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The Animal in the Synagogue - Franz Kafka's Jewishness (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,365
Discovery Miles 23 650
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The Animal in the Synagogue - Franz Kafka's Jewishness (Hardcover)
Series: Lexington Studies in Jewish Literature
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Total price: R2,385
Discovery Miles: 23 850
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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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