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i n t r o d u c t i o n Kafka’s Jewish Voice You never know what you’ll find in your own house. —Kafka, “A Country Doctor” (Ein Landarzt) “Everything came to his aid during the construction,” the narrator of “The Building of the Temple” declares. “Foreign workers” (fremde Arbeiter), the authoritative figure soon tells us, not only were essential to a structure that suggests both Jewish and German culture but also evoke an openness to the outside within: “no building ever came into being as easily as this temple—or rather, this temple came into being the way a temple should.” At first the “clumsy scribblings of senseless children’s hands” (unbeholfene Gekritzel sinnloser Kinderhände) written on “every stone” (auf jedem Stein) of the edifice remind the narrator of “the entries of barbaric mountain dwellers” (Eintragungen barbarischer Gebirgsbewohner) engaged in an act of “spite” or “desecration,” though at this primitive level their writing also recalls an originating force. These forgotten builders create the enduring perspective in Kafka ’s parable: their writing will remain for “an eternity outlasting the temple,” as a memory of the transactions between disparate nations that allowed the edifice to build and be built.1 The unknown source of the stones—“from what quarry [Bruche] had they come?”—thus points to a comic “break” (Bruch) with the notion of a singular tradition and to the blessing of those distant sources that give it continued strength. Kafka inscribes the Jewish voice in his parable in this same groundbreaking and future-oriented sense: as a reminder of the human differences that create the temple’s hidden beauty and suggest the power of its most redemptive text. I argue in this book that Kafka’s perspective on this hidden openness of tradition can be understood through the positive view of human difference that 2 introduction Jewish languages—specifically but not exclusively Yiddish and Hebrew—enabled him to develop in the period between 1911 and 1924. In a strict sense, my title thus refers to the Yiddish he began learning about in the Yiddish theater in 1911–12 and analyzed in a now-famous lecture, and to the modern Hebrew he began to acquire in earnest in 1917 and which culminated in his study with one of its first native speakers, Puah Ben-Tovim, who grew up near Eliezer Ben-Yehuda , the putative father of the “new” tongue. Jewish languages will therefore be considered in the ways outlined in this introduction: as Kafka’s linguistic doorway to the transnational and multilinguistic constitution of national and religious traditions. Yiddish and Hebrew, in this specific sense that I develop in my reading of cold war approaches that first canonized his fiction—seeing the “temple” of his writing as either German or Jewish—enabled Kafka to transform nationalistic conceptions of Jewish and other languages and to arrive at the vision of tradition as open to difference that enriches his work. Kafka’s devotion to Yiddish and Hebrew and his responses to them—including Zionism, in which the “builders” of Kafka’s parable convey a border-crossing sense—provide the point of departure for my commentary on his three major novels in the following chapters, where the openness of Jewish and other national, religious, and literary traditions and their interpretations that were sparked by Kafka’s interest in Jewish languages are my concerns. Yiddish and Hebrew in the following pages shed light on these transnational currents in Kafka’s imagination. As doorways to Kafka, these languages also revise the critical tradition that has presented his relation to Judaism as conflicted at best. Rather than approaching his work as if its German and Jewish elements were discrete and opposed, I focus on Kafka’s Jewish linguistic interests as entryways to his fiction’s pleasurable and in this way multiple effects. This “postnational,” as I describe it in Chapter 1, might better be called “prenational ” since my argument is that Jewish languages helped Kafka envision, to use Wittgenstein’s concept, the formative “family resemblances” between supposedly separate national and linguistic realms. Kafka’s Yiddish and modern Hebrew sources—languages undergoing their transnational formation in his period—served a quietly comic function: opening up the way German and other national languages are created and sustained by an implicit vaudeville of foreign sources that provide their verve and depth. Kafka’s German can thus be called morose or fatalistic in only a surface way. His engagement with Jewish languages—including a Yiddish-accented...

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