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