The Animal in the Synagogue

The Animal in the Synagogue explores Franz Kafkas 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 Kafkas 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 Kafkas correspondence with his Czech lover, Milena Jesenska, and on a meticulous analysis, thematic, stylistic, and structural, of Kafkas only short story touching openly and directly upon Jewish social and ritual issues, and known as In Our Synagogue (the titlenot by the author). In both the letters and the short story images of small animalsrepulsive, dirty, or otherwise objectionableare 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 Kafkas 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 Kafkas 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 Kafkas 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.