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

The question of Kafka’s relationship to Judaism and the role Jewish sources play in his writing has been with us since the earliest reception of his work. From Max Brod’s “Unsere Literaten und die Gemeinschaft” (1916) to Iris Bruce’s Kafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine (2007), countless critics have sought to locate the Jewish coordinates of Kafka’s literature. A recent addition to this ongoing conversation is David Suchoff’s theoretically innovative and exciting new book, whose revolutionary approach to this topic challenges much of the existing scholarship on the “Jewish Kafka.”

There is, of course, nothing new about excavating the Jewish sources embedded in Kafka’s writing. Since the 1970s, scholars have diligently traced fragments of Hassidic folktales, Kabbalistic lore, Zionist writings, and Yiddish cultural influences that pervade Kafka’s literary texts. The problem, Suchoff argues, is that these sources have all too often been interpreted “in terms of neat categories of national identity” (9). Suchoff’s principal objection to previous accounts of Kafka’s “ethnic origins” is that they tend to confine Kafka to the same fixed categories of identity that he was trying to break away from in the first place. Taking his cue from Walter Benjamin’s “postnational” reading of Kafka, Suchoff suggests exploring the author’s use of Hebrew and Yiddish as a doorway to the transnational and translinguistic drama that takes place in his writing.

Suchoff alludes to Red Peter, the talking ape at the center of Kafka’s short story “Report to an Academy” to illustrate his point. Much like Red Peter, who acquires a foreign, human language in his search of a “way out” of his cage, Kafka too assimilates different cultural and linguistic traditions in his writing in order to break out of what he perceives as a monolithic and confining literary tradition. Suchoff identifies the fictional ape as well as all of the other talking animals that inhabit Kafka’s literature with the author’s overall effort to introduce foreign voices into the seemingly self-enclosed temple of German culture. The Jewish linguistic and literary sources Kafka uses in his writing provide him with the key to what Suchoff calls “the hidden openness of tradition”—a glimpse of the multilingual and transnational undercurrents that permeate a canonical tradition, which only appears to be hermetically sealed.

The book’s first chapter, “Cold War Kafka and Beyond,” is a comprehensive overview of Kafka’s reception in North America. The survey begins in the 1950s with Lionel Trilling’s ethnically cleansed, universalized portrayal of Kafka as archetype of high modernist culture and ends in the twenty-first century with Ruth Wisse’s celebration of Kafka as bi-national, German and Jewish writer. Suchoff’s nuanced narrative carefully charts the paradigm shifts that occurred in this scholarly landscape over time, placing these changes within their broader historical and ideological context. More importantly, this critical account of Kafka’s reception history allows Such-off to situate his own interpretative approach within a seemingly endless forest of Kafka criticism.

Suchoff marks the appearance of Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature in 1974 as an important turning point in the history of Kafka criticism. Whereas scholars in the 1950s and 1960s mostly ignored Kafka’s ethnic and linguistic particularities, Deleuze and Guattari’s book heralded the beginning of a new era, in which Kafka was rediscovered and refashioned as a minority writer. Acknowledging the importance of works such as Evelyn Torton Beck’s Kafka and Yiddish Theater (1971) and Marthe Robert’s As Lonely as Franz Kafka (1979) in bringing Kafka’s previously unacknowledged Jewishness to the fore, Suchoff is nonetheless highly critical of their binary approach to author’s national and cultural identity. Critics, he argues, have tended to isolate the Jewish sources they identified in Kafka’s literature and treat them as if they were opposed to the German elements in his writing. What they failed to...