Kafka's Jewish languages : the hidden openness of tradition / David Suchoff.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Suchoff, David Bruce.

Series:

Haney Foundation series.

Haney Foundation Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Kafka, Franz, 1883-1924--Language.

Kafka, Franz.

Kafka, Franz, 1883-1924--Knowledge--Yiddish language.

Kafka, Franz, 1883-1924--Knowledge--Hebrew language.

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (276 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Introduction. Kafka's Jewish Voice

Chapter 1. Cold War Kafka and Beyond

Chapter 2. The Breakthrough to Jewish Languages

Chapter 3. Hebrews in New York

Chapter 4. Kabbalah and Comedy

Chapter 5. Open Boundaries

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

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781283897242

1283897245

9780812205244

0812205243

OCLC:

793012722