that the letter was meant to be a preview of future work; hence his interest in forwarding it as such to Arendt, who was in the United States and had already published on Kafka in the Partisan Review in 1944. See Gershom Scholem: A Life in Letters, 1914–1982, ed. and trans. Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 328; and Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981), 214. 46. Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography, 2nd enlarged ed. (1937; New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 202 and n. 59. 47. Robert Alter, “Jewish Dreams and Nightmares,” Commentary 45, no. 1 (January 1968): 48. 48. See Lionel Trilling, “Hawthorne in Our Time,” in Trilling, Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 201; Arendt, “Introduction,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, 32; and David Suchoff, “The Rosenberg Case and the New York Intellectuals,” in Secret Agents: The Rosenberg Case and the McCarthy Era, ed. Marjorie Garber and Rebecca Walkowitz (New York: Routledge, 1995), 155–69. 49. Scholem, Walter Benjamin, 85. 50. C. J. Wells, German: A Linguistic History to 1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 369. 51. Friedrich Kluge, Unser Deutsch: Einführung in die Muttersprache (Leipzig: Verlag von Quelle & Meyer, 1910), 26. Translations from this text are my own. 52. For a chart of the different types of foreign borrowing in German, see Wells, German, 276. Eric Blackall, The Emergence of German as a Literary Language 1700–1775, 2nd ed. (1959; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), is the classic demonstration of German’s literary dependence on such development help, especially in the famous example of French. 53. See Derek Bickerton, Roots of Language (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Karoma, 1981), 1–42. 54. Kafka, diary entry, December 25, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries, 150; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:322. 55. Franz Kafka, “Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language,” Jewish Town Hall, Prague, February 18, 1912, in Franz Kafka, Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York: Schocken Books, 1954); Franz Kafka, “Ein­ leitungsvortrag Über Jargon,” February 1912, in Franz Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, ed. Malcolm Pasley, Franz Kafka: Schriften Tagebücher Briefe, Kritische Ausgabe,

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ed. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, and Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1992), 1:189. 56. Kluge, Unser Deutsch, 80. 57. Wilhelm Grimm, “Bericht Über das Deutsche Wörterbuch,” Proceedings of the Germanists at Frankfurt, September 24, 25, and 26, 1846, in Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Werke, ed. Ludwig Erich Schmitt, Section II: Die Werke Wilhelm Grimms, vol. 31, Kleinere Schriften, vol. 1 (1881) (Hildesheim-Zürich-New York: Olms-Weidmann, 1992), 511; Franz Kafka, “Einleitungsvortrag über die Jargon,” in Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 1:190. 58. Irving Wohlfarth, “Männer aus der Fremde: Walter Benjamin and the GermanJewish Parnassus,” New German Critique 70, no. 3 (Winter 1997): 3–85, here 27. 59. Hermann Paul, Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (1880) (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1970), 404–5: “Gemeinsprache . . . ist nict als eine starre Regel, welche die Sprachbewegung zum Stillstand bringen würde”; the previous chapter is called “Sprachmischung.” On Kafka’s introduction to this text, see “Schulzeit,” in Kafka Handbuck in Zwei Bänden, Band I: Der Mensch und seine Zeit, ed. Hartmut Binder (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1979), 199. 60. This language mixture in the formation of Yiddish verbs includes common words such as leyenen (to read), which hailed from a pre-French form. On “Gauner,” see Friedrich Kluge, Etymylogisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (Strasbourg: Karl J. Trübner, 1899), 135–36. On the cross-linguistic fusion of the German infinitive suffix with Hebrew and other roots, see Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 33. For Kafka’s use of “Gaunersprache,” see “Einleitungsvortrag über Jargon,” in Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 1:189; and Kafka, Dearest Father, 382. 61. Luther Bibel, 2 Moses 7:2; Kafka, Der Verschollene, ed. Jost Schillemeit, in Franz Kafka: Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, and Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1983), 1:40. 62. Scholem, Walter Benjamin, 85. The quip had canonical significance since AveLallemant’s work has become a standard reference for both German and Yiddish historical linguistics. Kluge’s German etymological dictionary, for instance, still uses Ave-Lallemant as a source, just as the recent introduction to Harkavy’s groundbreaking Yiddish-English-­Hebrew Dictionary of 1925 notes that Das Deutsche Gaunerthum retains its “permanent value to Yiddish scholarship.” See Dovid Katz, “Alexander Harkavy and His Trilingual Dictionary,” in Harkavy, Yidish-English-Hebreyisher Verterbukh, Yiddish-­ English-Hebrew Dictionary, repr. of the 1928 expanded 2nd ed. (New York: Schocken Books, 1988), xiii. 63. Cf. Franz Rosenzweig, “Scripture and Luther,” in Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Scripture and Translation, trans. Laurence Rosenwald with Everett Fox (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 47, where the similar postulate that “all speaking is translating” is discussed; Benjamin, “On Language as Such,” 325; Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 2:151. 64. Franz Rosenzweig, “Modern Hebrew?” (1925), in Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, 3rd ed., presented by Nahum Glatzer, new foreword by Paul Mendes-Flohr (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1998), 276: “[Hebrew] endures because it cannot,



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will not, and may not die”; Rosenzweig, Kleinere Schriften (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1937), 223: “es ist nicht Nichtsterbenkönnen, Nichtsterbenwollen, Nichsterbendürfen”; Slezkine, Jewish Century, 19. 65. Franz Rosenzweig, “Nachwort zu den Hymnen und Gedichten des Jehuda Halevi, 1922/3,” in Rosenzweig, Kleinere Schriften, 202: “Wenn die fremde Stimme etwas zu sagen hat, dann muß die Sprache nacher anders aussehn als vorher”; Franz Rosenzweig, Ninety-Two Poems and Hymns of Yehuda Halevy, ed. with an intro. by Richard A. Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), xlv. 66. Rosenzweig, Ninety-Two Poems, xlv; Rosenzweig, Kleinere Schriften, 202. 67. See “Theology, Language, History,” in David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 140–41. 68. Benjamin, “On Language As Such,” in Benjamin, Reflections, 329. 69. Franz Rosenzweig, “The Peoples and the Land of Their Homeland,” in Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara E. Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 318–19: “For this reason, the tribal legend of the eternal people begins otherwise than with indigenousness . . . Israel’s ancestor immigrated.” 70. Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in Benjamin, Reflections, 335; Benjamin, “Über das mimetische Vermögen,” in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 2: 213: “Dergestalt wäre die Sprache die höchste Stufe des mimetischen Verhaltens und das vollkommenste Archiv der unsinnlichen Ähnlichkeit”; Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” 130ff. 71. See Blackall, Emergence of German as a Literary Language, 45–32; Walter Benjamin, The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, in Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. to date (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996–), 1:158; Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik (1919), in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 1:76. 72. Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” 131. 73. Walter Benjamin, Deutsche Menschen, quoting Jacob Grimm letter to Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann,” Berlin, April 14, 1858, in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 4:218– 19; Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” 120, 126; Benjamin, “Kafka,” in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 2:424; Wilhelm Grimm, “Bericht über das Deutsche Wörterbuch,” 518–19; Franz Kafka, letter to Felice Bauer, October 7, 1916, in Kafka, Briefe an Felice, und andere Korrespondenz aus der Verlobungszeit,ed. Erich Heller and Jürgen Born, in Franz Kafka, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Max Brod (Tübingen: S. Fischer Verlag, 1967), 720. 74. Stanley Corngold, Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 51, 55. 75. Kafka, “Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language,” 385; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 1:192–93. 76. Walter Benjamin, letter to Florens Christian Rang, November 18, 1923, in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–40, ed. and annot. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 215; Walter Benjamin, Briefe, vol. 1, ed. with comments by Theodor W. Adorono and Gershom Scholem (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978), 310: “Hier, wenn irgendwo, sind wir im Kern der gegenwärtigen Judenfrage: daß der Jude

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heute auch die beste deutsche Sache für die er sich öffentlich einsetzt, preisgibt, weil seine öffentliche deutsche Äußerung notwendig käuflich (im tiefern Sinn) ist.” 77. Walter Benjamin, letter to Gershom Scholem, June 12, 1938, in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem 1932–1940, 221; Benjamin, Briefe, 2:758. For a short summary of his unfulfilled plans to learn Hebrew in Jerusalem in the years 1927–32, see “Unlocking the Gates,” in Gershom Scholem: A Life in Letters, 1914–1982, 92–93. The full story of Benjamin’s encounter with modern Hebrew remains to be written. 78. Slezkine, Jewish Century, 45; Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, 82. 79. Franz Rosenzweig, “Scripture and Luther,” 49. Luther was “altogether conscious,” Rosenzweig writes, “of the movement of the German reader in the direction of the alien original, the genius of the alien language” (Dennoch war er sich auch der anderen Seite seines Werks, der Bewegung des deutschen Lesers hin zu dem fremden Original, dem fremden Sprachgeist, voll bewußt). See Rosenzweig, Kleinere Schriften, 143. 80. Benjamin, “Reflections on Kafka,” 144; Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, 72; Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 4:12: “So ist die Übersetzung zuletzt zweckmäßig für den Ausdruck des innersten Verhältnisse der Sprachen zueinander.” 81. My translation. See Franz Rosenzweig, letter to Gertrude Oppenheim, May 25, 1927, in Franz Rosenzweig, Briefe, with the assistance of Ernst Simon, selected and ed. by Edith Rosenzweig (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1935), 596. 82. Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften, pt. 1: Briefe und Tagebücher, vol. 2: 1918–29 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 768. 83. Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 319, translation modified. 84. Franz Kafka, Parables in German and English (New York: Schocken Books, 1946), 39; Franz Kafka, letter to Robert Klopstock, June 1921, in Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, 285; Franz Kafka, Briefe, 1902–1924 (New York: Schocken Books, 1958), 333. 85. Hillel Barzel, Khazon v’Khizyon: Franz Kafka, Gershon Shofman, Haim Hazaz, Natan Alterman, Aharon Appelfeld, A. B. Yehoshua (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Ykhidav, 1987), 26–27. It is not necessary, however, to envision the “new friend” as the New Testament and the Five Friends as the “Old,” since what is at stake in the parable is the issue that arises with any enlargement with an already established canon, or literary language. 86. Franz Kafka, “Fellowship,” in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum Glatzer, foreword by John Updike (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 435–36; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 2:313–14: “Wir sind fünf Freunde, wir sind einmal hintereinander aus einem Haus gekommen.” 87. Leora Batnitsky, Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 75. 88. Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 318, Der Stern der Erlösung, introduction by Reihhold Mayer, with a memorial address by Gershom Scholem (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988), 332. 89. Kafka, letter to Felice Bauer, January 16, 1913, in Kafka, Briefe an Felice, 252: “er macht auf mich einen öden Eindruck. Allem, was er sagt, fehlt etwas.”



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90. See Dana Hollander, “Franz Rosenzweig on Nation, Translation, and Judaism,” Philosophy Today (Winter 1994): 384; and Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 320. By 1926 Rosenzweig’s critical paradigm for national identity was a language open to foreign contributions, paralleling the “move toward Zionism” in his thinking that Stéphane Mòses detects. See “From 1917 to 1925,” in Franz Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings, trans. and ed. with notes and commentary by Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 2000), esp. 93n11; and Stéphane Mòses, “Franz Rosenzweig in Perspective: Reflections on His Last Diaries,” in The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1988), 191–95. 91. For an account of this dispute, see Martin Jay, “Politics of Translation: Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin on the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible,” in Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 198–215. 92. Kafka, diary entry, December 25, 1911, in Kafka, Tagebücher, 247. 93. Benjamin, letter to Scholem, September 18, 1926, in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 305, translation slightly modified; and Benjamin, Briefe, 1:432. 94. Benjamin here prefigures Scholem’s sense that a national language can be renewed only in secret: public avowal leads to the counterreaction of a nationalism that “disavows” its cross-border nourishment, producing a “demonic propaganda” instead. See Scholem, Walter Benjamin, 173. Only a “mad egotism,” as Rosenzweig observed, could be “mad enough to imagine itself satisfied with its own personal or national being, and to long for an empty desert all around”; see Rosenzweig, “Scripture and Luther,” 48. 95. Kafka, diary entry, December 25, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries, 152; Kafka, Tagebücher, 318. 96. Scholem, Walter Benjamin, 173. 97. Chana Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 11. 98. Daniel 1:16, Hebrew text; Ernest David Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language for Readers of English (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 351; Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 170, where the likely origin of “Meltzar” is “Akkadian”; Kafka, manuscript of Octavo Notebook D, Oxford Bodleian Library—next to the Hebrew word “Meltsar,” Kafka supplies the German definition “Kellner” (waiter); Kafka, diary entry, December 25, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries, 149; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:314–15: “verstorbene Schriftsteller litteraturgeschichtlich zu registrieren.” 99. Mordechai Georg [Jìri] Langer, “Mashehu Al Kafka” (A Kafka Anecdote), in Me’At Tsa’ri: Asufat Ketavav, coll. and ed. Miriam Dror (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Hotsaʾat Agudat ha-sofrim ha-ʻIvrim bi-Medinat Yiśraʾel ve-ʻEḳed, 1984), 133. 100. Franz Rosenzweig, “Neuhebräisch?” (Modern Hebrew?), in Rosenzweig, Kleinere Schriften, 221, 223. A partial translation can be found in Nahum Glatzer, ed., Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, 3rd ed. (Cambridge and Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 263–71. On the Arabic borrowings of the Tibbonides and their contributions, see William Chomsky, Hebrew: The Eternal Language (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969), 174–75ff.

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101. Rosenzweig, “Neuhebräisch?,” 222–23. 102. H. N. Byalik [Bialik], Law and Legend or Halaka and Aggada, trans. from the Hebrew by Julius L. Siegel (New York: Bloch, 1923), 14. 103. Benjamin, “Reflections on Kafka,” 133–34; Walter Benjamin, letter to Gershom Scholem, June 12, 1938, in Walter Benjamin, Briefe, vol. 2, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966), 763. 104. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, 108–9. 105. Moses Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 152. I am indebted to Willi Goetschel for this connection. See “From the Margins of Philosophy: Mendelssohn’s Aesthetic Theory of Mixed Sentiments,” in Willi Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 85–99, esp. 96. 106. Chaim Nachman Bialik, “Halacha und Aggada,” Der Jude 4 (1919–20): 61–72. 107. Bialik, Law and Legend, 10–11. 108. Ted Cohen, Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 60. 109. Bialik, Law and Legend, 10–11. 110. When meeting Felice Bauer on August 13, 1912, Kafka was carrying with him a copy of Palästina, with an essay by Ahad Ha-Am translated into German and entitled “Die Lehre der Tatsachen,” in which the “halbe Herrschaft” of the Hebrew language is discussed, as well as the struggle surrounding “die hebräischen Schulen in Jaffa und Jerusalem.” See Palästina: Monatsschrift für die Erschliessung Palästinas, 9, nos. 7/8 (1912); and Jürgen Born, Kafka’s Bibliothek: Ein beschreibendes Verzeichnis (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1990), 163, no. 277. 111. Harshav, Meaning of Yiddish, 115. 112. Hence the deadpan quip Kafka offers: “From the Talmud: when a scholar goes to meet his bride, he should take an amhorez [country bumpkin] along, he is too sunk in his scholarliness, he would not observe what should be observed [das Notwendige].” See Kafka, diary entry, November 29, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries, 129; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:276 (Aus dem Talmud: Geht ein Gelehrter auf Brautschau, so soll er sich einen amhorez mitnehmen, da er zu sehr in seine Gelehrsamkeit versenkt das Notwendige nicht merken würde). Kafka’s source for the Hebrew meaning of “Am-ha-arez,” before he translated it into “Mann vom Lande,” was Jakob Fromer, Organismus des Judentums, 1909, which Kafka reports reading on January 24, 1912, and gives the Talmudic passage from Sota 22a in German. 113. As Iris Bruce notes, the priest in The Trial’s version of this text is mocked for precisely such learned ignorance. See Bruce, “Kakfa and Jewish Folklore,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kafka, ed. Julian Preece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 155. 114. Henry Sussman, The Task of the Critic: Poetics, Philosophy, Religion (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 150. On the origins of “Tartar,” see Ernest David Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Amsterdam and New York: Elsevier, 1966–67); Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.); Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology,



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ed. Robert K. Barnhardt (New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1988); Friedrich Kluge, “Etymologisches Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1989). 115. See Walter Benjamin, letter to Gershom Scholem, November 3, 1930, in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, 369–70: “I read your observations on the end of the Balfour policy with considerable care. They have intensified my long-standing supposition, which was only strengthened by Escha’s reports: namely, the suspicion that you have taken up residence in the only corner of Zionism that is permanently sheltered.” 116. One of its leaders was Judah Magnes, the American rabbi who helped found Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the figure who, with Scholem, tried to convince Benjamin to assume a professorship there. See Gershom Scholem: A Life in Letters, 92–93; and Eddon, “Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and the Paradox of ‘Non-National’ Nationalism,” 56. 117. The quotations are from Scholem’s letter to Benjamin, August 1, 1931, reprinted in Scholem, Walter Benjamin, 169–74. 118. Ritchie Robertson, “‘Antizionismus, Zionismus’: Kafka’s Responses to Jewish Nationalism,” in J. P. Stern and J. J. White, Paths and Labyrinths: Nine Papers Read at the Franz Kafka Symposium Held at the Institute of Germanic Studies on 20 and 21 October 1983 (London: Institute of Germanic Studies, 1985), 28. 119. Scholem, Walter Benjamin, 169–74; Scholem, “The Science of Judaism: Then and Now,” in Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays in Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 310. 120. For fuller context in this regard, see Biale, “Scholem und der Moderne Nationalismus,” 259. 121. Franz Kafka, letter to Felice Bauer, September 8, 1913, in Kafka, Briefe an Felice, 465: “Ergebnislose Deutsche Reden, viel hebräisch . . . Lise W. wirft Papierkügelchen in den Saal, trostlos.” 122. The issue was Palästina: Monatsschrift für die Erschliessung Palästinas 9, nos. 7/8 (1912). In his essay “Die Lehre der Tatsachen,” his report of a visit to the Jewish schools in Palestine, Ha-Am wrote, “The Hebrew language is no longer an ideal in Palestine, but the essence of life, a natural phenomenon” and a “valid model for the sons of our people in all lands” (183) (Und die hebräischen Schulen in Jaffa und Jerusalem . . . “Hebräischer Erziehung” in “Hebraischer Sprache” ist kein Ideal mehr in Palästina, sondern Lebenswesen, natürliche Erscheinung . . . mustergülitig . . . für die Söhne unseres Volkes in allen Ländern). See Born, Kafka’s Bibliothek, 165, 215. For an account of Rosenfeld’s speech and its effect on the convention, see Michael Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 74–75. Many of the languages that concerned Kafka’s national politics were present in Rosenfeld’s speech: English, the fictional language of Amerika; Yiddish, the language in which Rosenfeld wrote his poetry; and Hebrew, as the exclusive national language that was the subject of his ire. 123. Franz Kafka, letter to Max Brod, September 16, 1913, in Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, 100; Kafka, Briefe, 1902–1924, 120. 124. Stenographisches Protokoll der Verhandlungen des XI: Zionisten-Kongresses in Wien, September 8, 1913, 288: “Die Juden, welche nach Palästina kamen, bringen den Golus-­Schmutz mit, ohne zu überlegen, daß durch die Sprachenzersplitterung die Erlösung

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der Kultur in eine weite Ferne gerückt wird. Statt einer einzigen, zentralisierten Nationalkraft haven wir dort Splitter, unzusammenhängend, ja sich gegenseitig bekämpfend. Diese trauerige Erscheinung finden wir auch bei den vielen palästinensischen Schulen: eine babylonische Sprachenverwirrung—die Kinder, die Zöglinge, verstehen einander nicht” (The Jews who came to Palestine brought the filth of the diaspora with them, without considering that this splintering into different languages pushed their redemption through culture far into the distance). 125. [Zwischenrufe], Stenographisches Protokoll, September 3, 1913, 53. 126. Franz Kafka, “Wir graben den Schacht von Babel,” in Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 2:484. 127. Franz Kafka, “Letter to His Father,” in Kafka, Dearest Father, 145; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 2:152: “Your opinion was correct, every other was mad, wild, meshugge, not normal.” On the self-denial of German’s transnational legacy, see Goldstein, “Deutsch-jüdischer Parnaß,” 281–94; and Steven Aschheim’s excellent account of the furor the essay raised, “1912: The Publication of Moritz Goldstein’s ‘The German Jewish Parnassus’ Sparks a Debate over Assimilation, German Culture, and the ‘Jewish Spirit,’” in The Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture 1096–1996, ed. Sander Gilman and Jack Zipes (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 299–305. Kafka refers to Jakob Wasserman in the diary entry that interprets his own text, “The Judgment” (1912), and expands this list. See Kafka, diary entry, September 23, 1912, in Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:100; and Kafka, Diaries, 213. 128. Kafka, letter to Brod, June 1921, 286–89; Kafka, Briefe, 334–38. 129. Kafka, diary entry, November 5, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries, 105; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:227. 130. Harshav, Meaning of Yiddish, 67. 131. Kafka, diary entry, January 26, 1912, in Kafka, Diaries, 175: “S. Rabinowitz (Sholom Aleichem), né 1859. Custom of great jubilee celebrations in Yiddish literature”; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:26. 132. Kafka, “Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language,” 382; Kafka, “Einleitungsvortrag über die Jargon,” in Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 1:189, translation slightly modified. 133. Kafka, “Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language,” 382. 134. See Born, Kafkas Bibliothek, 38; and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Der junge Goethe: Neue Ausgabe in sechs Bänden, ed. Max Morris (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1909), 1:249. I am grateful to the Bowdoin College Library for making this edition available to me. 135. Kafka, diary entry, February 5, 1912, in Kafka, Diaries, 178; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:371. On the circumstances of Goethe’s study of Yiddish, his compositions in the language, both comic and serious, his family’s business dealings in the Frankfurt Judengasse, and the definitive provenance of the “Judenpredigt,” see Mark Waldman, Goethe and the Jews (New York and London: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1934), 55–61; and Jürgen Stenzel, “‘No was sogt ehr dozu’: Jüdisches im Werk des jungen Goethe,” in “Außerdem waren sie ja auch Menschen”: Goethes Begegnung mit Juden und Judentum, ed. Annette Weber (Berlin and Vienna: Philo Verlagsgesellschaft, 2000), 99–115. 136. Wilhelm Grimm, “Bericht Über das deutsche Wörterbuch,” 512.



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137. Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, trans. Shlomo Noble, with the assistance of Joshua A. Fishman (1973; Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 282. 138. Kafka, letter to Felice Bauer, November 18, 1912, in Kafka, Briefe an Felice, 103. 139. See Willi Jasper, “Die Entstehung eines nationalen Goethe-Bildes im 19. Jahrhundert und seine Rolle in anti-semitischen Ausgrenzungsstrategien,” in “Außerdem waren sie ja auch Menschen,” ed. Weber, 133; and Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” in Benjamin, Selected Writings, 1:323; Benjamin, “Goethes Wahlverwandt­ schaften,” in Benjamin, Gesammelte Werke, 1:158. 140. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe, und Gespräche, ed. Ernst Beutler (Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1949), 10:166. 141. Goethe, Der junge Goethe, 249; Kafka, letter to Brod, June 1921, 288; Kafka, Briefe, 336–37. 142. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Deutsche Sprache,” 1817, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, 14:266. 143. Kafka, diary entry, January 24, 1912, in Kafka, Diaries, 173; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:360. 144. Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), 249. 145. M. Pines, Histoire de la littérature Judéo-Allemande, preface by Charles Andler (Paris: Jouve et Cis, Éditeurs, 1911), iv, my translation. 146. The presence of such a “mosaic” accent—one of the definitions of Mauscheln in German dictionaries, meaning to speak “like Moses,” or Moishe in Yiddish—well describes the scene of language creation as the space between nations, transforming the slur usually intended into a recognition of fertile space: between the Egypt of a foreign language and a national language of one’s own. 147. “It was not yesterday,” as Andler puts it, that “Jacob Grimm” had remarked similar “mosaic” (mauscheln) forms in Middle High German, whose forms appeared in writers as canonical as “Berthold von Regensburg” and “Hartmann von Aue.” See Pines, Histoire de la littérature Judéo-Allemande, “Preface,” v. 148. Kafka, letter to Brod, June 1921, 288; Kafka, Briefe, 337. 149. My translation. See Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne: Eine Denkschrift, Sämtlichen Schriften, ed. Klaus Briegleb (Munich: Karl Hanser Verlag, 1971), 4:24. 150. John McWhorter, The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language (New York: Perennial, 2001), 93–94. 151. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Calling, trans. John R. Russell (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1995), 104; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische Sendung, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe, und Gespräche, ed. Ernst Beutler (Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1949), 8:668–72. 152. See Binder, ed., Kafka Handbuch, “Schulzeit: 1889–1901,” 196. 153. Wilhelm Grimm, “Einleitung: Über das Wesen der Märchen,” in Wilhelm Grimm, Kleinere Schriften, 1:334: “Darum kennt es weder Namen und Orte, noch eine bestimmte Heimath, und es ist etwas dem ganzen Vaterlande Gemeinsames.”

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154. See Wisse, Modern Jewish Canon, 65–66. Unfortunately, Max Brod expurgated the next part of this letter of 1902, which he tells us contained an attack on August Sauer, the nationalist professor of Germanistik at the University of Prague whose lectures Kafka attended with Pollak the year before. See Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak, August 24, 1902, in Kafka, Letters to Friends, 3–4; and Kafka, Briefe, 11–12. 155. See Jürgen Stenzel, “ ‘No was sogt ehr dozu’: Jüdisches im Werk des jungen Goethe,” in Weber, Außerdem waren sie ja auch Menschen, 114–15. 156. Kafka, “Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language,” 382. 157. Hans Tramer, “Prague—City of Three Peoples,” Leo Baeck Society Year Book 9 (1964): 305–39. 158. Fritz Mauthner, Errinerungen I: Prager Jugendjahre (Munich: Georg Müller, 1918), 51–53. 159. A short and clear account of these various positions can be found in “Das Prager Deutsch,” in Binder, ed., Kafka Handbuch, 1:83–85. Important sources include Pavel Trost, “Das späte Prager Deutsch,” Acta Universitas Carolinae Philologica 2, Germanistica Pragensia 2 (1962), Pavel Trost, “Franz Kafka und das Prager Deutsch,” Acta Universitas Carolinae, Philologica 1: Germanistica Pragensia 3 (1964): 29–37; and Emil Skala, Das Prager Deutsch, in Weltfreunde, ed. E. Goldstücker (Berlin, 1967), 119–25. For a still helpful framing of the issue, see Peter Demetz, “Noch Einmal: Prager Deutsch,” Literatur und Kritik 1, no. 6 (1966): 58–59. 160. Kafka, “Letter to His Father,” 181; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 2:198. As Ernst Pawel notes, August Sauer’s nationalist lectures were likely Kafka’s first impetus to rethink the assumptions of canonical German literature as a whole. See Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 115. 161. Jacob Grimm, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1848), 437: “Seit dem schluz des ersten jh. hatte sich die ohnmacht des römischen reichs, wenn auch seine flalmme einmal noch aufleuchtete, entschieden, und in den unbesiegbaren Germanen war das gefühl ihres unaufhaltsamen vorrückens in alle theile von Europa immer wacher geworden . . . wie sollte es anders sein, als dasz ein so heftiger aufbruch des volks nicht auch seine sprache erregt hätte, sie zugleichaus hergebrachter fuge rückend und erhöhend? Liegt nicht ein gewisser mut und stolz darin, media in tenuis, tenius in aspirate zu verstärken?” For a discussion and this translation, see Geoffrey Samson, Schools of Linguistics (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1980), 30ff. 162. Paul, Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, 404–5, translation of Hermann Paul, Principles of the History of Language, trans. from 2nd ed. of original by H. A. Strong (New York: Macmillan, 1889), 457. 163. Kafka, letter to Brod, June 1921, 286–89; Kafka, Briefe, 334–38. 164. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 13, 14, in Benjamin, Illuminations, 260–61. 165. Harshav, Meaning of Yiddish, 115. 166. Franz Kafka, “Investigations of a Dog,” in Kafka, Complete Stories, 281; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 2:490. 167. Franz Kafka, letter to Milena Jensenska, June 12, 1920: “Ja du verstehst mich doch auch nicht Milena, die ‘Judenfrage’ war doch nur dummer Spaß.” In Briefe an

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 5 8 – 63 229 Milena, ed. Jürgen Born and Michael Müller (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1983), 59. 168. Franz Kafka, letter to Milena Jensenska, July 30, 1920, in Kafka, Briefe an Milena, 164. 169. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Vereinsamt,” Kritische Studienausgabe 11 (1884): 329 : “Die Krähen schrein / und ziehen schwirren Flugs zur Stadt: / bald wird es schnein, weh dem, der keine Heimat hat!” Daß Gott erbarm’! / Der meint, ich sehnte mich zurück / In’s deutsche Warm. / In’s dumpfe deutsche Stuben-Glück! / Mein Freund, was hier / Mich hemmt und hält, ist dein Verstand, / Mitleid mit dir! / Mitleid mit deutschem Quer-Verstand!” 170. Max Weinreich, “YIVO and the Problems of Our Time, “ YIVO-Bleter 25, no. 1 (1945): 13. 171. Kafka, “Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language,” 380; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 1:189. 172. As Hermann Paul put it, “the common language . . . is rather a foreign idiom to which the dialect is sacrificed.” See Paul, Prinzipien, 48; Paul, Principles of the History of Language, 35. 173. Kafka, “Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language,” 381–85; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 1:188–92. 174. See Die Sagen der Juden, collected by Micha Josef bin Gorion (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1962), 29–30; and Kafka Handbuch 1:195, where we learn that Hebbel’s poem “Der Maulwurf,” from his Schatzkästlein des rheinischen Hausfreunds, was on the curriculum that Kafka studied in school; on English’s foreign sources, see ­McWhorter, Power of Babel, 94–95. 175. Bin Gorion, Die Sagen der Juden, 29–30. On the presence of this book in Kafka’s library, see Born, Kafka’s Bibliothek, 84. 176. Deutsches Wörterbuch, by Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm, 16 vols. (Leipzig: S Hirzel, 1854), vol. 1, “Vorwort: Fremde Wörte,” xxvii, xxvi; my translation. 177. Franz Kafka, “The Warden of the Tomb,” in Kafka, Complete Stories, 208, 213, 218; Franz Kafka, “Der Gruftwächter,” in Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 1:277, 278, 286. 178. Kafka, Dearest Father, 303; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 2:339. 179. Kafka, Dearest Father, 214; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 2:546; Kafka, diary entry, October 15, 1921, in Kafka, Diaries, 392; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:863 (ich bin ein ­lebendig gewordenes Gedächtnis, daher auch die Schlaflosigkeit).

Chapter 2 1. See Heinz Politzer, Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox (1962; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966), “Chapter III: The Breakthrough: 1912,” 48–82; and Mark Anderson, Kafka’s Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 9. 2. Franz Kafka, diary entry, September 23, 1912, in Kafka, The Diaries 1910–1923, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken Books, 1948), 212–13; Franz Kafka, Tagebücher, ed.

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Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller, and Malcolm Pasley (Franz Kafka: Schriften Tagebücher Briefe, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, and Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt: S. Fischer 1990), 1:460–61. 3. Franz Kafka, Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, foreword by John Updike (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 385; Franz Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, ed. Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch, and Gerhard Neumann, Schriften Tagebücher Briefe, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, and Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1994), 1:22. 4. Franz Kafka, diary entries, December 25, 1911, and January 24, 1912, in Kafka, Diaries, 148, 173; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:312–15, 321–22, 326, 360. 5. Kafka, diary entry, September 25, 1917, in Kafka, Diaries, 386–87; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:837–38; Franz Kafka, “The Judgment,” in Kafka, Complete Stories, 77; Kafka, “Das Urteil,” in Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 43. 6. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 353; Kafka, diary entry, October 15, 1921, in Kafka, Diaries, 392; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:863. 7. Franz Kafka, letter to Max Brod, June 1921, in Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 289; Franz Kafka, Briefe 1902–1924, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken Books, 1958), 338. 8. Franz Kafka, diary entry, December 25, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries, 149; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:315. 9. M. Pines, Histoire de la littérature Judéo-Allemande, preface by Charles Andler (Paris: Jouve et Cis, Éditeurs, 1911), 411. 10. Kafka, diary entry, December 25, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries, 386–87; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:837–38. 11. Franz Kafka, letter, February 22, 1909, quoted in Ernst Pawel, Franz Kafka: The Nightmare of Reason (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984), 194. 12. Kafka, diary entry, December 25, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries, 386–87; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:837–38. 13. See Politzer, Franz Kafka, 48–82; and Elias Canetti, Kafka’s Other Trial: The Letters to Felice (1969; New York: Schocken Books, 1994). On the issue of Palästina, see Rainer Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, trans. Shelley Frisch (New York: Harcourt Inc., 2005), 99. 14. Kafka, “Judgment,” in Kafka, Complete Stories, 77; Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 43. 15. Stach, Kafka, 99. 16. Kafka, “Judgment,” in Kafka, Complete Stories, 77, 78; Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 33, 34. 17. Ahad Ha-Am, “Die Lehre der Tatsachen,” Palästina: Monatsschrift für die Erschliessung Palästinas 9, nos. 7/8 (1912): 172. On the polemic between Ahad Ha-Am and Brenner ongoing at the time, see Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha-Am and the Origins of Zionism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 235–44. 18. Franz Kafka, “Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language,” Jewish Town Hall, Prague, February 18, 1912, in Franz Kafka, Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings,



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trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York: Schocken Books, 1954), 383; Franz Kafka, “Einleitungsvortrag Über Jargon,” February 1912, in Franz Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, ed. Malcolm Pasley, Franz Kafka: Schriften Tagebücher Briefe, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, and Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1992), 1:189–90. 19. Kafka, “Das Urteil,” in Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 44. 20. See Kafka, diary entry, January 24, 1912, in Kafka, Diaries, 173; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:361. 21. Pines, Histoire de la littérature Judéo-Allemande, x, my translation: “A coup sûr, les relations qu’il faut souhaiter entre les colonies juives de Russie et la civilisation occidentale, se feraient plus étroites et plus multiples par une large diffusion de la culture intellectuelle de l’Occident, tandis que la fraternité chassidité, même transformée par un apport tolstoïste, risquerait de refermer sur elle-même la communauté juive, ou la disjoindre en sectres fraternelles, sympathetiques, mais impuissantes.” 22. On Beckett and Synge, see James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 71. For “loy,” see John Millington Synge, Playboy of the Western World, in Modern Irish Drama, ed. John P. Harrington (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 80. 23. Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (1951; New York: Grove Press, 1994), 53; James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 272. 24. Joyce, Ulysses, 272. 25. Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography, 2nd enlarged ed., trans. G. Humphreys Roberts and Richard Winston (1960; New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 132. 26. Kafka, “Talk on the Yiddish Language,” 384; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 1:191. For a transliterated Yiddish text of the Rosenfeld poem “Di Grinen” (The Greenhorns), see Hartmut Binder, ed., Kafka Kommentar zu den Romanen, Rezensionen, Aphorismen und zum Brief an den Vater (Munich: Winkler Verlag, 1982), 400–402. 27. I will hereafter be quoting from Kafka, “Letter to His Father,” in Kafka, Dearest Father, 145–96; Franz Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 2:143–217. 28. Kafka, Diaries, 119; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:253. 29. Kafka, “Letter to His Father,” in Kafka, Dearest Father, 145, translation modified; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 2:152. 30. James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 216. 31. See Pascale Casanova, Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution (London and New York: Verso Books, 2006), 32–36, 95–100, esp. the section “Literary Typology: Dublin, London, Paris.” 32. Kafka, diary entry, October 24, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries, 88; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:102. 33. Samuel Beckett, Molloy (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1951), 7. 34. See Mark Harman, “ ‘At Least He Could Garden’: Beckett and Kafka,” Partisan Review 66, no. 4 (Fall 1999): 574–79.

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35. Franz Kafka, letter to Max Brod, beginning of October 1917, in Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, 152; Kafka, Briefe, 178. 36. On Jakob Freud’s origins in Tysmenitz, Galicia, and frequent travels in Moravia, see Yosef Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Analysis Terminable and Interminable (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 61. 37. Ruth Kestenberg-Gladstein, “The Jews between Czechs and Germans in the Historic Lands, 1848–1918,” in The Jews of Czechoslovakia: Historical Studies and Surveys (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1968), 1:55. 38. Ibid., 3; Kafka, “Letter to His Father,” in Kafka, Dearest Father, 172; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 2:186. 39. James A. Matishoff, Blessings, Curses, Hopes, and Fears: Psycho-Ostensive Expressions in Yiddish (1979; Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), chap. 9, “AlloMalo Petition: Curses!,” 75. 40. Kafka, “Brief an den Vater,” in Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 2:152. 41. See Evelyn Torton Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 80ff. 42. Kafka, “Judgment,” in Kafka, Complete Stories, 86; Kafka, “Das Urteil,” in Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 58. 43. Kafka, “Judgment,” in Kafka, Complete Stories, 85; Kafka, “Das Urteil,” in Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 56. 44. Walter Sokel, Franz Kafka: Tragik und Ironie: zur Struktur seiner Kunst (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1976), 566. 45. Kafka, diary entry, January 24, 1912, in Kafka, Diaries, 173; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:360. 46. Sandrow, Nahma, Vagabond Stars: A World History of the Yiddish Theater (New York: Harper & Row, 1977 ), 112. 47. Kafka, diary entry, October 26, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries, 89; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:189. 48. C. J. Wells, German: A Linguistic History to 1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 318. 49. G. E. Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Victor Lange (New York: Dover Editions, 1962), 49. 50. On G. E. Lessing and the late eighteenth-century debate on the sources of the German comic tradition, see J. G. Robertson, Lessing’s Dramatic Theory: Being an Introduction to and Commentary on His Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 7ff. 51. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. with an intro. by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 75; Walter Benjamin, “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Theodor W. Adorno, Gerhom Scholem, Rolf Tiedemann, and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhkamp Verlag, 1972), 4:14. 52. Franz Kafka, diary entry, January 26, 1912, in Kafka, Diaries, 174; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:362–63.



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53. See Moses Mendelssohns Schriften Zur Philosophie und Aesthetik, ed. Moritz Brasch (Leipzig: L. Voss, 1880), “Rhaphsodie Über die Empfindungen,” 119. 54. Erwin R. Steinberg, “The Judgment in Kafka’s ‘The Judgment,’” Modern Fiction Studies 8, no. 1 (Spring 1962): 23; Arnold J. Band, “Kafka and the Beiliss Affair,” Comparative Literature 32, no. 2 (Spring 1980): 168–83. 55. Kafka, “Das Urteil,” in Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 54. 56. Band, “Kafka and the Beiliss Affair,” 181: “The mahzor customarily used in Prague in 1911 was either in Hebrew alone or in Hebrew with German translation. It is impossible to determine with certainty in which version Kafka read the translation of the prayer.” 57. Kafka, “Letter to His Father,” in Kafka, Dearest Father, 177; Kafka, “Brief an den Vater,” in Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 2:193. 58. Franz Kafka, diary entry, December 25, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries, 148; Kafka, Tagebücher, 313. 59. Stanley Corngold, Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), 97. 60. Matishoff, Blessings, Curses, 80, 71–72. 61. See Stach, Kafka, 31, 278. 62. Ahad Ha-Am, “Khikui v’Hitbolelut” (Imitation and Assimilation), (1893), repr. in Robert Alter, ed., Modern Hebrew Literature (New York: Behrman House, Inc., 1975), 90–101. 63. Franz Kafka, “Report to an Academy,” in Kafka, Complete Stories, 253, 257; Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 305. 64. See Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte, intro. and notes by Dr. Jakob Fromer (Munich: Georg Müller, 1911), 460. On Kafka’s relation to this volume, see Jürgen Born, Kafka’s Bibliothek: Ein beschreibendes Verzeichnis (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1990), 204. 65. Abraham P. Socher, The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy, and Philosophy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), 7. 66. Franz Kafka, letter to Felix Weltsch, beginning of December 1917, in Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, 173; Kafka, Briefe, 203. Kafka’s word “gespenstisch,” or “ghostly,” glosses the self-description Maimon uses quite cleverly, suggesting this hidden, translinguistic dimension. In 1912 Kafka reminded a Prague audience that the “everyday colloquial language” of German Jews—their “Verkehrsprache,” or everyday language (a phrase to which I will return since “Verkehr” is the word that ends “The Judgment”)—resembled Yiddish, depending on whether they lived more “in the East or the West.” See Kafka, “Talk on the Yiddish Language,” in Kafka, Dearest Father, 385; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 1:192. 67. Franz Kafka, “The New Advocate,” in Kafka, Complete Stories, 414–15; Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 1:251–52. 68. See Pavel Trost, “Franz Kafka und Das Prager Deutsch,” Acta Universitatis ­Carolinae—Philologica 1, Germanistica Pragensia III (1964): 31. 69. Pines, Histoire de la littérature Judéo-Allemande, 410. 70. Sigmund Freud, “Humor” (1927), in Freud, The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents and Other Works, the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological

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Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. from the German under the general editorship of James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, vol. 21 (1927–31) (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 161–66. 71. Bluma Goldstein, Reinscribing Moses: Heine, Kafka, Freud and Schoenberg in a European Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 218. 72. Kafka, diary entry, January 26, 1912, in Kafka, Diaries, 174; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:363. 73. Kafka, “Letter to His Father,” in Kafka, Dearest Father, 151; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 2:159. 74. Judith Ryan, “Kafka’s Narrative Breakthrough: September 1912,” in A New History of German Literature, ed. David Wellberry, Judith Ryan, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 694ff. 75. Kafka, “Judgment,” in Kafka, Complete Stories, 83; Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 54. 76. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet, 222–23. 77. See Dan Miron, Bodedim b’Moedam: L’Dyokana Harepublika Hasifrutit Haivrit b’Thhilat Hamea Haesrim (When Loners Come Together: A Portrait of Hebrew Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1987), 125ff. 78. See David Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 176. 79. Franz Kafka, diary entry, October 20, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries, 81; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:89. 80. Ibid. 81. See Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). 82. Kafka, “Talk on the Yiddish Language,” in Kafka, Dearest Father, 385; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 1:192. 83. On “Verkehr” in this aestheticist German context, see Anderson, Kafka’s Clothes, 48. 84. Franz Kafka, diary entry, February 11, 1913, in Kafka, Diaries, 214; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:491. 85. Kafka, “Talk on the Yiddish Language,” in Kafka, Dearest Father, 383; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 1:190. 86. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Nina Burgis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 1–2. Kafka calls “The Stoker” section of Amerika: or The Man Who Disappeared a “sheer imitation of Dickens” after mentioning this novel. See Kafka, diary entry, October 1917, in Kafka, Diaries, 388. 87. Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 4. 88. Franz Kafka, diary entry, October 24, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries 88, Tagebücher, 1:102. 89. Franz Kafka, diary entry, October 24, 1911, ibid. 90. Kafka, letter to Brod, June 1921, 288–89; Kafka, Briefe, 336–37. Kafka played with the particles of the name “Bendemann” in his diary this way: “in Bendemann, ‘mann’ is a strengthening of ‘Bende’ to provide for all the as yet unforeseen possibilities in



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the story. But Bende has exactly the same number of letters as Kafka.” See Kafka, diary entry, February 11, 1913, in Kafka, Diaries, 215; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:492. 91. On Freud’s multilingual voice, see Elliott Orring, The Jokes of Sigmund Freud: A Study in Humor and Jewish Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984). 92. The prophetic address “Son of Man” appears several times, in Yiddish form, in the Bialik poem Kafka heard, and thus it is transcribed in the multilingual “Ben-de-Mann” of Mr. Bendemann. 93. Beck shows that Mr. Bendemann contains elements of the father as wedding jester on the down and out that Kafka saw performed in Gordin’s God, Man, and the Devil. See Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater, 80ff. 94. Kafka, “Judgment,” in Kafka, Complete Stories, 85; Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 57. 95. Quoted in Naomi Seidman, “Lawless Attachments, One-Night Stands: The Sexual Politics of the Hebrew-Yiddish Language War,” in Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies, ed. Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 301. 96. See Casanova, World Republic of Letters, 91ff: “What Is Modernity?” 97. Brod, Streitbares Leben: Autobiographie (Munich: F. A. Herbig, 1969), 48ff. 98. Quoted in Hartmut Binder, ed., Kafka Handbuch in Zwei Bänden (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1979), 1:199. 99. Kafka, “Das Urteil,” in Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 1:44. 100. Ibid., 1:44–45; Palästina: Monatsschrift für die Erschliessung Palästinas 9, nos. 7/8 (1912): 173. 101. Ahad Ha-Am, “Die Lehre der Tatsachen,” 180, 176. 102. Kafka, “Judgment,” in Kafka, Complete Stories, 77; Kafka, “Das Urteil,” in Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 43–44. 103. Ahad Ha-Am, “Rival Tongues,” in Ahad Ha-Am, Ahad Ha-Am: Essays, Letters, Memoirs, trans. Leon Simon (Oxford: East and West Library, 1956), 225. 104. Ibid.; Politzer, Franz Kafka, 62: “he [Mr. Bendemann] appears likewise as a descendent of those archaic fathers who had the power to bless and to curse.” 105. Kafka, “Judgment,” in Kafka, Complete Stories, 87, 81; Kafka, “Das Urteil,” in Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 59, 50. 106. See “Moses,” in Ahad Ha-Am, Selected Essays by Ahad Ha-‘Am, ed. Leon Simon (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1912), 306–30. 107. Franz Kafka, diary entry, December 17, 1913, in Kafka, Diaries, 249; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:616. As Roy Pascal notes, Kafka’s figures for authority, by contrast, often “come from popular farce.” See Pascal, Kafka’s Narrators: A Study of His Stories and Sketches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 44. 108. Kafka, diary entry, February 11, 1913, in Kafka, Diaries, 215; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:492. 109. Iris Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 189.

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110. Kafka, “The Judgment,” in Kafka, Complete Stories, 80; Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 1:48: “Wenn du solche Freunde hast, Georg, hättest du dich überhaupt nicht verloben sollen.” 111. On Felice Bauer, to whom “The Judgment” was dedicated, as a comparable figure for Zionism in Kafka, see Scott Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 143ff. 112. For a survey of this phenomenon of “Multisourced Neologization” in the Hebrew renaissance, see Ghil’ad Zuckerman, Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Modern Hebrew (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 63–87. Kafka’s engagement with this phenomenon will be treated in Chapter 5. 113. Kafka, “The Judgment,” in Kafka, Complete Stories, 77; Kafka, “Das Urteil,” Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 44. 114. Kafka, “The Judgment,” in Complete Stories, 78, 51; Kafka, “Das Urteil,” in Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 50, 45. 115. Kafka, diary entry, February 11, 1913, in Kafka, Diaries, 215; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:492; Kafka, “The Judgment,” in Kafka, Complete Stories, 78, 81; Kafka, “Das Urteil,” in Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 50, 45. 116. Kafka, diary entry, October 20, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries, 81; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:88–89. 117. Dan Miron’s critique of Kafka’s “herabgelassen,” or “stooped,” Bialik shows just how invested Kafka became in this “contiguous” writer, as the title of this work so beautifully suggests. As Miron shows, Kafka’s “sarcastic” comment accurately pointed to Bialik’s continuing engagement with Yiddish and opening up the Hebrew voice—in writing poems as well as furthering the translation of German Jewish writers such as Heine into Yiddish as well as Hebrew. See Dan Miron, From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010), 322–27, and Na’ama Rokem, “Heinrich Heine, Theodor Herzl and the Poetics of Space,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 8, no. 1 (March 2009): 67–68.

Chapter 3 1. See Wolfgang Jahn, “Anspielungen auf Neutestamentliches,” in Jahn, Kafkas Roman “Der Verschollene” (“Amerika”) (Stuttgart: J. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1965), 94–97. 2. Franz Kafka, Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared), trans. Michael Hoffman (New York: New Directions, 1996), 20; Kafka, Der Verschollene, ed. Jost Schillemeit, Franz Kafka: Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, and Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1983), 1:40. 3. Kafka, Amerika, 58; Kafka, Verschollene, 1:133: “ich heiße Delamarche, bin Franzose.” 4. Heinz Politzer, Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox (1962; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966), 122; Kafka, letter to Felix Weltsch, beginning of December 1917,



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in Franz Kafka, Briefe, 1902–1924, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken Books, 1958), 203–4; Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 173: “When you read Maimonides, you may want to supplement it with Solomon Maimon’s Autobiography.” 5. Salomon Maimon, Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte, ed. Jakob Fromer (Munich: Georg Müller, 1911), 419–20: “Jede Wirkung geschieht nämlich durch einen Engel, denn Engel heißt Bote. Derjenige der also den Befehlt eines andern ausrichtet, ist ein Engel.” 6. Politzer, Franz Kafka, 126. 7. On Lazarus and her sources, see Max Cavitch, “Emma Lazarus and the Golem of Liberty,” American Literary History 18, no. 1 (2006): 1–28. 8. Franz Kafka, diary entry, January 24, 1912, in Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910–1923, ed. Max Brod (1948; New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 173; Franz Kafka, Tagebücher, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller, and Malcolm Pasley, Schriften Tagebücher Briefe, Kritische Ausgabe (Frankfurt: S Fischer, 1990), 1:360. 9. M. Pines, Histoire de la littérature Judéo-Allemande, preface by Charles Andler (Paris: Jouve et Cis, Éditeurs, 1911), 364. 10. Selbstwehr, September 25, 1908, quoted in Iris Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 45. 11. Kafka, Amerika, 68; Franz Kafka, Der Verschollene, 1: 132–33. 12. Kafka, Amerika, 13; Kafka, Verschollene, 1:27, 25. According to Walter Sokel, the stoker’s speech is “letzten Endes ein künstlerisches Versagen” (finally an artistic failure), while his linguistic humanity remains. See Walter Sokel, Franz Kafka: Tragik und Ironie (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1976), 353. 13. Pines, Histoire de la littérature Judéo-Allemande, 375. 14. Pines, Histoire de la littérature Judéo-Allemande, 381. 15. Franz Kafka, Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York: Schocken Books, 1954), 383–84; Franz Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, ed. Malcolm Pasley,Franz Kafka: Schriften Tagebücher Briefe, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley und Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1993), 1:190–91. Hartmut Binder points out that the Rosenfeld poem that Kafka introduced was “Di Historishe Peklakh,” since he wrote no poem called “The Greenhorns”; see Hartmut Binder, Kafka Kommentar zu den Romanen, Rezensionen, Aphorismen und Brief an Den Vater (Munich: Winkler Verlag, 1976), 400–402. 16. Kafka, Amerika, 5–6; Kafka, Verschollene, 1:10, 13: “Auf dem Schiff wechseln mit den Hafenplätzen auch die Sitten . . . Überhaupt ist man hier gegen Fremde eingenommen.” 17. The “erev rav” were a source of rich speculation in Jewish commentary on the meaning of the foreign as part of the Jewish tradition. For some Kabbalistic examples, see Shaul Magid, “The Politics of (Un)Conversion: The ‘Mixed Multitude’ (Erev Rav) as Conversos in Rabbi Hayyim Vital’s Ets Ha-Daat Tov,” Jewish Quarterly Review 95, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 625–66. 18. On this overly German aspect of Rosenfeld’s poetry, see Marc Miller, Representing the Immigrant Experience: Morris Rosenfeld and the Emergence of Yiddish Literature in America (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 134–38, here 137.

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19. Kafka, letter to Max Brod, June 1921, in Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, 286–89; and Kafka, Briefe, 334–38. 20. See Leo Wiener, The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1899), quoted in Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 32. On Wiener’s conflicted relationship with Rosenfeld, see Miller, Representing the Immigrant Experience, 23–24. 21. M. Pines, Histoire de la littérature Judéo-Allemande, 386, my translation. 22. Kafka, Amerika, 6–7; Kafka, Verschollene, 1:12–13. 23. Kafka, Amerika, 25, 7; Kafka, Verschollene, 1:50, 14. 24. Binder, Kafka Kommentar, 401. 25. Kafka, Amerika, 67; Kafka, Verschollene, 1:131. As Robert Alter observes, Karl’s version of the Hebrew Bible where Ramses appears is “no doubt . . . Luther’s German translation”; see Robert Alter, Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 77. 26. Kafka, Amerika, 7, 67; Kafka, Verschollene, 15, 131. 27. Benjamin Harshav, “Language in Chagall’s Early Paintings,” in Harshav, The Polyphony of Jewish Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 220. 28. Morris Rosenfeld, “Goles Marsh,” transliteration quoted from Pines, Histoire de la littérature Judéo-Allemande, 366–67, my translation. 29. Kafka, Amerika, 19; Kafka, Verschollene, 1:37. 30. Kafka, diary entry, December 8, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries, 132; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:282: “die Thora ist die beste Ware.” 31. Kafka, Amerika, 34; Kafka, Verschollene, 1:66, translation modified. 32. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, intro. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 82. 33. Kafka, diary entry, January 26, 1912, in Kafka, Diaries, 175; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:366, a note taken from Pines’s Littérature Judéo-Allemande. 34. See Kafka, diary entry, January 24, 1912, in Kafka, Diaries, 175; and Elliot R. Wolfson, “Polemical Images of Christianity and Islam in Zoharic Literature,” a section of the essay “Othering the Other: Eschatological Effacing of Ontic Boundaries,” in Elliot R. Wolfson, Venturing Beyond: Law & Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 146. 35. Kafka, Amerika, 50, 45; Kafka, Verschollene, 1:98, 87. 36. Wolfson, “Othering the Other,” 146. 37. Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 2:72 (Wir sind nicht nur deshalb sündig weil wir vom Baum der Erkenntnis gegessen haben, sondern auch deshalb weil wir vom Baum des Lebens noch nicht gegessen haben). 38. “Aus dem Buche Sohar,” “II: Das Licht des Urquells,” trans. Ernst Müller,” in Von Judentum: Ein Sammelbuch,” ed. Verein Jüdischer Hochschüler Bar Kochba in Prag (Leipzig: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1913), 283. On Kafka’s ownership of this volume, see Ritchie Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 151. 39. Walter Benjamin, “Some Reflections on Kafka,” letter to Gershom Scholem, June 12, 1938, in Benjamin, Illuminations, 144; Benjamin Über Kafka: Texte, Briefzeugnisse, Aufzeichnungen, ed. Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981), 87.



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40. See The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Revised Standard Edition, ed. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 298; and Tanakh: A New Translation of the Holy Scriptures According to the Traditional Hebrew Text (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985), 385. 41. See Miller, Representing the Immigrant Experience, 24–25. To a Kafka absorbed with the Yiddish theater just before he started the novel, Morris Rosenfeld was a significant figure. After listening to a debate unfold in Prague, Kafka recorded Löwy’s view that since Dovid Edelstadt was a “socialist,” Mania Tschissik, his interlocutor, “considers him the greatest,” while Löwy pointed out that “the world knows Rosenfeld.” See Kafka, diary entry, October 23, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries, 86; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:99; Kafka, Amerika, 38; Kafka, Verschollene, 1:74. 42. Kafka, Amerika, 39; Kafka, Verschollene, 76. 43. Kafka, Amerika, 45, 49; Kafka, Verschollene, 1:88, 97. 44. Holitscher refers in particular to the “Ostseite,” where “den jüdischen, d.h., im Jiddischen Jargon spielenden Theater[n],” that is, the “eastside where the Yiddish theaters can could be found.” See Arthur Holitscher, Amerika Heute und Morgen (Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1912), 414. On the presence of the text in Kafka’s library, see Jürgen Born, Kafka’s Bibliothek: Ein beschreibendes Verzeichnis (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1990), 145. 45. Kafka, Amerika, 46–47. 46. See Alfred T. Thomas, Anne’s Bohemia: Czech Literature and Society 1310–1420 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 34ff. 47. Kafka, Amerika, 50, 149; Kafka, Verschollene, 1:98, 288–89. 48. Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Mannheim (1960; New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 12. 49. See Origen, Contra Celsum, trans. with an intro. and notes by Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 4:44, 219. 50. Michael A. Singer, “Searching the Scriptures: Jews, Christians, and the Book,” in Christianity in Jewish Terms, ed. Tikva Frymer-Kensky (Westview, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000), 93. 51. Kafka, Amerika, 34; Kafka, Verschollene, 66. 52. See Jacques Derrida, “Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, and the German,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 173, 184. 53. Kafka, Amerika, 45; Kafka, Verschollene, 1:88. 54. Kafka, Amerika, 62; Kafka, Verschollene, 1:122–23. 55. Kafka, Amerika, 29–30; Kafka, Verschollene, 1: 57–58. 56. On the Prague context of this work, see Scott Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 153–57. 57. See Hugo Bergmann, “Schulzeit und Studium,” in “Als Kafka mir entgegenkam”: Errinerungen an Franz Kafka, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, 2000), 18. 58. Kafka, diary entry, December 17, 1913, in Kafka, Diaries, 249; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:616–17.

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59. Hugo Bergmann, “Einleitung,” in Worte Mosis, ed. Dr. Hugo Bergmann (Minden, Westfalia: Bruns, 1913), 1. 60. See David Damrosch, “Conclusion: Deconstruction or Reconstruction?,” in Damrosch, The Narrative Covenant: Transformation of Genre in the Growth of Biblical Literature (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 298–326. 61. Ahad Ha-Am, “Moshe,” Hashiloach 13 (1904), repr. in German translation by Gotthold Weil in Ost und West (1904), 224ff., quoted in Hugo Bergmann, Worte Mosis (Minden, Westphalia, 1913), 5; Born, Kafka’s Bibliothek, 169. 62. Kafka, Amerika, 30; Kafka, Verschollene, 1: 59. 63. The new construction of the Law occurs in Baba Metzia 59b and is discussed by Scholem in “Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism,” in Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 291. 64. Scholem, On the Kabbalah, 56–57; Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, Talmudic Stories: Narrative Art, Composition and Structure (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 65. 65. Kafka, Diaries, 96 (which dates this entry October 28); Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:209; Jakob Fromer, Der Organismus des Judentums (Charlottenburg, 1909), 62. 66. Karl Erich Grözinger, Kafka und die Kabbala: Das Jüdische im Denken Franz Kafkas (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994), 37–38. 67. Ibid. 68. On “cutting the shoots,” Elisha ben Abuya, and the many meanings of the complex of passages surrounding the pardes that Kafka reconstructs, see Jeffrey Rubenstein, “Elisha ben Abuya: Torah and the Sinful Sage (Hagiga 15a–b),” in Rubenstein, Talmudic Stories, 66–104. 69. Kafka, diary entry, January 16, 1922, in Kafka, Diaries, 399; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:878. 70. Idel gives a helpful account of the different theories that account for this four-level model of reading, best known in later scholarship in Dante’s famous letter to Can Grande: “Wilhelm Bacher maintained that the Kabbalists adapted the Christ four-fold theory of interpretation, whereas Peretz Sandler asserted that this exegetical system emerged as a result of an inner development starting with twelfth-century Jewish exegesis. At first Gershom Scholem adopted Bacher’s theory, but later he did not explicitly reject the view of Sandler.” See Moshe Idel, Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), 430. 71. Franz Kafka, “The Coming of the Messiah,” in Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes in German and English (New York: Schocken Books, 1946), 80–81; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 2:55. 72. Kafka, Amerika, 34; Kafka, Verschollene, 1:65–66. 73. Gershom Scholem, “The Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysticism,” in Scholem, On the Kabbalah, 39. 74. R. Hayyim Yoseph David Azulai, the HYDA, quoted in Moshe Idel, Absorbing Perfections, 432.



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75. Kafka, Amerika, 78; Kafka, Verschollene, 1:152. 76. Kafka, Amerika, 69; Kafka, Verschollene, 1:134; Kafka, diary entry, December 25, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries, 150; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:322. 77. Kafka, Amerika, 96, 110; Kafka, Verschollene, 1:186, 214. 78. Kafka, Diaries, 29; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:130. 79. Harry Jolson, as told to Alban Emley, Mistah Jolson (Hollywood, Calif.: HouseWarven, 1952), 45. 80. Franz Kafka, “Report to an Academy,” in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, foreword by John Updike (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 257; Franz Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, ed. Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch, and Gerhard Neumann, Schriften Tagebücher Briefe Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, and Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1994), 1:311. 81. On the deeper “multivalence” of Red Peter’s voice and such racialized readings, see Spector, Prague Territories, 192–93. 82. Douglas Gilbert, American Vaudeville: Its Life and Times (New York and London: Whittlesey House, 1940), 289. 83. See Evelyn Tornton Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 182, and her excellent summary of readings of the ape as either African or Jewish in nature. 84. Kafka, Diaries, 77; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:81–83. 85. Kafka, Amerika, 110; Kafka, Verschollene, 1: 212. 86. Wilhelm Grimm, “Bericht Über das Deutsche Wörterbuch,” Proceedings of the Germanists at Frankfurt, September 24, 25, and 26, 1846, in Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Werke, ed. Ludwig Erich Schmitt, Section II: Die Werke Wilhelm Grimms, vol. 31: Kleinere Schriften, vol. 1 (1881) (Hildesheim-Zürich-New York: Olms-Weidmann, 1992), 511. 87. See Rainer Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, trans. Shelley Frisch (New York: Harcourt, 2005), 275. As Stach observes, Kafka felt as if “he had literally put aside a fearsome phantasm.” 88. Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis,” in Kafka, Complete Stories, 108; Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 1:147. 89. Harold B. Segal, Turn-of-the-Century Cabaret: Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Cracow, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Zurich (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 128. 90. Kafka, diary entry, October 14, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries, 76; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:79. 91. Kafka, Amerika, 154; Kafka, Verschollene, 298. 92. Heinrich Heine’s Atta Troll, German and translation quoted from Siegfried Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 437ff. 93. Ibid. 94. Kafka, diary entry, October 14, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries, 76; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:79. 95. Kafka, diary entry, December 30, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries, 157; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:330. 96. As Evelyn Tornton Beck suggests, Kafka’s source for “clay” as a hidden symbol of redemption from oppression may have been the Yiddish play “Moshe the Tailor,” which he

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saw in Prague and in which a character declares of Columbus: “Why didn’t he lead us back to Egypt? What is the difference between Pithom and Raamses and Brooklyn and New York? There they fed us clay [lahm] and bricks [tsigl], and here they feed us machines and pressing irons.” See Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater, 128. 97. Kafka, Amerika, 162, 164; Kafka, Verschollene, 1: 315, 317. 98. Patrick Bridgwater, Kafka’s Novels: An Interpretation (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), 90. 99. Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism, 4. 100. See, for instance, Bernhard Greiner, “Im Umkreis von Ramses: Kafkas Verschollener als jüdischer Bildungsroman,” Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 77 (2003): 637–58, here 638. Brunelda’s name thus echoes “Brunhilde” and displays “the enormous measurements the Valkyries used to display on the Wagnerian stage of Kafka’s time,” as Heinz Politzer points out. She suggests the nationalist pressure faced by the Jewish artist in many senses, conceived of in comic Zionist terms. See Politzer, Franz Kafka, 152. 101. See Max Brod, “Nachworte des Herausgebers,” in Franz Kafka, Amerika, Franz Kafka: Gesammelte Werke in Sieben Bänden (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1976), 260. 102. Kafka, Amerika, 167, 164; Kafka, Verschollene, 1: 323, 317–18. 103. Kafka, diary entry, January 26, 1912, in Kafka, Diaries, 174; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:363. 104. Selbstwehr, September 29, 1911, 9. 105. Kafka, Amerika, 166, 179; Kafka, Verschollene, 1:321, 345. As a source for Mendel and his medicament, see Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. with intro. and notes by Shlomo Pines, introductory essay by Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), bk. 3, chap. 37, 544, which mentions the “application of a dog’s refuse to the swellings of the throat,” which Kafka may have disguised in Mendel’s treatment of Brunelda’s couch instead. 106. Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, 120. 107. Gila Safran Naveh, Biblical Parables and Their Modern Re-Creation: From “Apples of Gold in Silver Settings” to “Imperial Messages” (Albany: State University of New York Press, 200), 32–33. 108. Kafka, Amerika, 186; Kafka, Verschollene, 1:358. 109. Robert Hendel, “Israel among the Nations: Biblical Culture in the Ancient Near East,” in Cultures of the Jews, ed. David Biale (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), 44. 110. Ahad Ha-Am, “Imitation and Assimilation,” in Modern Hebrew Literature, ed. Robert Alter (New York: Behrman House, 1975), 90–101. 111. Kafka, Amerika, 132; Kafka, Verschollene, 1:255. 112. Kafka, letter to Martin Buber, May 12, 1917, in Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, 132. 113. Franz Kafka, “Jackals and Arabs,” in Kafka, The Complete Stories, 410, and 409; Franz Kafka, “Schakale und Araber,” in Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 1:272–73.



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114. Franz Kafka, “Jackals and Arabs,” in Kafka, The Complete Stories, 410; Franz Kafka, “Schakale und Araber,” in Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 1:274. 115. Spector, Prague Territories, 191. 116. Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 230; Franz Kafka, Der Proceß, ed. Malcolm Pasley, Franz Kafka: Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe: Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, and Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1990), 311. 117. Franz Kafka, “Jackals and Arabs,” in Kafka, The Complete Stories, 410; Franz Kafka, “Schakale und Araber,” in Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 1:274. 118. See Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 22ff. 119. As Dimitry Shumsky perceptively notes, the story reflects Kafka’s “understanding of Zionism as move toward the Jews’ self-repositioning within local multinational networks and against the identification of the Jewish minority with the imperial forces.” See Shumsky, “Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews: Franz Kafka’s ‘Jackals and Arabs’ between Bohemia and Palestine,” AJS Review 33, no. 1 (2009): 71–100, here 100. 120. Hugo Bergmann, “Bemerkungen zur Arabischen Frage” (1911), in Hugo Bergmann, Yavne und Jerusalem (Berlin, 1919), 60–61; Kafka, “Report to an Academy,” 253; Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 1:305. On Kafka’s mention of this volume, see Born, Kafkas Bibliothek, 194. Bergmann’s essay first appeared in Palästina: Monatsschrift für die Erschliessung Palästinas 8, no. 1 (1911): 190–95. As Born points out, Kafka reports possessing other issues of this journal. 121. Holitscher, Amerika Heute und Morgen, 367; Robertson, Kafka, 48–49, 60. 122. Kafka, Amerika, 210; Kafka, Verschollene, 402. For Kafka’s manuscript change of the name “Leo” to the English word “Negro,” see Kafka, Verschollene, 2:85. 123. Holitscher, Amerika Heute und Morgen, 365. 124. Kafka, Amerika, 205; Kafka, Verschollene, 1:393. 125. Holitscher, Amerika Heute und Morgen, 417. 126. See Jeffrey Paul Melnick, Right to Sing the Blues: African-Americans, Jews and the American Popular Song (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 43–56. 127. Jahn, Kafkas Roman der Verschollene, 14: “eine Travestie des jüngsten Gerichts.” 128. See Barbara W. Grossman, “The Ziegfeld Connection: The Follies of 1910 and 1911,” in Grossman, Funny Woman: The Life and Times of Fanny Brice (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 34–58. 129. Kafka, Amerika, 205; Kafka, Verschollene, 1:393. 130. Alain Locke would write that “Harlem is the home of the Negro’s Zionism,” a form of cultural nationalism with open boundaries that Kafka’s Theater of Oklahoma gives a utopian sense; see Alain Locke, ed., Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro, special issue of Survey Graphic 6, no. 6 (March 1925): 633. 131. Kafka, Amerika, 209; Kafka, Verschollene, 390. 132. Kafka, diary entry, April 20, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries, 360. Iris Bruce reports that in one of the greatest comedies of Kafka scholarship, this text about the hidden powers of kabbalistic creation “has now been eliminated from the latest ‘critical edition’ of Kafka’s

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diaries,” on the grounds that Kafka apparently tried to cross his Golem out; see Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism, 105. 133. Kafka, Amerika, 203; Kafka, Verschollene, 1:389; Kafka, Diaries, 29; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:130. On the meaning of “clay” in “Clayton” as a secret port of entry for Kafka’s writing, see Norbert Fürst, Die Offenen Geheimtüren von Franz Kafka (Heidelberg: Rothe, 1956), 54, 55; and Hillel Kieval, “Pursuing the Golem of Prague: Jewish Culture and the Invention of a Tradition,” Modern Judaism 17, no. 1 (1997): 1–20. 134. Franz Kafka, “The Coming of the Messiah,” in Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes, 80–81; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 2:55.

Chapter 4 1. Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography, 2nd enlarged ed. (1937; New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 177. 2. Franz Kafka, diary entry, January 24, 1912, in Kafka, Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910–1923, ed. Max Brod (1948; New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 173; Franz Kafka, Tagebücher, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller, and Malcolm Pasley, Schriften Tagebücher Briefe, Kritische Ausgabe (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1990), 1:360. 3. Jakob Fromer, Der Organismus des Judentums (Charlottenburg, 1909), 63. 4. Walter Benjamin, letter to Gershom Scholem, February 4, 1939, in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem 1932–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem, trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 243. 5. Walter Benjamin, letter to Gershom Scholem, June 12, 1938, in Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 221. 6. For the text of the letter and commentary, see David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 74–75, 215–16. On the nexus of Zionism, biblical and modern Hebrew in relation to the letter, and Scholem’s other writing, see Galili Shahar, “The Sacred and the Unfamiliar: Gershom Scholem and the Anxieties of the New Hebrew,” Germanic Review 83, no. 4 (2008): 308. 7. Benjamin, letter to Scholem, February 4, 1939, 243. 8. Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 7; Franz Kafka, Der Proceß, ed. Malcolm Pasley, Franz Kafka: Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, and Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1990), 12. 9. See Evelyn Tornton Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 155–60. 10. Quoted in Biale, Gershom Scholem, 74–75, 215–16. 11. Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. with intro. and notes by Shlomo Pines, introductory essay by Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 2:497. 12. Franz Kafka, The Trial, 6–7, Der Proceß, 11. 13. Kafka, diary entry, January 6, 1912, in Kafka, Diaries, 167; Kafka, Tagebücher, 349. 14. Brod, Franz Kafka, 178. 15. Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater, 156.



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16. I here use the German spelling preferred by the critical edition. See Kafka, Trial, 22–23; and Kafka, Proceß, 33. 17. Kafka, diary entry, January 6, 1912, in Kafka, Diaries, 167; Kafka, Tagebücher, 349–50. 18. Ruth Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Language and Culture (New York and London: Free Press, 2000), 81. 19. “ ‘Küß die Hand,’ sagte Josef, nahm die Zigarette und verbeugte sich, indem er ohne ersichtlichen Grund die Hacken aneinander schlug” (“‘I kiss your hand,’ said Josef, who took the cigarette, bowed, and for no apparent reason, clicked his heels together”). See Arthur Schnitzler, Der Weg ins Freie, Gesammelte Werke von Arthur Schnitzler (Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1914), 2:34; Arthur Schnitzler, The Road into the Open, trans. Roger Byers, intro. by Russell A. Berman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 15; Kafka, Trial, 194; Kafka, Proceß, 263. 20. Kafka, Trial, 195; Kafka, Proceß, 265–66, English translation modified. 21. Kafka, diary entry, January 26, 1912, in Kafka, Diaries, 175; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:366. 22. Elliot R. Wolfson, “Beautiful Maiden without Eyes: Peshat and Sod in Zoharic Hermeneutics,” in The Midrashic Imagination: Jewish Exegesis, Thought and History, ed. Michael Fishbane (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 155. 23. (Der maimonidische Kodex . . . heisst Mischne Tora [2. Tora] oder Jad haChazaka [die starke Hand]). See Fromer, Organismus des Judentums, 155, my translation. 24. See Gershom Scholem, “Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism,” in Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 296–97. 25. James A. Matishoff, Blessings, Curses, Hopes and Fears: Psycho-Ostensive Expressions in Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 140n9. 26. Kafka, Trial, 104; Kafka, Proceß, 139–40, 27. Der Grosse Duden: Stilwörterbuch der deutschen Sprache—Die Verwendung der Wörter im Satz, ed. Günther Drosdowski, Der Grosse Duden: Band 2 (Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut, 1970), 527. 28. Franz Kafka, “Einleitungsvortrag Über Jargon,” February 1912, in Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, ed. Malcolm Pasley, Franz Kafka: Schriften Tagebücher Briefe, Kritische Ausgabe (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1992), 2:192: “Die Verbindungen zwischen Jargon und Deutsch sind zu zart und bedeutend, als daß sie nicht sofort zerreißen müßten, wenn Jargon ins Deutsche zurückgeführt wird”; Franz Kafka, Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York: Schocken Books, 1954), 384–85: “The links between Yiddish and German are too delicate and significant not to be torn to shreds the instant Yiddish is transformed back into German.” 29. Kafka, Trial, 97; Kafka, Proceß, 130. 30. Franz Kafka, Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared), trans. Michael Hoffman (New York: New Directions, 1996), 51; Franz Kafka, Der Verschollene, ed. Jost Schillemeit, Franz Kafka: Schriften Tagebücher Briefe, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, and Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1983), 1:100. 31. Kafka, Trial, 198; Kafka, Proceß, 269.

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32. See Martin Buber, Werke (Munich: Kösel-Verlag, 1962), 1:499. 33. Ritchie Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 126. 34. Kafka, Trial, 39; Kafka, Proceß, 54. 35. See Malcolm Pasley, “Two Literary Sources of Kafka’s Der Proceß,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 3, no. 2 (1967): 142–43. The Talmudic passage referred to is Yoma 54b. See Kafka, Trial, 56–57; Kafka, Proceß, 76–77. 36. Arthur Schopenhauer, “Supplement to Book I [Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung]: Chapter 8, “ ‘On the Theory of the Ludicrous’ [Lächerlich],” in The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, ed. John Morreall (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 54–55. On Kafka’s possession of Schopenhauer, see Jürgen Born, Kafka’s Bibliothek: Ein beschreibendes Verzeichnis (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1990), 128. 37. Salomon Maimons Lebengeschichte, with an introduction and notes, newly edited by Dr. Jakob Fromer (Munich: Georg Müller, 1911), 357–58. On Kafka’s possession of this volume, see Born, Kafka’s Bibliothek, 204. 38. Salomon Maimons Lebengeschichte, 358–59. 39. Northrop Frye, An Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 328. 40. Lewis Carroll, “Jabberwocky,” in The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass, intro. and notes by Martin Gardiner (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1960), 148–49. 41. Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), 271. 42. I am quoting here from Gershom Scholem’s version of Zohar II, 99a–b, in Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 56. Stanley Corngold relates the Sortini/Sordini pairing to Kafka’s Gnostic sensibility in his Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 5–7. 43. See Franz Kafka, Das Schloß, ed. Malcolm Pasley, in Franz Kafka: Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe: Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, and Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1982), 308. 44. Gershom Scholem, “The Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysticism,” in Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, 56; Wolfson, “Beautiful Maiden without Eyes,” 187. 45. Kafka, Trial, 213; Kafka, Proceß, 289. 46. Gershom Scholem, “Kabbalah and Myth,” in Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, 105. 47. Kafka, Trial, 226; Kafka, Proceß, 306. 48. Kafka, Trial, 224; Kafka, Proceß, 304; Karl Erich Grözinger, Kafka und die Kabbala: Das Jüdische im Werk und Denken von Franz Kafka (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1994), 83: “Das weibliche Element im Rahmen der Gerichtshierarchien.” 49. Kafka, Trial, 106–7; Kafka, Proceß, 142–3. 50. Kafka, Trial, 209; Kafka, Proceß, 284. 51. See Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 193; Beck’s



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earlier Kafka and the Yiddish Theater, 181–87; Kafka, Trial, 213, 209; Kafka, Proceß, 289, 284. 52. Kafka, Trial, 57; Kafka, Proceß, 77. 53. Kafka, Trial, 67; Kafka, Proceß, 90–91; Idel, Kabbalah, 227. 54. Franz Kafka, “Report to an Academy,” in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, foreword by John Updike (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 258; Franz Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, ed. Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch, and Gerhard Neumann, Franz Kafka: Schriften Tagebücher Briefe, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, and Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1994), 1:311. 55. Kafka, Trial, 41–42; Kafka, Proceß, 57–58. 56. Kafka, Trial, 45; Kafka, Proceß, 62. 57. Kafka, Trial, 209; Kafka, Proceß, 283. 58. Kafka, Trial, 223; Kafka, Proceß, 303. 59. Felix Weltsch, Religion und Humor im Leben und Werke Franz Kafkas (Berlin: F. A. Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1957), 93. 60. Kafka, Trial, 213; Kafka, Proceß, 290. 61. Kafka, diary entry, December 25, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries, 148; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:313. 62. In an acute observation, Giuliano Baioni notices how in Kafka’s Trial, “there is no doubt that the Eastern Jews suggested this image of an animal family in which he sees the most elementary form of a court judging him (as assimilated Jew). His lavish descriptions of the filth of this world are not meant to erase but to celebrate it,” whereas “the Zionists champion cleanliness because of the filth of the galut.” See Giuliano Baioni, “Zionism, Literature, and the Yiddish Theater,” in Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics and the Fin de Siècle, ed. Mark Anderson (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 107. 63. Scholem, “Kabbalah and Myth,” 105; Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 1:49, 55 n. 5. 64. In her perspicuous judgment of the virgin-whore dichotomy, Elizabeth Boa notes that “sexuality is under trial in The Trial. Women have positive features only as long as they remain ascetically asexual, which usually is not long,” at least when viewed from the priestly point of view. See Boa, Kafka: Gender, Class and Race in the Letters and Fictions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 223–24. 65. On gender dynamics of the Shekhinah in the Kabbalah, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), esp. 71–72, where the female indwelling as “androgynous angel” is explored. I wish to acknowledge my full debt to his groundbreaking work. 66. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 1:25, 55. 67. Scholem, “Kabbalah and Myth,” 105. 68. Kafka, Trial, 207, translation modified; Kafka, Proceß, 281. 69. Kafka, diary entry, October 1, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries, 59; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:47; Grözinger, Kafka und Kabbalah, 6. 70. Kafka, Trial, 213; Kafka, Proceß, 290. 71. Kafka, Trial, 145–46; Kafka, Proceß, 195–97.

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72. Kafka, diary entry, December 6, 1921, in Kafka, Diaries, 397–98; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:875. 73. See Stanley Corngold, Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), 47–55, for a genealogy of the concept of the literalized metaphor in Kafka’s writing and Kafka criticism as a whole. On Kafka and Kabbalah as a liberation of the literal from the prefiguring constraints of interpretation, see 112. 74. Kafka, Trial, 57, translation modified; Kafka, Proceß, 76. 75. On “Schmutz” as what the young Kafka was not supposed to bring home, see Franz Kafka, “Brief an den Vater,” in Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, 2:1, 203. 76. Kafka, Trial, 57, translation modified; Kafka, Proceß, 76. 77. Kafka, Trial, 67, 213; Kafka, Proceß, 90–91, 290. 78. Idel, Kabbalah, 227. 79. Kafka, Diaries, 129; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:277. See Gershom Scholem, “Tradition and New Creation in the Ritual of the Kabbalists,” in Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, 140–45. 80. Kafka, Trial, 67; Kafka, Proceß, 91. 81. Kafka, Trial, 56; Kafka, Proceß, 75. 82. Arnold Band and Joseph Dan, “Introduction,” in Nahman of Bratslav: The Tales, trans., intro., and commentaries by Arnold J. Band, pref. by Joseph Dan (New York: ­Paulist Press, 1978), 38–39. 83. Ibid. On Kafka and the tales of Rav Nahman of Bratslav, see Robertson, Kafka, 151. 84. Kafka, Trial, 65, 74; Kafka, Proceß, 87, 99. 85. Kafka, Trial, 62; Kafka, Proceß, 52. 86. Scholem, “Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysticism,” 67. 87. Kafka, Trial, 74; Kafka, Proceß, 100. 88. Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, 2:227–30, 2:68ff; Kafka, Dearest Father, 230–31. 89. Idel, Kabbalah, 228. 90. Kafka, Trial, 60–61; Kafka, Proceß, 81–82. 91. Wolfson, “Beautiful Maiden without Eyes,” 187. 92. Kafka, Trial, 226; Kafka, Proceß, 306. 93. Kafka, Trial, 231; Kafka, Proceß, 312. 94. Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, 145. 95. Kafka, Trial, 84; Kafka, Proceß, 114. 96. “It is because of impatience that we were banished from Paradise,” Kafka concludes the second of his numbered aphorisms; “it is because of indolence they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return.” See Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, ed. Max Brod, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1991), 87; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, 2:113. 97. “Aus dem Buche Sohar,” “II: Das Licht des Urquells,” trans. Ernst Müller,” in Von Judentum: Ein Sammelbuch,” ed. Verein Jüdischer Hochschüler Bar Kochba in Prag



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(Leipzig: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1913), 283. On Kafka’s ownership of this volume, see Robertson, Kafka, 151. 98. Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” in Kafka, Complete Stories, 144; Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 1:210. 99. “Egge,” in Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1854), 3:35–40. As Stanley Corngold observes, “Kafka assiduously consulted Grimm’s etymological dictionary.” See Corngold, Franz Kafka, 57n57. 100. Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 148; Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 1:205: “dieser Apparat . . . ist eine Erfindung unseres früheren Kommandanten.” On this very partial listing of the story’s multiple influences, see Peter Fenves, “Continuing the Fiction: From Leibniz’s ‘Petit Fable’ to Kafka’s ‘In der Strafkolonie,’” Modern Language Notes 116, no. 3 (German Issue) (April 2001): 502–20; Sander Gilman, Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient (New York: Routledge, 1995), 85ff.; Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater, 147–54. 101. Roy Pascal, Kafka’s Narrators: A Study of His Stories and Sketches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 80, 82; Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater, 148. 102. Corngold, Lambent Traces, 70. 103. Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 149; “In der Strafkolonie,” 218. 104. Jacob [sic] Gordin, Elishe ben Avuya (New York: International Library Publishing Company, 1910), 87–88. As Beck notes, Kafka saw this play on October 28, 1911, in Prague. See Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater, 215. 105. Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 144; Franz Kafka, “In der Strafkolonie,” in Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 1:203, 210. On the overlapping dates of composition, see Hartmut Binder, Kafka Kommentar zu den Romanen, Rezensionen, Aphorismen und zum Brief an den Vater (Munich: Winkler Verlag, 1982), 6; and Hartmut Binder, Kafka Kommentar zu sämt­ lichen Erzählungen (Munich: Winkler Verlag, 1982), 7. According to Binder, the composition of The Trial took place between the second week of August 1914 and January 17, 1915, while “In the Penal Colony” was composed between October 15 and 18, 1914. 106. Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 145; Kafka, “In der Strafkolonie,” 212. 107. Kafka, Diaries, 96 (which dates this entry October 28); Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:209. Given Kafka’s viewing of Elishe ben Avuye on October 28, 1911 (see Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater, 215), Grözinger’s suggestion that Kafka discussed pardes with Löwy the day after seeing it discussed in Gordin’s drama makes good sense if October 29, 1911, is the date for this crucial passage on Jewish mysticism in Kafka’s diary. See Grözinger, Kafka und Kabbalah, 36–37ff. Aspects of the pardes passage appear elsewhere in Gordin, Elishe ben Avuye; see 71, 80. 108. Franz Kafka, letter to Kurt Wolff, September 4, 1917, in Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 136; Franz Kafka, Briefe 1902–1924 (New York: Schocken Books, 1958), 159. 109. Fromer, Organismus des Judentums, 126. 110. In Scholem, “Revelation and Tradition,” 283. 111. “The account of Moses traveling through time to R. Akiba’s academy reports that he sat in the eighteenth row, apparently with the most inferior students.” See Jeffrey

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R. Rubenstein, Talmudic Stories: Narrative Art, Composition and Culture (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 271. 112. Scholem, “Revelation and Tradition,” 283. 113. Ibid. Kafka was familiar with the historical fate of Rabbi Akiba, who mistakenly supported the Jewish rebel Bar Kochba as the coming of the Messiah in his failed revolt against the Romans in Judea. See Gordin, Elishe ben Avuya, 40. 114. Fromer, Organismus des Judentums, 126. 115. Scholem, “Revelation and Tradition,” 283. 116. Fromer, Organismus des Judentums, 128: “Da sagte Jischmael: ‘weil du ein Waw deutest, sollen wir einen Menschen verbrennen?’” (Sanhedrin 51b). 117. Gordin, Elishe ben Avuye, 40. 118. In Fromer, Organismus des Judentums, 142, Kafka encountered “Meturgeman” as an Aramaic term from the Talmud meaning “translator” (Dolmetscher) or “explainer” (Erklärer). 119. Kafka, diary entry, December 6, 1921, in Kafka, Diaries, 398; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:875. On this problematic of foreshortened metaphor in Kafka and the multiple potential of literal meaning, “always a live factor in the functioning of metaphor,” and which the “operation of social constraints” restricts in “The Metamorphosis,” see Stanley Corngold, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Vermin: Metaphor and Chiasm in Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis,’” Literary Research/Recherche Littéraire 21, no. 41 (2004): 78, 77; and Corngold, Franz Kafka, 47–89. 120. According to a tradition cited by Abraham Joshua Heschel, “some say: Elishe ben Avuye became an apostate when he saw the tongue of Huztpit the Interpreter (one of the ten sages martyred by the Romans) lying in the dunghill, and he cried, ‘shall a tongue which uttered pearls of wisdom now lick filth?’” See Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations, trans. Gordon Tucker and Leonard Levin (New York: Continuum, 2005), 141. 121. Grözinger, Kafka und Kabbalah, 47–48. 122. Robertson, Kafka, 123. 123. Kafka, Trial, 205; Kafka, Proceß, 278. 124. Kafka, Trial, 226; Kafka, Proceß, 306. 125. The same is true of the end of The Trial. The debate over the manuscript variants of the conclusion, like the earlier controversy over the positive or negative meaning of Josef K.’s demise, has had the ironic effect of giving life to interpretation as an aftereffect of his fictional execution, making the conclusion of The Trial only an act of attempted murder where commentary is concerned. On the “resistant” character of the conclusion, see Peter Beicken, Franz Kafka, Der Proceß: Interpretation (Munich: Oldenbourg 1999), 231ff. On “Kafka the narrator” who “does anything in his power to crush it,” see Corngold, Lambent Traces, 222–23. On the earlier debate on the ending that centered on the readings of Politzer and Sokel, see Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater, 165. 126. Martin Wasserman, “Kafka’s ‘The Animal in the Synagogue’: His Marten as a Special Biblical Memory,” Studies in Short Fiction 34, no. 2 (1997): 241–45. 127. Grözinger, Kafka und Kabbalah, 120.



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128. Kafka, Trial, 146; Kafka, Proceß, 197. 129. Franz Kafka, “The Hunter Gracchus,” in Kafka, Complete Stories, 228; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, 2: 309. 130. Ibid., 230; 1:310. 131. “Es begann ein Wettlaufen in den Wäldern. Alles war voll von Tieren. Ich versuchte Ordnung zu machen.” Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, 2:543. 132. Yiddish, as Kafka observed in his “Talk,” represented a linguistic hospitality to “foreign words” (Fremdwörtern). See Kafka, Dearest Father, 382; Franz Kafka, “Einleitungsvortrag Über Jargon,” February 1912, in Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, 1:189. 133. On these Yiddish and Hebrew sources of the “Mann vom Lande,” or “man from the country,” in “amhoretz” and “Am-ha’aretz,” see Heinz Politzer, Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox (1962; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), 174ff. 134. Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 140, translation modified; Kafka, “In der Straf­ kolonie,” 1:203. 135. Kafka, Trial, 213; Kafka, Proceß, 289. 136. Fromer, Organismus des Judentums, 64, which quotes the Talmudic passage Sota 22. 137. Kafka, Diaries, 96 (which dates this entry October 28); Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:209. 138. See Marthe Robert, As Lonely as Franz Kafka, trans. Ralph Mannheim (1979; New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 118; Idel, Kabbalah, 271; Robertson, Kafka, 126; Grözinger, Kafka und Kabbalah, 46–48; Kafka, Trial, 217; Kafka, Proceß, 295. 139. Gordin, Elishe ben Avuye, 88. 140. Ibid., 22, 43. 141. Kafka, Trial, 213; Kafka, Proceß, 289. 142. Kafka, Diaries, 129; Kafka, Tagebücher, 276. 143. Kafka, Trial, 8–9; Kafka, Proceß, 14. 144. Kafka, Trial, 108; Kafka, Proceß, 145. 145. Kafka, Trial, 184; Kafka, Proceß, 251. 146. Fromer, Organismus des Judentums, 12; Kafka, Diaries, 129; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:277. 147. Franz Kafka, “The Country Doctor,” in Kafka, Complete Stories, 220; Franz Kafka, “Ein Landarzt,” in Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 1:253. 148. On Kafka’s Hasidic sources, especially from Buber, see Robertson, Kafka, 179– 80; and Bluma Goldstein, “Franz Kafka’s ‘Ein Landarzt’: A Study in Failure,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 42 (1968): 752ff. 149. Kafka, diary entry, September 25, 1917, in Kafka, Diaries, 387; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:837–38. 150. Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 121. 151. Kafka, “A Country Doctor,” 220; Kafka, “Ein Landarzt,” 253. 152. Gordin, Elishe ben Avuye, 79. 153. Ibid.

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154. Ibid., 80. 155. Kafka, Trial, 219, 218; Kafka, Proceß, 297, 296. 156. Kafka, Trial, 223; Kafka, Proceß, 303. 157. Kafka, Trial, 223; Kafka, Proceß, 303. 158. Gordin, Elishe ben Avuye, 80. 159. Kafka, diary entry, January 16, 1922, in Kafka, Diaries, 399; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:878. 160. Kafka, Trial, 216; Kafka, Proceß, 294. 161. Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, 13.

Chapter 5 1. Evelyn Torton Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 195. Kafka was, as Ritchie Robertson reminds us, fluent in modern Hebrew at this point: “it must not be imagined,” he cautions, “that these allusions” to Hebrew as well as Hasidic sources “form a code that can be cracked, revealing that the meaning of Das Schloß was all along perfectly simple”; see Ritchie Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics and Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 226. 2. Erich Heller, “The World of Franz Kafka,” in Kafka: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ronald Gray (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1962), 111. 3. See Avraham Even-Shoshan, Ha-Milon Ha-Hadash: Otsar Shalem Shel Ha-Lashon Ha-‘Ivrit, Ha-Sifrutit, Ha-Mada’ it V’Ha-Meduberet (Jerusalem: Sivan Press, 1972), 2:791, 794–95. 4. Franz Kafka, diary entry, October 29, 1911, in Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910–1923, ed. Max Brod (1948; New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 96; Franz Kafka, Tagebücher, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller, and Malcolm Pasley, Franz Kafka: Schriften Tagebücher Briefe, Kritische Ausgabe (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1990), 1:209. 5. See Dan Miron, From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010), 329; and Iris Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007). 6. Gerson Shaked, The New Tradition: Essays on Modern Hebrew Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), 242. 7. Kafka, diary entry, January 8, 1914, in Kafka, Diaries, 252; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:622. 8. Ernst Pawel, “Kafka’s Hebrew Teacher,” American Zionist 74, no. 1 (October/November 1985): 21–22; Franz Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, ed. Jost Schillemeit, Franz Kafka: Schriften, Tagebücher Briefe, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, and Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1992), 2:131. 9. See Ernst Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984), 429; and Jack Fellman, The Revival of a Classical Tongue: Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and the Modern Hebrew Language (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1973), 63. 10. Mordechai Georg [Jìri] Langer, “Mashehu Al Kafka” (A Kafka Anecdote), in Langer, Me’At Tsa’ri, coll. and ed. Miriam Dror (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Hotsaʾat Agudat hasofrim ha-ʻIvrim bi-Medinat Yiśraʾel ṿe-ʻEḳed, 1984), 133.



N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 7 2 – 1 75

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11. Robert Alter, The Invention of Hebrew Prose: Modern Fiction and the Languages of Realism (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1988), 50; Kafka, diary entry, December 25, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries, 148; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:313. 12. Gerson Shaked, Modern Hebrew Fiction, trans. Yael Lotan, ed. Emily Miller Budick, bib. comp. Jessica Cohen (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), 52. 13. Franz Kafka, letter to Max Brod, October 25, 1923, in Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 387–90; Franz Kafka, Briefe 1902–1924 (New York: Schocken Books, 1958), 452–55. 14. Ernst Pawel, “Literary Footnote: Kafka’s Hebrew Teacher,” New York Times, August 16, 1981, http://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/16/books/literary-footnote-kafka-s-hebrew -teacher.html?&pagewanted=3. Pawel interviewed Ben-Tovim for this article and the other sources authored by him I have cited in this chapter. 15. Fellman, Revival of a Classical Tongue, 58, 66. 16. See footnote 1 to Puah Menczel Ben-Tovim, “Ich War Kafkas Hebräischlehrerin,” in Hans-Gerd Koch, ed., “Als Kafka Mir Entgegenkam”: Errinerungen an Franz Kafka (Frankfurt am Main: Fisher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000), 165; Pawel, Nightmare of Reason, 429; Pawel, “Kafka’s Hebrew Teacher,” 21–22; and Hartmut Binder, “Kafkas Hebräisch­ studien: Ein biographisch-interpretorischer Versuch,” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 11 (1967): 527–56. 17. Franz Kafka, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, foreword by John Updike (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 368–69; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, 2:665, 664. 18. Pawel, Nightmare of Reason, 429. 19. Ibid.; Pawel, “Kafka’s Hebrew Teacher,” 21. 20. Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism, 177. 21. Franz Kafka, diary entry, January 16, 1922, in Kafka, Diaries, 399; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:878. 22. Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, 2:131. 23. Pawel, Nightmare of Reason, 429. 24. See Ofer Aderet, “Bidding War Erupts over Kafka’s Tel Aviv Legacy,” Haaretz, August 19, 2008, http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasen/spages/1000641.html. 25. Franz Kafka, Hebrew letter to Puah Ben-Tovim, June 1923, reprinted in Hayim U-Ma’As B’Mifalenu Ha-Khinukhim: Sefer Zikaron L’Dr. Yosef Shomo Menzel Zikhrono Livrakha, Leben und Wirken: Unser Erzieherisches Werkk: In Memoriam Dr. Josef Schlomo Menczel 1903–1953, ed. Puah Menczel-Ben-Tovim (Bersheva-Jerusalem: Dr. J. S. Menczel Memorial Foundation, 1981), 49. 26. When he met Felice Bauer on August 13, 1912, Kafka was carrying with him Palästina: Monatsschrift für die Erschliessung Palästinas 9, nos. 7/8 (1912), which contained a Ahad Ha-Am essay translated into German as “Die Lehre der Tatsachen.” The essay describes the controversy surrounding the new Hebrew Gymnasium, the Herzelia in Tel Aviv/Jaffa. See Jürgen Born, Kafka’s Bibliothek: Ein beschreibendes Verzeichnis (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1990), 163.

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N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 75 – 1 8 0

27. Israel Cohen, The German Attack on the Hebrew Schools in Palestine (London: Offices of the Jewish Chronicle and the Jewish World, 1918), 7. 28. On these Jewish and other national sources, see Heinz Politzer, “The Bitter Herb: The Castle,” in Politzer, Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox (1962; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966), 218–81. 29. According to the standard estimate, Kafka wrote The Castle between February 1922 and the end of August or the beginning of September 1922. See Hartmut Binder, Kafka Kommentar zu den Romanen, Rezensionen, Aphorismen und zum Brief an den Vater (Munich: Winkler Verlag, 1976), 7. 30. Mark Harman, “Digging the Pit of Babel: Retranslating Franz Kafka’s The Castle,” New Literary History 27, no. 2 (1996): 302. 31. Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism, 173. 32. “The Balfour Declaration (November 2, 1917),” in The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, 2nd ed., ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 582; Hartmut Binder, ed., Kafka Handbuch in Zwei Bänden, Band I: Der Mensch und Seine Zeit (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1979), 516. 33. For the first appearance of “Vor dem Gesetz” (Before the Law; see Selbstwehr. Unabhähgige jüdische Wochenschrift 9, no. 34, September 7, 1915, 2. Kafka’s Talmudic sources for the parable are to be found in Jakob Fromer, Das Organismus des Judentums (Charlottenburg, 1909), 64ff. 34. The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Revised Standard Edition, ed. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 908. 35. Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 93–95. 36. Palästina: Monatsschrift für die Erschliessung Palästinas 9, nos. 7/8 (1912), 183. 37. Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Mark Harman (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 131; Franz Kafka, Das Schloß, ed. Malcolm Pasley, Franz Kafka: Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe: Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, and Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1982), 207: (“Unsere Gehilfen sind Kinder, die trotz ihrer Jahre noch in diese Schulbänke gehöhren”). 38. Dan Miron, “Sadness in Palestine?,” Haaretz, English ed., November 24, 2008, http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/104056.html. 39. Yael Chaver, What Must Be Forgotten: The Survival of Yiddish in Zionist Palestine (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 43. 40. Kafka, diary entry, October 15, 1921, in Kafka, Diaries, 392; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:863: (ich bin ein lebendig gewordenes Gedächtnis, daher auch die Schlaflosigkeit). 41. Itamar Even-Zohar, “The Emergence of a Native Hebrew Culture in Palestine, 1882–1948,” in Essential Papers on Zionism, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 734, 742–43, n. 7. 42. Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution, 115. 43. See Ahad Ha-Am, “Riv Ha-Lashonot” (Rival Languages), Hashiloach 22 (1910): 161; English in Ahad Ha-Am: Essays, Letters, Memoirs, trans. from the Hebrew and ed. Leon Simon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 225.



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44. Ahad Ha-Am, “Die Lehre der Tatsachen,” 179. 45. Ibid., 170. 46. Kafka, Castle, 190; Kafka, Schloß, 299, translation modified. 47. See Sharon Kinoshita, “Pagans Are Wrong and Christians Are Right: Alterity, Nation and Gender in the Chanson de Roland,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 106. 48. Kafka, Castle, 20, 72; Kafka, Schloß, 36, 116. 49. Fellman, Revival of a Classical Tongue, 50. 50. Cohen, German Attack, 7. 51. Kafka, Castle, 20; Kafka, Schloß, 36. 52. Kafka, letter to Felice Bauer, September 12, 1916, in Franz Kafka, Briefe an Felice und andere Korrespondenz aus der Verlobungszeit, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Jürgen Born and Erich Heller (1967; Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1970), 697; Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice, ed. Erich Heller and Jürgen Born, trans. James Stern and Elizabeth Duckworth (New York: Schocken Books, 1988), 481. 53. Franz Kafka, letter to Felice Bauer, August 9, 1913, in Kafka, Briefe an Felice, Franz Kafka: Gesammelte Werke, ed. Erich Heller and Jürgen Born (S. Fischer Verlag, 1967), “Ergebnislose Deutsche Reden, viel hebräisch . . . Lise W. wirft Papierkügelchen in den Saal,” 465. 54. Cohen, German Attack, 7. 55. “Herzliya High School” (Gymnasia Herzlia) entry, in Encyclopedia of Zionism and Israel, ed. Raphael Patai (New York: Herzl Press/McGraw Hill, 1971), 1:495–96. 56. Franz Kafka, letter to Felice Bauer, November 20, 1912, in Kafka, Briefe an Felice, 107; Kafka, Letters to Felice, 51. 57. Kafka, letter to Bauer, August 9, 1913, 465. 58. Gershom Scholem, letter to Franz Rosenzweig, December 26, 1926, Jerusalem, den 7 Teveth, 5687, reprinted with English translation in William Cutter, “Ghostly Hebrew, Ghastly Speech: Scholem to Rosenzweig, 1926,” Prooftexts 10 (1990): 413–33. 59. Scholem, letter to Franz Rosenzweig, December 26, 1926, 415–18. 60. Marek Nekula, Franz Kafkas Sprachen (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2003), 42. 61. Kafka, “Josephine,” 367; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, 2:663. 62. Kafka, “Josephine,” 369, 368; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, 2:666, 665. 63. See Otto Jespersen, An International Language (London: Allen & Unwin, 1928), X. In Volapük, as Jespersen notes, “most of the words are taken from European languages, especially English, and yet when one sees a page of Volapük, one hardly recognises a single word of it.” 64. Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, ed. Max Brod, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1991), 47; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, 2:90. 65. Scholem, letter to Rosenzweig, 416, 418. 66. On the meeting that Kafka and Scholem attended, see Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale

256

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 85 – 191

University Press, 1996), 187–88; Kafka, diary entry, June 12, 1922, in Kafka, Diaries, 423; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:926. 67. Scholem, letter to Rosenzweig, 416; Ghil’ad Zuckermann, “Multisourced Neologization in ‘Reinvented’ Languages and Languages with ‘Phono-Logographic Script,’” Languages in Contrast 4, no. 2 (2002–3): 281. 68. Franz Kafka, diary entry, June 12, 1923, in Kafka, Diaries, 423; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:926. 69. Franz Kafka, postcard to Robert Klopstock, July 13, 1923, in Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, 372. 70. Pawel, Nightmare of Reason, 432. 71. Kafka, letter to Robert Klopstock, December 31, 1923, in Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, 403; Kafka, Briefe, 470. 72. Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution, 128. 73. Michael G. Corenthal, Cohen on the Telephone: A History of Jewish Recorded Humor and Popular Music 1892–1942 (Milwaukee, Wisc.: Yesterday’s Memories, 1984), 13; Franz Kafka, diary entry, October 26, 1911, in Kafka, Diaries, 89; Kafka, Tagebücher, 1:195. 74. Kafka, Castle, 20; Kafka, Schloß, 36–37. 75. Kafka, letter to Milena Jensenska, end of March 1922, in Franz Kafka, Briefe an Milena, ed. Jürgen Born and Michael Müller (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1983), 302; translation from The Basic Kafka, intro. by Erich Heller (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 274. 76. On this boundary zone in Ben-Yehuda’s technique for introducing foreign sources into modern Hebrew, see Fellman, Revival of a Classical Tongue, 58–59. 77. Ibid., 63; Gershom Scholem, letter to Franz Rosenzweig, 1926, in Cutter, “Ghostly Hebrew,” 415. 78. Kafka, Castle, 20–22; Kafka, Schloß, 36. 79. Kafka, Castle, 20; Kafka, Schloß, 36–37. 80. Charles Bernheimer, Flaubert and Kafka: Studies in Psychopoetic Structure (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1982), 219; Kafka, letter to Robert Klopstock, December 19, 1923, in Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, 402; Kafka, Briefe, 470. 81. N. H. Tur-Sinai, The Revival of the Hebrew Language (Jerusalem: R. H. Hacohen Press, 1960), 9. 82. Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism, 182. 83. Tur-Sinai, Revival of the Hebrew Language, 22. 84. Kafka, Hebrew letter to Puah Ben-Tovim, June 1923, reprinted in Hayim UMa’As B’Mifalenu Ha-Khinukhim, 49. 85. Yoram Bar-David, “Kafka k’Talmid Ivrit: Ha-shayachut L’havaya: u ekh kotvim Ivrit b’Milim Germaniyot,” in Kafka v’Dimiyotav: Beyn Yahadut Nisteret L’S’gida Lo Ya-Ad (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Tzur-Ot, 1998), 75. 86. Moses Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, trans. with intro. and notes by Shlomo Pines, intro. essay by Leo Strauss (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1963), 3:8, 435–36.



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87. Kafka’s sense of the surveyor’s task has not carried over into the historiography of Ben-Yehuda, which has been written in a heroic male cast, as Naomi Seidman has shown. See Naomi Seidman, “Lawless Attachments, One-Night Stands: The Sexual Politics of the Hebrew-Yiddish Language War,” in Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies, ed. Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 279–305. 88. Kafka, Castle, 66; Kafka, Schloß, 107. 89. Todd Hasak-Lowy, Here and Now: History, Nationalism, and Realism in Modern Hebrew Fiction (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 87. 90. Quoted in Seidman, “Lawless Attachments, One-Night Stands,” 285. 91. Quoted in Fellman, Revival of a Classical Tongue, 59. 92. Kafka, Blue Oktavo Notebooks, 46; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, 2:88: “Wie ein Jagdspiel bei dem der einzige Ruheplatz ein Baum jenseits des Weltmeeres ist.” 93. For this background, see David Suchoff, Critical Theory and the Novel: Mass Society and Cultural Criticism in Dickens, Melville and Kafka (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 174ff. 94. Kafka, Castle, 205; Kafka, Schloß, 324. 95. Kafka, Castle, 168; Kafka, Schloß, 197. 96. Kafka, Castle, 169; Kafka, Das Schloß, 199. 97. See Andreas Kilcher, “Kafka, Scholem und die Politik der jüdischen Sprachen,” in Politik und Religion im Judentum, ed. Christoph Miething (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1999), 104. 98. Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, 435. 99. Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 105. 100. Kafka, Castle, 192; Kafka, Schloß, 303. 101. This translation from The Zohar is taken from Gershom Scholem’s translation, Zohar: The Book of Splendor (New York, 1949), 87, with the emendations made by Abraham Socher in his The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy and Philosophy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), 139. 102. See Elliot R. Wolfson, “Beautiful Maiden without Eyes: Pshat and Sod in Zoharic Hermeneutics,” in The Midrashic Imagination: Jewish Exegesis, Thought and History, ed. Michael Fishbane (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 186. 103. Kafka, Castle, 32; Kafka, Schloß, 55. 104. Scholem, Zohar, 87. 105. Kafka, The Castle, 205. 106. Fellman, Revival of a Classical Tongue, 38; Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism, 179. 107. See Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution, 85. 108. Kafka, Castle, 168; Kafka, Schloß, 265. 109. Kafka, Castle, 195; Kafka, Schloß, 307. 110. Ahad Ha-Am, “Die Lehre der Tatsachen,” 170. 111. Walter Sokel, The Myth of Power and the Self: Essays on Franz Kafka (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 323.

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112. Morton Gurewitch, The Ironic Temper and the Comic Imagination (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 200. 113. Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, 2:227–30; Franz Kafka, Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York: Schocken Books, 1954), 230–32. 114. Bernhard Greiner, “Im Umkreis von Ramses: Kafkas Verschollener als jüdischer Bildungsroman,” Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 77 (2003): 657–58. 115. Y. H. Brenner, Breakdown and Bereavement, trans. from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1971), 179. 116. Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, 2:678. 117. Ahad Ha-Am, “Die Lehre der Tatsachen.” 118. Kafka, Castle, 128; Kafka, Schloß, 202. 119. Kafka, Castle,, 9; Kafka, Schloß, 19. 120. Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution, 128. 121. Ibid. 122. “‘Good day teacher,’ [K.] said. All of a sudden the children fell silent [verstummten die Kinder]; having this sudden silence before he spoke must have pleased the teacher. ‘You’re taking a look at the Castle?’ he asked more gently than K. had expected, but as though he did not approve of what K. was doing. ‘Yes,’ said K. ‘I’m a stranger here [ich bin hier fremd], I only arrived in the village yesterday evening.’ ‘You don’t like the Castle?’ the teacher said quickly. ‘What’ countered K., somewhat baffled, but then rephrasing the question more delicately, he said: ‘Do I like the Castle? What makes you think I don’t like it?’ ‘Strangers never do [keinem Fremden gefällt es],’ said the teacher.” 123. Kafka, Castle, 126; Kafka, Schloß, 199. 124. Franz Kafka, “Einleitungsvortrag Über Jargon,” February 1912, in Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, 1:189; Kafka, Dearest Father, 385. 125. Kafka, Castle, 126; Kafka, Schloß, 199. 126. Ibid., 1:190, 384. 127. Kafka, The Castle, 126. 128. Jeffrey R. Rubenstein, Talmudic Stories: Narrative Art, Composition and Culture (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 147. 129. Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, 379; Rubenstein, Talmudic ­Stories, 66. 130. Kafka, The Castle, 9. 131. Kafka, postcard to Robert Klopstock, July 13, 1923, in Kafka, Letters to Family, Friends and Editors, 372; Kafka, Briefe, 435. 132. Kafka, letter to Hugo Bergmann, July 1923, in Kafka, Letters to Family, Friends and Editors, 372–73; Kafka, Briefe, 436. 133. Kafka, “The Hunter Gracchus,” Kafka, The Complete Stories, 230; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, 1:310.



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Afterword 1. Franz Kafka, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories 1883–1924, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, foreword by John Updike (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 361; Franz Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, ed. Jost Schillemeit, Franz Kafka: Schriften Tagebücher Briefe, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, and Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt: S. Fischer 1992), 2:652. 2. Kafka “Josephine the Singer,” 368; Nachgelassene Schriften, 2:665. 3. Kafka, “Josephine the Singer,” 361; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 2:652. 4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 194. 5. Marek Nekula, Franz Kafkas Sprachen (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2003), 46; Iris Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 197; Hartmut Binder, “Kafkas Hebräischstudien: Ein biographisch-interpretorischer Versuch,” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 11 (1967): 552. 6. Kafka, “Josephine,” 361–62; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 2:654. 7. On this history, see Hartmut Binder, ed., Kafka-Handbuch in Zwei Bänden, vol. 2: Das Werk und Seine Wirkung (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1979), 6–7. 8. For these details, see Elif Batuman, “Kafka’s Last Trial,” New York Times Magazine, September 26, 2010, 34–41; Mark M. Anderson, “Virtual Zion: The Promised Lands of the Kafka Critical Editions,” in Kafka, Zionism and Beyond, ed. Mark Gelber (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2004), 310n5; and Ofer Aderet, “Box with Kafka Manuscripts to Be Opened to the Public,” Haaretz, July 21, 2010, online edition. 9. Batuman, “Kafka’s Last Trial,” 39. 10. Kafka, “Josephine,” 362, 363; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 2:654, 657. 11. Kafka, “Josephine,” 360; Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften, 2:651. 12. On the interdependence of Hebrew and Yiddish in this sense, see Anita Norich, “Hebraism and Yiddishism: Paradigms of Modern Jewish Literary History,” in Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries, ed. Sheila E. Jelen, Michael P. Kramer, and L. Scott Lerner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 338.

index

African American culture, 11–12, 116–17, 127–28, 130. See also Jazz Agnon, S. Y., 114 Ahad Ha-Am (Asher Ginzburg), 43, 45, 65– 66, 79, 82, 87–91, 111–12, 121–22, 125, 175, 177, 179–81, 195, 198–202, 205 Akiba, Rabbi, 113–14, 156–59, 162 Aleichem, Sholem, 47, 82–83 Alter, Robert, 18–19, 26, 172 Amerika Heute und Morgen, 106, 127–28 Anders, Guenther, 147 Andler, Charles, 50 Aramaic: elements in modern Hebrew, 179– 80; as language of Origen, 108; Talmudic strictures and, 41; as traditional Jewish language, 7 Arendt, Hannah, 20–21, 25–27 Atta Troll, 120 Ave-Lallement, Christian Benedict, 27 Baioni, Giuliano, 16 Balfour Declaration, 176 Band, Arnold, 76, 151 Bar-David, Yoram, 190 Barzel, Hillel, 36 Batnitsky, Leora, 36–37 Batuman, Elif, 208 Bauer, Felice, 37, 44–45, 65, 81, 87, 90, 181–82 Beck, Evelyn Tornton, 16, 132–34, 170 Beckett, Samuel, 67 Ben-Tovim, Puah, 2, 7, 171–75, 191, 195, 208 Ben-Tovim, Zalman, 171, 174–75 Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer, 2, 171–73, 186–87, 189–92 Benjamin, Walter, 8, 19–21, 23–24, 26–28, 30–35, 37–38, 40, 43–44, 56–57, 61, 75, 103–5, 123, 132 Bergmann, Hugo, 43, 90, 110–12, 126–27, 173, 178, 190, 204

Berlin: cabaret scene and “Mistkäfer” act in, 119; Jewish People’s Home in, 204; Der Jude published in, 117; Kafka, Felice Bauer, and, 87; Kafka learns Hebrew in, 185; Kafka’s Hebrew letter to Puah BenTovim in, 173; as modernist center, 39; Scholem, Zionism, and, 44 Berlin, Irving, 128 Berlin Childhood Around 1900, A, 23 Bernheimer, Charles, 189 Berra, Yogi, 42 Biale, David, 26, 32 Bialik, H. N., 40–43, 82–84, 86–88, 92, 171 Bible, 6, 11, 31, 35–36, 39, 87, 93–94, 98, 101– 3, 107–8, 121, 124, 129, 133, 138–39, 147, 176, 188, 190–91, 193 Bin Gorion, Micha Josef, 59–60 Binder, Hartmut, 16 Blackface (minstrel shows), 6, 116, 120 Blei, Franz, 65 Börne, Ludwig, 49, 51 Breakdown and Bereavement, 196–97 Brenner, Yosef Haim: background to “The Judgment,” 65–66; as Hebrew text read by Kafka, 178; Kafka’s comment on, 171–72; transnational Hebrew perspective of, 196–97 Brentano, Clemens, 23 Brice, Fanny, 129 Brit Shalom, 26, 43–44 Brod, Max, 7–8, 16, 35, 46, 49, 52, 56, 58, 61 Bruce, Iris, 9, 90, 96, 121, 160, 171, 174 Buber, Martin, 4, 37, 78, 138 Bush, Frank (vaudeville comedian), 117 Casanova, Pascale, 14, 70, 88 Chaver, Yael, 178 Cohen, Israel, 175, 181 Cohen, Ted, 41

2 62

i n de x

“Cohen on the Telephone” (comedy routine), 186 Cold war and containment criticism, 16–20 Corngold, Stanley, 34, 147, 156 Czech language, 54 Czech nationalism, 17, 58, 63, 142 Damrosch, David, 19 Dan, Joseph, 151 David Copperfield (Dickens), 85 Delueze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 5, 13–18 Derrida, Jacques, 19, 108 Des Knabens Wunderhorn, 23 Deutsche Gaunerthum, Das (The German Underworld), 27 Dialect and language, distinguished, 58 Dichtung und Wahrheit, 47–49, 54 Eddon, Raluca, 26 Elisha ben Abuya (Talmudic figure), 113, 131, 159, 163, 167–68, 203 Elishe ben Avuye (Gordin play), 74, 156, 159– 60, 167–68, 203 Even-Zohar, Itamar, 178–79 Faynman, Zygmund, 75, 132 Fellman, Jack, 181 Fiedler, Leslie, 26 Frankfurt, Jewish accent in, 51–52. See also Mauscheln Freud, Sigmund, 71, 80–81, 86, 134 Fromer, Jakob, 11, 26, 112, 131, 137, 157, 158 German Jewish writing, 46–47, 49, 64, 99 German language, 25, 37–38; Benjamin on isolation and decline of, 8; as influence on Morris Rosenfeld, 95–96; Jewish love for, 93; as model for Ahad Ha-Am’s Hebrew, 180; Prague German, 9, 54–55; as rival of modern Hebrew in Palestine, 181; shared origins with Yiddish, 27ff., 50, 52, 64 Germanistik, 55, 74, 119 Gilman, Sander, 17 Ginzburg, Asher. See Ahad Ha-Am God, Man and the Devil, 73 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 37, 46–54; Goethe and Yiddish, 48–49; Kafka’s essay on, 110 Goldfaden, Abraham, 118 Goldstein, Moritz, 24–25

Gordin, Jacob, 73–74, 163, 203 Graetz, Heinrich (History of the Jews), 3 “Greater Germany,” 54 Grimm, Jacob, 9, 55–56, 155 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (the Brothers Grimm), 53, 60 Grimm, Wilhelm, 33, 49, 119 Grözinger, Karl Erich, 16, 144, 156, 161 Gurewitch, Morton, 196 Ha-Levi, Yehuda, 85–86, 94–95 Hanssen, Beatrice, 21 Harman, Mark, 176 Harshav, Benjamin, 57, 85–86, 101, 177, 185, 199–200 Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), 23–24, 39 Havel, Vaclav, 13 Hebrew, 2, 4–5, 7, 9, 24, 26–27, 30, 34–45, 62, 65, 86, 102, 136–37, 147, 170, 171–75; character of Y. H. Brenner’s Hebrew and modernism, 171–72; Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and recreation of, 171–74, 187–92, 194–96; and infinite interpretation, 93, 157; Kafka speaks in Prague, 171; Kafka’s Hebrew notebooks, 195; language war in Palestine and Europe, 88–89, 174, 177–78, 192; letter to Puah Ben-Tovim in and Kafka’s lessons in, 172–85; modern Hebrew’s emergence in Russia, 81–82; relations with other traditions, 108; Rosenzweig on modern form of, 7, 31, 39; Scholem’s letter to Rosenzweig on renewal of in Palestine, 183. See also Herzelia Gymnasium; Tel Aviv; Zionism Heimat (homeland): Brod, Amerika and, 122; Brothers Grimm, fatherland and, 53; in “The Judgment,” 66, 74; Kafka’s attitude toward, 58–59; Nietzsche’s poem on and Kafka, 58; Rosenzweig on, 37 Heine, Heinrich, 23, 49, 51–52, 120–21 Heller, Erich, 170 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 18, 33 Herz, Marcus, 80 Herzeliya Gymnasium, Tel-Aviv-Jaffa, 44– 45, 182 Histoire de la littérature Judéo-Allemande, 50, 66, 80, 95–96, 98 “History’s Baggage” (Rosenfeld), 97–98, 100 Hexapla, 108 Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judenums (Berlin), 26, 161 Hoffe, Esther, 207

i n de x 263 Hoffe, Eva, 207 Holitscher, Arthur, 106, 127–28 Hollander, Dana, 37 humor: badchen or wedding jester figure in “The Judgment,” 73, 90; black humor or gallows humor, 54, 80–81; cabaret scene and “Mistkäfer” act in Berlin, 119; “Cohen on the Telephone” (comedy routine), 186; and comedy, 74–76; commedia dell’arte style and ethnic humor, 52; father as shund “comedian” in “The Judgment,” 73–74; Freud on, 80–81; “German Entering a Saloon” (Jewish comedy routine), 117; and German Jewish speech, 49; Jewish definition of, 41; modern Hebrew and comedy of origins, 173–89; vaudeville animals, 57; vaudeville influence, 86–87; and Yiddish theater, 74, 135 Hutzpit, Rabbi (Hutzpit ha-Meturgeman), 159 Hyperion, 63 Idel, Moshe, 114, 142, 144–45, 150, 153, 163 “In the City of Slaughter” (Bialik), 82 “Jabberwocky,” 142 Jahn, Wolfgang, 128–29 Jameson, Frederic, 19 Janacek, Frantisek, 70 Jazz, 6, 122, 124 Jensenska, Milena, 58, 187 Jenufa, 70 Jolson, Harry, 115–16 Joplin, Scott, 128 Joyce, James, works by: Finnegan’s Wake, 70; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 70; Ulysses, 68, 70 Jude, Der, 4, 6, 41, 78, 117, 125–26, Kabbalah, 103, 109–15; influence on The Trial, 131–69; pardes passage of Talmud and kabbalistic themes in Amerika, 113–15; shekhinah theme in The Castle, 193–94ff. See also Zohar Kafka, Franz: childhood and linguistic background in Prague, 69–70; comic Kabbalah and The Trial, 131–69; critical attitude toward Germanistik, 53–55, 74–75; dispute over manuscripts in Tel Aviv, 207–8; editions of, 7–10; German Jewish writing and, 46–47, 49, 64, 99; Goethe

and, 46–54; Hebrew lessons and Berlin, 185ff.; initial canonization of, 13–20; Jewish linguistic influences and, 4–5; Jewish messianism and, 21, 32, 62, 99, 114, 130, 155, 170, 180; as Jewish son and talking animal, 78–87; lessons in modern Hebrew, 174–75ff.; linguistic turn and Jewish languages, 54–62; love of modern Hebrew and acquisition of, 171–75; Palestine, ­Zionism, and, 43–44; study at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, 26, 160–61; Talmudic pardes passage, Kabbalah, and Amerika, 112–13ff.; transformative power of Yiddish cursing and, 71–78; transnational perspective, 2–3; Yiddish theater and, 63. See also Berlin; Hebrew; German Jewish writing; Humor; Prague; Yiddish; Zionism Kafka, Franz, works by: “Abraham,” 11, 36; Amerika, or the Man Who Disappeared, 6, 11, 87, 93–130, 138, 147, 161, 165, 196; “The Animal in the Synagogue,” 8, 160–61; “Before the Law,” 42, 167–69; “The Building of the Temple,” 1, 3, 9, 165; “Cares of a Family Man,” 21–22; The Castle, 35, 142, 170–204; “The Coming of the Messiah,” 114; “A Country Doctor,” 1, 165–66; diary entries, 6, 11, 46, 50, 67, 82–83, 86, 110, 112, 116, 117, 123, 130, 134, 151, 156, 164, 171, 186; “Five Friends,” 35; “Golem,” 130; “The Hunter Gracchus,” 39, 161; “I Was a Visitor among the Dead,” 4–5, 153, 196; “In the Penal Colony,” 155, 158–62; “Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language,” 4–5, 8, 29–30, 34, 54, 58–59, 66, 69, 75–77, 84, 97, 153, 201; “Jackals and Arabs,” 6, 125–27; “Josephine the Singer, or, the Mouse-Folk,” 7, 135, 175, 183–85, 196–97, 205–9; “The Judgment,” 59, 63–92, 95; “Letter to the Father,” 69–70, 73; letters, 9, 37, 44, 46, 49, 53, 56–57, 58, 157, 185, 187; “The Metamorphosis,” 118; “Mt. Sinai,” 10; “On Small Literatures,” Dec. 25, 1911 diary entry, 5, 29, 39, 63–65, 115, 146; “The New Advocate,” 80; “On Suspended Animation,” 12; “Report to an Academy,” 3, 4, 6, 17, 78–79, 117, 125–26, 128, 144–45, 190; “Researches of a Dog,” 57; “The Thorn Bush,” 4; “The Tomb Watcher,” 61; “The Tradesman,” 63, 66; The Trial, 8, 31, 118, 131–69; “The Village Schoolteacher,” 59–60

264

i n de x

Kafka, Hermann, 69–70, 72 Kennan, George, 16 Kermode, Frank, 151 Kestenberg-Gladstein, Ruth, 71 Kilcher, Andreas, 6, 193 Kishinev pogrom, 83ff. Klopstock, Robert, 185 Kluge, Friedrich, 28, 30 Kracauer, Siegfried, 37 Kraus, Karl, 49–51, 55 Kronfeld, Chana, 38 Ladino: as language in the Hebrew schools of Jaffa, 175; as rival of modern Hebrew in Palestine, 181 Langer, Mordechai Georg (Jìri), 39, 171 “Language War” (milchemet ha-safot), 42, 44–45, 81, 88, 192 Lazarus, Emma, 94 Lessing, G. E., 74–75 Lessing, Theodor, 21 Löwy, Yitzhak, 46, 63, 69, 97, 112–13, 118 Ludwig Börne: eine Denkschrift, 49, 51 Luther, Martin, 29 Maimon, Salomon, 11, 79–80, 94, 140–41 Maimonides, Moses, 4, 40, 133 Maimonides, Moses, works by: Guide of the Perplexed, 11, 94, 191, 193; Mishne Torah, 11, 94, 137 “March of Exile, The” (Rosenfeld), 101–3 Matishoff, James A., 72 Mauscheln (Yiddish-inflected German), 25, 49–52 Mauthner, Fritz, 54 McWhorter, John, 52 Meir, Rabbi (Talmudic figure), 113–14, 156, 162–63, 167–69 Mendelssohn, Moses, 23–24, 40–41, 67, 76 Metatron, 203 Miron, Dan, 177–78 Modernism: cold war modernism and Kafka’s initial canonization, 14ff.; Hebrew and Yiddish, 38–39; “international,” 14–15; Irish and European, 67–68 Molloy, 67 Moses, 13, 90, 110–12, 157–59, 174, 196 Mossinsohn, Ben-Zion, 182 Mother tongue: Ahad Ha-Am and modern Hebrew notion of, 179–80; German idea of as lacking comedy, 75; ostensible lack of

in Prague German, 54; Yiddish (mamaloshon) as trans-linguistic model of, 67, 85–86 Nathan the Wise, 75 Naveh, Gila Safran, 123–24 New York, 8, 11; Arendt’s refuge and Kafka, 20, 25; Breakdown and Bereavement first published in, 178; and Hebrew and Yiddish modernism, 39; Kafka’s diaries first appear in, 26; Morris Rosenfeld in, 45, 69, 74; and Sholem Aleichem, 82; site of modernist canonization, 14–15; as symbolic location in Amerika, 93–130ff., 138, 165; vaudeville and Yiddish theater in, 186 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 58 Niger, Shmuel, 7 Organismus des Judentums (Fromer), 26, 112, 131, 162 Origen (Church father), 107–8 Ornan, Uzzi, 7 “Our Ship” (Rosenfeld), 95–96 Palästina: Monatsschrift für die Erschliessung Palästinas, 45, 65 Palestine, “Arab Question,” Bergmann, and, 126–27; Puah Ben-Tovim and, 173–74; bi-national movement, Scholem, and, 43–44; Brod’s arrival in with Kafka’s manuscripts, 8; Hebrew language growth in, 192ff.; Hebrew schools in, 180–83; Jewish “colonies” in and “The Judgment,” 44–45ff., 66, 81, 89–91; Kafka, Zionism and, 44–45; “language war,” Hebrew and, 42, 44–45, 81, 88, 192; re-creation of Hebrew in, 12; suppression of Yiddish in, 178 Pascal, Roy, 156 Paul, Hermann, 56 Pawel, Ernst, 173 Peretz, Y. L., 83 Pines, Meyer, 50, 66, 95–96, 99 Playboy of the Western World (Synge), 67 Politzer, Heinz, 15, 94, Pollak, Oscar, 53, 55 Popular History of the Jews (Graetz), 3 Postmodernism, 19 Prague: account of Yiddish theater performance in, 119–20; Puah Ben-Tovim lives in, 173–74; Bialik poem performed in, 86–87; Brod flees Nazis from, 207;

i n de x 265 ­ uber’s lectures in, 37; Czech literature B in, 77; German idiom in, 9–10, 54–55, 80; Hebrew prayer book used in, 76; influence on Amerika, 100, 107; Kafka’s “Cares of a Family Man” and, 21–22; Kafka’s childhood and linguistic background in, 69–70; Kafka’s history in and reception, 13; nationalism in and Kafka, 17; Rosenfeld reads poems in, 95–96; Spring ’68 and Kafka, 14; synagogue in, 148; trans­ national influences in and Hermann Kafka, 72–73; Zionist circle in, 43–44 “Raisins and Almonds” (Yiddish standard), 118–20 Return to Zion (Shivat Zion; 1921 film), 176 Robert, Marthe, 15–16 Robertson, Ritchie, 16, 27, 44, 163 Rokem, Na’ama, 236 Rosenfeld, Morris, 45, 50, 69; Germanophile position in Yiddish letters and, 96ff.; Kafka’s influence by and interpretation of, 97ff.; reads poems in Prague, 95–96; trans-linguistic formation of Yiddish and, 99; country house of Amerika, 105–6 Rosenfeld, Morris, works by: “History’s Baggage,” 97–98; “March of Exile,” 100– 103; “Our Ship,” 95–97 Rosenzweig, Franz, 35, 183–84 Rosenzweig, Franz, works by: “Modern Hebrew?” 7, 31, 39; “Preface” to Ninety-Two Poems and Hymns of Yehuda Halevy, 31– 32; Star of Redemption, 35–37 Russia: “friend” in Russia in “The Judgment” and Jewish languages, 89–92; including Poland and Yiddish-speaking lands, 66; language as threat to Czech, 77; as nonWestern Jewish “colonies,” 67; revolution of 1905 in and “The Judgment,” 81–82 Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschiche (The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon), 11, 79, 94, 140–41 Sandrow, Nahma, 75 Sauer, August, 55 Sayings of the Jews, 59–60 Schleyer, Johann Martin, 184 Schnitzler, Arthur, 135 Schocken Books, 8, 26 Scholem, Gershom, 3, 20, 25–26, 28, 31, 43– 44, 107, 132–33, 147, 154, 169; letter to

Franz Rosenzweig on modern Hebrew, 183, 187–88 Selbstwehr (Prague Zionist journal), 21–23, 43, 88, 95, 123, 151–52, 161, 167, 176 Sforim, Mendele Mocher, 123 Shaked, Gerson, 172 Shulamit, 117 Shumsky, Dimitry, 212, 243 Shund (popular Yiddish theater), 74 Slezkine, Yuri, 21, 24 Sokel, Walter, 15–16, 147, 195 Sonnenfels, Joseph, 74 Spector, Scott, 17 St. Claire of Assisi, 107 St. Louis of France, 43 Stölzl, Christoph, 15 Sussman, Henry, 43 Synge, John Millington, 67 Talmud: Aggadah and Halakhah, 40; Talmudic (Bavli) passages discussed, Avodah Zarah 22b, 123; —, Eruvin 13a, 114, 156– 157; —, Menahot 29b, 157; —, “The Oven of Akhnai” (Baba Metzia 59b), 112; —, “pardes” (Hagiga 14b, Tosefta Hagiga 2:3–4), 112–13ff., 162–63, 171; —, Hagiga 15b, 131; —, Yoma 54b, 141; —, Sanhedrin 51b, 159 Tel Aviv, 10, 39, 87–88, 175, 207–8 Thieves’ cant (Gaunersprache), 28–30 Tolstoy, Count Leo, 200 “Torah Scribe, The” (Agnon), 114 Torcyner, Harry (Naphtali Tur-Sinai), 190 Tradition, Kafka’s conception of, 10–11 Trilling, Lionel, 15, 27 Vaudeville, 6, 115–30; and linguistic origins, 173–89 Vice-King, The (Yiddish play), 74, 132 Volapük, 184 Wagenbach, Klaus, 16 Wasserman, Jakob, 46 Weg ins Freie, Der, 135 Weinreich, Max, 7, 58 Weltsch, Felix, 5, 146 Weltsch, Lise, 182 Wiener, Leo, 98 Wiesler, Ruth, 207 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Urmeister), 52–53

266

i n de x

Wisse, Ruth, 18, 53, 135 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 60, 159, 206 Wohlfarth, Irving, 30 Wolff, Kurt, 78, 157 Wolfson, Elliot, 103–4, 147, 194 Yiddish: and blackface, 120; daytshmerish influence of German on literature upon, 95–96, 98; debate over at 11th Zionist Convention, 45; Deleuze and Guattari, and 14ff.; formation of vocabulary, 46–47, 52, 58–59; Goethe Mauscheln and, 45–54; language, 2, 4, 6–7, 23, 25–26, 57–58, 69; Haskalah, Benjamin, and, 24; humor, Yiddish definition of, 81; influence on modern Hebrew in Palestine, 177–78; Kafka’s “Talk” on, 4–5, 8, 29–30, 34, 54, 58–59, 66, 69, 75–77, 84, 97, 153, 201; literature, 50, 69 (see also Kafka, works by, “On Small Literatures”); as mama-loshon, 85; Moses Mendelssohn and, 23; psychoostensive expressions in, 72–74, 77–78; as rival of modern Hebrew, 81–82, 167;

r­ epresented in “Josephine,” 184, 206ff.; semiotics of communication in, 42; shared origins with German, 27ff., 50, 66. See also Aleichem, Sholem; Faynman, ­Zygmund; Gordin, Jacob; Peretz, Y. L.; Rosenfeld, Morris; Sforim, Mendele Mocher Yiddish theater, 63, 75ff., 117–18; influence on The Trial, 132–34ff.; shund and Kafka’s attitude toward, 74 Ziegfeld Follies, 129 Zipperstein, Steven, 81–82 Zionism, 6, 16, 26, 35, 37, 41, 43–46, 88–91, 132, 146, 161, 167; Brit Shalom movement in Palestine, 26, 43–44; comedy and cultural Zionism, 121–30; 11th Zionist Convention, Vienna, 1913, 45; and language debates in Palestine, 175–89. See also Ahad Ha-Am; Ben-Tovim, Puah; Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer; Brenner, Y. H.; Hebrew; Palestine; Selbstwehr Zohar, The, 103, 139, 150, 153, 155

Acknowledgments

Gratitude does not describe the debt I owe for the colloquy about Kafka that made this book possible—beginning with my mother, who told me she could not speak Yiddish and certainly not Hebrew. Her lively conversations in Yiddish on park benches in Tel Aviv, after a lifetime of claiming not to speak the language, first exposed me to the relation between the hidden and the open explored in this book. Though my father’s skill at Jewish vaudeville may not seem like a positive resource for such a study, I thank him for an expertise that allowed me to discover the comedy hiding in plain sight. I also discovered more about Kafka than comes through in these pages from Sacvan Bercovitch, Amir Eshel, Willi Goetschel, Benjamin Harshav, Sharon Kinoshita, Jon Klancher, Winfried Kudszus, D. A. Miller, Hanna Roisman, Yossi Roisman, Doris Sommer, and all the students of my Franz Kafka and modern Jewish writing courses. Willi Goetschel read the entire manuscript and made many helpful suggestions. I am also grateful to Martha Helfer, Bill Donahue, Adam Newton, Mary Rhiel, Judith Ryan, Doris Sommer, and Liliane Weissberg for opportunities to present parts of this book in different forums, and to Robert Alter, who allowed the seeds of this study to grow in my own rough ground. As an editor, Jerry Singerman was both a true professional and a mensch. In Israel, Avi Avidov and Mark Gelber generously helped me acquire new material. Portions of Chapter 1 appeared as “Kafka’s Politics: Goethe, Zionism and the Hidden Openess of Tradition,” Journal of the Kafka Society of America, nos. 1–2 (June–December 2005): 71–83, and as “Kafka’s Jewish Languages: The Hidden Openess of Tradition,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 15, no. 2 (2007): 65–132. During the process of writing, my wife Karen and daughters Dani and Jessi made my life far better than Kafka’s research dog—as it were. Each of them provided the nourishment I needed to bring this project to completion. The entire family provided the advice and support—under the table and above— that brought me back, when I strayed, to our family tradition, where all the best discoveries were made. This book is for them.