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

David Suchoff’s Kafka’s Jewish Languages: The Hidden Openness of Tradition argues that all of Kafka’s major works are shaped by Kafka’s knowledge of Yiddish and Hebrew. The works, he claims, are particularly indebted to Kafka’s comic understanding that, nationalist notions notwithstanding, languages are not pure but rather contain within themselves many foreign elements.

Suchoff’s introduction concludes by claiming Kafka to be “a classic German as well as a Jewish writer” (12), something that, the first chapter (“Cold War Kafka and Beyond”) argues, was long suppressed by “cold war” views of Kafka and their “strategies of containment.” Such strategies, elevated here to a “containment paradigm,” prevented critics up until Deleuze and Guattari’s “prophetic” Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1974) from acknowledging even Kafka’s fluency in Hebrew (13, 15). One of few exceptions was Hannah Arendt’s “post-containment” view of 1968. For her, Kafka was “the writer who understood that Yiddish’s historical contact with German was a normal process” (25). Chapter 2 focuses especially on “The Judgment.” It argues that Kafka’s famous “breakthrough” in that story was really “to Jewish languages,” especially Yiddish: “While Jewish linguistic sources and the related question of Czech literary and political nationalism had begun to motivate his deepest creative impulses, his desire to ‘raise the world’ to the level of the ‘pure, the true, and the immutable’ called for precisely the kind of sojourn through the ‘Niederungen’ of foreign and Jewish literary voices that his alter ego—the ‘friend’ in ‘Russia’—had already begun to explore” (63–64). Beyond “The Judgment,” Suchoff discusses “Letter to the Father,” the “talking animals” of “Report to an Academy” and “Jackals and Arabs,” Yiddish, the situation of Hebrew in Palestine, and Kafka’s hearing the Yiddish poem “City of Slaughter,” a response by leading Hebrew poet Ch. N. Bialik to the 1903 Kishinev pogrom.

Chapter 3, “Hebrews in New York: Amerika, or the Man Who Disappeared,” focuses on Kafka’s first novel, designated from the outset “a German-Jewish parable” (93). Why a German-Jewish parable? Because “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” (93). If “The Judgment” and “Letter to the Father” attest to the importance of Yiddish for Kafka, The Man Who Disappeared attests to the import of Hebrew, which does not prevent further excursus into Yiddish and German. In chapter 4, “Kabbalah and Comedy: The Trial and the Heretic Tradition,” Suchoff begins, as elsewhere, by emphasizing Kafka’s ostensibly detailed knowledge of Jewish sources (Jakob Froner’s Der Organismus des Judentums, Talmudic parables, Kabbalah, and so on). He then argues—first by way of Max Brod, who, we again learn, misread Kafka; then by way of Gershom Scholem, whose erudite references to Kabbalah got Kafka more right than Brod; and finally by way of Walter Benjamin, who got him more right still—that Kafka’s response to the “tradition” was a comic one.

Suchoff further elaborates his thesis about The Trial by way of Maimonides (an inspiration for Scholem) and his commentary on the Book of Job. Detecting further references to the Jewish traditions and sources noted here as well as Hebrew, German, and Yiddish, Suchoff presents Josef K. as a “Jewish humorist” and—after excursus into “In the Penal Colony,” “The Hunter Gracchus,” and the Zionist periodical Selbstwehr—concludes with “Before the Law.” Kafka’s parable comically reverses the Kabbalistic notion that held, in Gershom Scholem’s presentation (two decades after Kafka’s death), that “every word of the Torah has its six hundred thousand ‘faces,’ that is, layers of meaning or entrances, one for each of the children of Israel who stood at the foot of Mt. Sinai; each face is turned toward only one of them; he alone can see and decipher it” (169).

By chapter 5, “Open Boundaries...