More in ‘Franz Kafka’

I was sitting in the upstairs lounge of a small local tavern when a dozen women of various ages strode purposefully through the doorway and quickly commandeered three tables. After pushing the tables together, they called for the waiter, and, as he brought over a pile of leather-bound menus, the women made their way to ...

A writer would be tempted to describe any conflict over Franz Kafka’s estate as “Kafkaesque,” even if it were relatively ordinary and clear. However, in the Czech Jewish writer’s case, the eponymous adjective really does seem apt. According to The Washington Post, unpublished papers belonging to the estate of Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, are ...

Once, a Hungarian physician by the name of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweiss (1818-1865) took it upon to himself to investigate the causes of childbed fever in the maternity ward of Vienna’s largest hospital. There, in the cramped, squalid quarters where the poor gave birth—the rich birthed at home, delivered by professional midwives—mortality rates for mothers were ...

Michael Kohlhaas, a novella by Heinrich von Kleist, so moved Franz Kafka that he devoted one of his very few public performances to reading sections of it. He could not even think of the tale, he said, “without being moved to tears and enthusiasm.” It similarly touched E.L. Doctorow, who in Ragtime transformed its eponymous character ...

The idea that there is a Jewish genius for commentary—more, that in some way commentary, or criticism, or interpretation, represents the truly Jewish way of engaging with literature, and even with the world—has appealed to many modern Jewish writers. And certainly there is no shortage of examples to support this idea. Georg Morris Cohen Brandes, the late-19th century Danish Jewish critic, was responsible for introducing the works of Nietzsche and Ibsen to Europe. Walter Benjamin, perhaps the most influential theorist of modernism, elevated criticism and commentary to a high art, even a metaphysical principle; to Benjamin, everything that exists, from language to the stars, is a kind of text waiting for its commentator.

Reading Israeli writer Yoel Hoffmann’s newly published autobiographical novel Curriculum Vitae (New Directions) caused me to think about the Two Easts, about Zen Buddhism and Hasidism. Hoffmann’s books, five out of nine of which have been translated from Hebrew into English, represent a polyglot’s synthesis: his commingling of these two mystical traditions begins with a delight in paradox, and darkens as both Zen and Hasidism concern themselves with life’s futility and human powerlessness.

In the spring of 1940, Walter Benjamin produced the last and possibly the most influential of his essays, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” The great pathos and urgency of the text comes in part from what we know about Benjamin’s circumstances when he wrote it. In 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany, ...

One of the most resplendent moments in Kafka’s The Trial is a short parable, spoken to Joseph K by a shifty priest.
It tells the story of a country bumpkin who wishes to gain entry into the law, but discovers that the law is guarded by a hulking man with a thin black beard and ...

I don’t know much about Kabbalah, the recently fashionable realm of Jewish mystical and esoteric thought. And what I do know, I don’t really understand.
I had a brief introduction to the subject in high school, when a chain-smoking Israeli expat who dabbled in amateur theater attempted to explain the Sefirot to my ninth grade ...

In 1924, an ailing, depressed Kafka asked his friend the author Max Brod to burn his notebooks after his death, and, if Brod had complied, the world—already lacking in eloquence—would have had to have found other and probably lesser ways to artistically express its dissolution amid technology, and mass organization.
Asking a fan to burn your ...