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  • Kafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine
  • Ritchie Robertson (bio)
Iris Bruce. Kafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine. University of Wisconsin Press. xvii, 262. US $65.00

Kafka’s interest in Jewish traditions and in the possibility of Jewish settlements in Palestine is now a commonplace of scholarship. With copious reference to previous studies, Iris Bruce has now assembled a large store of information on this subject and added more. In Kafka’s upbringing, Judaism meant less a commitment to religious tradition than a setting for Kafka senior’s social ascent, marked by his repeated moves to smarter synagogues. Kafka encountered Zionism around 1909, when his friend Max Brod clashed with the small Zionist student society in Prague. Their interest was less in political Zionism – negotiations with the Turkish government in the hope of founding a secular Jewish state – than in practical and cultural Zionism. This meant studying agriculture in the hope of joining the pioneers, learning Hebrew, attending to Jewish history, and gaining some distance from the materialistic Western civilization to which their parents’ generation had so eagerly assimilated.

Kafka had little interest in religious Judaism. His growing interest in Zionism was practical and cultural. From the Yiddish actors who visited Prague in 1910–12, Kafka gained his first impression of a living Jewish culture with its own lore and legends. Kafka turned to Jewish history and to Meyer Isser Pinès’s history of Yiddish literature, of which Bruce gives us a detailed account. During the First World War he spent much time with Jewish refugees in Prague, and encouraged his fiancée Felice Bauer to teach in a school for refugee children in Berlin; after the war he took a close interest in the Jewish elementary school founded in Prague in 1920, and, in 1923, when he and his lover Dora Diamant were living in Berlin, both attended classes at the Academy for Jewish Studies. Kafka also studied Hebrew with the evident intention of following such friends as Hugo Bergmann and Felix Weltsch to Palestine.

Kafka was also sharply aware of anti-Semitism. Russian pogroms, trials for ritual murder, and the Dreyfus case all entered his imagination. He felt the position of Jews in Europe to be untenable, especially during his agonized love affair with the Gentile journalist Milena Jesenská, and his writings are not free from ‘self-hatred.’

Bruce’s valuable collection of material includes many additions and emphases of her own. She has drawn on the Prague Zionist newspaper Selbstwehr for details of the lectures on Jewish themes that Kafka attended, and calls attention especially to the importance of Micha Josef Berdyczewski (alias bin Gorion) both as an exponent of cultural Zionism and as a collector of Jewish legends. Such legends strongly appealed to Kafka, as Bruce has already shown in a contribution to The [End Page 334] Cambridge Companion to Kafka (2002). She repeats and expands her material here, with particular attention to Kafka’s oblique satires on assimilated and orthodox Jewry, ‘A Report for an Academy,’ and ‘Jackals and Arabs.’

The payoff for literary interpretation is mixed. Bruce scores a hit by pointing out that in Kafka’s fragment ‘Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor,’ the blue-and-white celluloid balls that disturb Blumfeld’s peace bear the Zionist colours. This might suggest that Blumfeld’s otherwise dreary life typifies the assimilationism that Kafka and his contemporaries rejected, but Bruce mostly prefers to concentrate on details rather than offer a full interpretation of a text. Kafka’s three novels do not feature, except for the legend of the doorkeeper in The Trial.

Despite its narrow focus, which may make the unwary reader forget how deeply Kafka’s work is embedded in European literature, this study will remain an important reference point in Kafka scholarship.

Ritchie Robertson

Ritchie Robertson, Faculty of Modern Languages, St. John’s College, Oxford University

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