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c h A P t e r 3 Hebrews in New York Amerika, or The Man Who Disappeared And the children of Yisrael journeyed from Ra’meses to Sukkot, about six hundred thousand men on foot, beside children. And a mixed multitude [erev rav] went up with them. —Exod. 12:37–38. Though the novel that came to be known as Amerika has long been seen as ending with references to the New Testament, New York is the location that sparked Kafka’s reimagination of the Hebrew voice.1 “The Judgment” had already taught Kafka how to write a German shot through with foreign sources and liberated his writing, with the model of Yiddish inspiring him to rethink the idea of a mother tongue. Kafka’s New York novel became the fictional site that allowed him to rethink his relation to his own linguistic origin in broader ways with the broader range of Jewish languages in mind. Karl Rossman, the novel’s protagonist, will therefore be banished from his father’s house for having been seduced by the Christian maid but obviously, in this German Jewish parable, for having been seductive to her as well. Without a proper name, Yiddish in Kafka’s New York resembles the offspring Karl left behind in Prague: like that child, who was “christened Jakob” (in der Taufe den Namen Jakob erhielt), Yiddish in 1912 was the product of a vibrant Hebrew language and its love for the common German tongue.2 This symbolically German Jewish romance leaves Karl’s child in Prague and leads him to discover in New York his long-lost Uncle Jakob, who is engaged in what is often a more acceptable form of trade and exchange, one that will suggest Kafka’s own reading of the hidden but infinite potential of the Hebrew voice. 94 chAPter 3 New York is in this way Kafka’s first, large-scale site for encountering the symbolic force of Hebrew in his fiction and for imagining an exodus among others as key to its lasting effects. Kafka’s use of biblical sources does not make this a story of his linguistic origins alone, as Karl Rossman’s sojourn in the “Hotel Occidental” suggests. After leaving New York and the house of Uncle Jakob, Karl heads to the city of Ramses, New York, by sharing his fate with the “Irishman” Robinson and “Delamarche, I’m French,” giving Kafka’s first hidden exploration of Hebrew in his fiction a radically biblical and at the same time hypermodern, transnational sense.3 Immigrant Israel: Kafka and Morris Rosenfeld Kafka’s German Jewish vision of New York is symbolized by the sword in the hand of the Statue of Liberty on the novel’s first page. This “divine messenger,” as Heinz Politzer calls her, finds a source in the Hebrew meaning of that term, whose translinguistic meaning is outlined in Salomon Maimons Lebengeschichte, a book that Kafka mentions in a letter to Felix Weltsch as a source for Maimonides .4 There the Hebrew meaning of such a “messenger” is discussed in the section on angels in Moses Maimonides’ terms. In the Hebrew Bible, Maimon writes, translating Maimonides’ twelfth-century text, working from a Hebrew translation of the original Judeo-Arabic in which The Guide of the Perplexed was composed, “every action [Wirkung] occurs, that is to say, through the offices of an angel”: “for angel [in Hebrew, malakh] means messenger [Bote]. He who follows the order of another is an angel. Thus we find that the Holy Scripture even attributes the involuntary movements of senseless animals [unvernünftige Tiere] to angels, when, that is, those actions have a purpose.”5 Angels, in other words, are translator figures, and Kafka’s sword—replacing the torch of the actual statue—confirms this sense of “angel” as “messenger” in just this sense. In the world-famous poem by Emma Lazarus that became part of the pedestal of the statue in 1903, the allegorical freedom of this angel figure is called the “mother of exiles.” In this sense Hebrew is figured in New York as a translation of foreign voices, even animal ones, and as Politzer reminds us, “Rossman,” Karl’s family name, can suggest horse-man.6 Kafka’s liberty thus signifies both exile, like the angel with the flaming sword guarding the gates of paradise after the expulsion, and the redemption of otherness through translation (Gen. 3:24). At the same time Lady Liberty’s sword is also a sign for...

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