The Animal in the Synagogue: Franz Kafka's Jewishness
Dan Miron, "The Animal in the Synagogue: Franz Kafka's Jewishness "
English | ISBN: 1498595138 | 2019 | 166 pages | PDF | 2 MB
English | ISBN: 1498595138 | 2019 | 166 pages | PDF | 2 MB
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.
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