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c h A P t e r 2 The Breakthrough to Jewish Languages “The Judgment” Ten waters will not cleanse you of Jewish talk. (Fun yídishe reyd ken men zikh nit ópvashn in tsen vasern.) —Yiddish proverb Hailed as Kafka’s “breakthrough” text, “The Judgment,” composed on the now-famous night of September 22, 1912, was new only as an act of transnational consolidation, sparked by his encounter with the life of Jewish languages .1 Kafka’s conviction that he had risen above the “shameful lowlands of writing” (schändlichen Niederungen) after completing the text suggests just how this story of father, son, and the missing mother and mother tongue built upon his existing sense of foreignness as central to his literary creation, constructing the platform from which his later works would spring.2 “My money is in the hands of strangers [fremde Leute],” he had written in “The Tradesman ,” a self-conscious exploration of his own “small business” and his small share of literary capital, which was published in the periodical Hyperion in 1908.3 By 1912 Kafka had experienced the Yiddish theater in Prague, been an impresario for its performances in Bohemia with Zionist organizations throughout the Austro-Hungarian province, and steeped himself, via Yitzhak Löwy, in what his diary entry of December 25, 1911, called “contemporary Jewish literature in Warsaw,” meaning both Yiddish and Hebrew, as well as “contemporary Czech literature, partially through my own insight.”4 Kafka’s “Judgment” was a breakthrough only in its coded but humorous grasp of Kafka’s dilemma as a German and Jewish writer. While Jewish linguistic sources and the related question of Czech literary and political nationalism 64 chAPter 2 had begun to motivate his deepest creative impulses, his desire to “raise the world” to the level of the “pure, the true, and the immutable” called for precisely the kind of sojourn through the “Niederungen” of foreign and Jewish literary voices that his alter ego—the “friend” in “Russia”—had already begun to explore.5 New in “The Judgment” was Kafka’s ability to interrelate these two exclusive alternatives and to do so with hidden humor. In this story a “pure” literature shorn of its “national and cultural characteristics” at the same time evokes the exchanges between Jewish and other voices that were “memories come alive” for his generation of German Jewish writers.6 The point that Kafka made in his now-famous diary entry of December 25, 1911, on “small literatures” and the challenge to the conception of a “German” or “Jewish” linguistic identity was brilliantly clear and consistent with his later animal imagery in his fiction and literary correspondence. Just as “young Jews who began to write German” are described in his 1921 letter to Brod as a kind of acrobatic performer on a “tightrope,” “stealing the German child from the cradle,” and rethinking the symbolic accession to literary language, so Kafka in his diary entry sees the “small” languages of “Jewish Warsaw” as a window on the process by which literary traditions are formed.7 Whether part of a “small” or “great” literature themselves, the most powerful writings drew from the present-day Volk, by enabling the people to recover the sources of their own linguistic past: “A small nation’s memory [Gedächtnis] is not smaller than the memory of a large one and so can digest the existing material more thoroughly. There are, to be sure, fewer experts in literary history employed, but literary history is less a concern of literary history than of the people [des Volkes].”8 Astounding in this passage is not its Jewish populism— Kafka had recently read of Sholem Aleichem as the “Mark Twain of the ghetto” and in the prestigious language of French—but the notion of literary process it evokes, in which Jewish and other small languages are viewed as preemergent forms of literary wealth.9 The number of speakers of Yiddish or modern Hebrew, as Kafka suggests, creates a more intensive integration of what is “past,” enabling a recovery of the full range of the nation’s literary tradition and voice. Already in 1911 Kafka saw Hochdeutsch as impoverished, because its writers had forgotten to mine the forgotten sources of their national forms of expression, which once entered the language from abroad. “This is plain, for example,” Kafka writes, “in a literature rich in great talents, such as German is, where the worst writers limit their imitation to what they find at home.”10 [18...

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