When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature (review)

The crux of Vivian Liska's painstakingly researched When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature is that there is no crux—at least not for Franz Kafka and the other writers she addresses. Arranged carefully in five sections of three chapters each, Liska's meticulous examination tackles the seemingly contradictory task of bringing together a group of authors whose texts resist "pre-existing concepts and categories." (4) Thankfully, the "uncommon community" Liska identifies shares more than a mere way of writing unconventionally in the margins of twentieth-century German-Jewish experience (3), or even a literary debt to Kafka, which, in the cases of Else Lasker-Schüler and Ilse Aichinger, is decidedly tenuous. Paradoxically, what ultimately links these authors, according to Liska, is a uniformly ambivalent response to Kafka's question "What have I in common with Jews?" (3-4), and a consequent rejection of a closed community "in which all faces turn toward each other." (22) Because Kafka's question binds the writers together, Liska conceives of her project as organized concentrically outward from Kafka (9), in three distinct time periods. While German Jews early in the twentieth century perceived a rift between modern (urban) and antimodern (shtetl) experiences, according to Liska (6), those after the war grappled with their identity within a Schicksalsgemeinschaft, or "community of fate." (6) For the third period, Liska borrows Homi Bhabha's term to claim that Jews in the latter part of the twentieth century saw their Jewishness as "inbetweenness." (7) Liska places her study within this broader chronology, beginning with the first decades of the century: Part One addresses only Kafka, and Part Two focuses on Theodor Herzl and Else Lasker-Schüler. In Part Three, the analysis proceeds to Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, and then to Ilse Aichinger in the beginning of Part Four; the three together represent the immediate postwar period. Liska then moves to contemporary Austrian-Jewish literature in the remaining chapters of Part Four and analyzes works by Robert Schindel, Doron Rabinovici, and Robert Menasse. Part Five reverses the chronological movement, returning to more detailed discussions of Celan and Aichinger, and concludes both the section and the book with a curiously brief snippet on Kafka and Hannah Arendt.

Throughout the book, Liska's precise and far-ranging scholarship convincingly informs her tightly constructed arguments for locating Kafka within a community of literary heirs. Her discussion of Kafka's "Speech on the Yiddish Language" is particularly compelling in its identification of Kafka's "we" as a rhetorical device to unsettle the western Jews of his audience. (30) Liska provocatively calls into question Deleuze and Guattari's reading of Kafka as appreciating only one movement within his works (16), and her inquiry admits to many ways of reading Kafka and his relationship to the Jewish community. Her treatment of the other authors is also well-considered, especially of two "uncommon" reactions to closed communities under very different circumstances, namely of Else Lasker-Schüler in chapters 5 and 6, and Paul Celan in chapters 7, 8, and 13. Liska's reading of a feminine subtext in Else Lasker-Schüler's treatment of "Song of Songs" (69) is augmented by her spot-on gendered comparison of Kafka's "Worries of a Family Man" and Aichinger's "Spots" (201), and her discussion of Celan supports the notion that the writers she examines continually question the "rootedness" of the Jewish tradition (108), even as they rewrite stereotypes and redefine that tradition.

Aside from a puzzlingly speculative concluding chapter that utilizes Kafka's "Imperial Message" to explore Hannah Arendt's relationship to Kafka, the one area where Liska's analysis falls short is in her incomplete exploration of the "contentious hyphen" between the two denominations of "German-Jewish." (78) Indeed, the question as to whether she succeeds in bringing her subjects together into an uncommon community is perhaps less important than the...