Kafka’s Jewish Languages: The Hidden Openness of Tradition by David Suchoff (review)

David Suchoff’s Kafka’s Jewish Languages stands in an illustrious tradition of scholarly works that have sought to specify the Jewish dimension of Kafka’s writing. It represents a significant contribution not only in this regard, but also as a model of criticism that meaningfully argues for the diversity of origins and interpretive multiplicity in a major literary author. Suchoff’s point is not simply that figures such as the Law or the Father are ambiguous and multivalent (though he would surely agree they are), but to specify the multiple strands of Jewish influence that inform these and many other elements of Kafka’s writings. He does this with an extraordinary degree of subtlety, detail, and learning.

The book’s brief introduction lays out some of the Yiddish and Hebrew influences in Kafka’s life and presents his argument about “the hidden openness of tradition” in broad terms. The first chapter, which reads like the book’s actual introduction, proceeds to present the argument and stakes of the book in greater detail. Suchoff begins with a history of “post-containment” Kafka criticism, by which he means the return of national, ethnic, and religious questions to a critical tradition that had suppressed such concerns in the service of Kafka’s inclusion in a high modernist canon. The turning point is Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, though Walter Benjamin’s 1934 essay “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death” is also credited with providing an initial and very early perspective on a transnational and Jewish Kafka. It should be noted that Suchoff does not pronounce judgment on Deleuze and Guattari’s book, though he does quote some critical voices (Walter Sokel, Stanley Corngold). His main concern, after all, is to emphasize the role of this work in ushering in a trend in Kafka criticism to which his own study belongs.

Chapter 1 goes on to bring a Benjaminian idea of language to bear on Kafka’s writings, with particular attention to the hidden presence of foreign words and the creative energies that infuse linguistic processes. It proceeds by introducing historical debates on Yiddish and Hebrew and suggests their relevance to Kafka in biographical and textual terms. Finally, Suchoff argues that Kafka’s encounter with Goethe’s German reveals how even the most canonical literary language is informed by dialect, accent, and other foreign or liminal forms of language. These seemingly disparate strands are joined together in the final section, which introduces the idea of Jewish humor as linguistic humor: it is “the ability to enjoy the foreign as a living presence in one’s mother tongue” (Suchoff 54). This claim raises the stakes of Suchoff’s study, whose aim is not only to uncover the multiple linguistic strands that inform Kafka’s writings, but to see their role in Kafka’s particular brand of humor. The book will return to comedy (there are extensive discussions of vaudeville, cabaret, and gallows humor in the chapters that follow), but this is Suchoff’s most compelling theoretical formulation on the topic: that Kafka’s linguistic humor derives from the surprising, vivifying effects of the foreign within the familiar tongue.

The following four chapters are each devoted to the detailed examination of the Jewish sources that inform a major work by Kafka. Suchoff is attentive not only to verbal and grammatical constructions shaped by Hebrew and Yiddish, but to numerous habits and traditions within these languages that are submerged in Kafka’s texts. In Chapter 2, he applies the idea of Yiddish as a language of comic curse to “Das Urteil,” and argues that the father-son conflict in that work is fundamentally linguistic, reflecting the language wars that arose in Zionist discourse of the time. In Chapter 3, Suchoff uses notions connected to Jewish Kabbalah and elements of Hebrew Bible interpretation to unpack the transnational and transcultural dimensions of Der Verschollene. Chapter 4 uses Kafka’s critique of...