Yet this is how the critic Clement Greenberg responded to Chagall’s Crucifixions: “A new yellow plays a role, along with more ambitious or more surrealist subject matter—crucifixions and monsters. … Chagall’s two or three new major efforts—major in size and pretension—abound in patches of interesting painting, but none is fused into a complete and organic work of art.” The chilly insistence on formal analysis (“a new yellow”) and the brisk rebuke to the Crucifixion imagery—which can be admitted, at most, as an example of surrealism—reads as a complete evasion of the specifically Jewish challenge of these pictures.

It begins to seem a little suspicious, even neurotic, that Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg—two leading 20th-century American art critics whose Jewishness played a central role in their public and private identity—set their faces so completely against the very idea of a modern Jewish art. In 1966, Rosenberg attempted to tackle the relationship between Judaism and visual art head-on in a lecture at New York’s Jewish Museum titled “Is There a Jewish Art?” As he recognized, it was a funny question to ask in that venue: “First they build a Jewish Museum, then they ask, Is there a Jewish art! Jews!” He went on: “As to the question itself, there is a Gentile answer and a Jewish answer. The Gentile answer is: Yes, there is a Jewish art, and No, there is no Jewish art. The Jewish answer is: What do you mean by Jewish art?” Was it any art produced by Jews, or fine art with Jewish subject matter, or strictly “Judaica”—Jewish ceremonial objects like rimonim and kiddush cups?

Such questions are very familiar in modern Jewish cultural debates; they are regularly asked, for instance, about Jewish writers. No Jewish reference ever appears in the fiction of Franz Kafka, and it would be entirely possible to read and admire his work without knowing anything about his Jewishness. But as soon as you do know something about Kafka’s life and times, it becomes impossible not to understand his themes—alienation, miscommunication, the perversion of law—as expressions of a particular moment in modern Jewish history. That is why most readers would agree that Kafka is a Jewish writer, while insisting that Jewishness does not explain or exhaust his genius—just as calling Flaubert a French writer is the beginning, not the end, of appreciating him.

With the visual arts, however, things are even more ambiguous. While no one would doubt the existence of Jewish literature, the very phrase “Jewish Art” is still contested—even, ironically enough, in the pages of Jewish Art. Samantha Baskind and Larry Silver, the authors, acknowledge in their introduction that, almost half a century after Rosenberg, “no sole definition of Jewish art has universal applicability.” They begin by inviting the reader to “consider two paintings” of haystacks, one by Camille Pissarro, who was Jewish, and one by Claude Monet, who was not. In his lifetime, Pissarro was “often singled out as a ‘Jewish artist,’ ” above all during the Dreyfus Affair, when many of his fellow-Impressionists revealed themselves as anti-Semites. Yet simply by looking at their canvases, Baskind and Silver ask, “can we determine what distinguishes Pissarro’s painting [from Monet’s] as an example of ‘Jewish art?’ ”

In practice, Jewish Art relies on a less abstract criterion: If an artist is Jewish, he finds a place in the volume, regardless of technique or subject matter. Pissarro, for instance, is represented by a cityscape, Place du Theatre Francais: Rain Effect, an urban variation on the Impressionist haystack, which is equally inexpressive of the artist’s religious background. Many other 19th-century Jewish artists, however, were drawn to explicitly Jewish subject matter. Emancipated from the traditional Jewish past yet not quite integrated into the promised secular future, such painters turned to Jewish subjects in a spirit that was both anthropological and apologetic.

Alphonse Lévy (1843-1918) painted the Jews of Alsace, presenting figures “clad in their distinctive ethnic garb, uncompromised by urban modernity in the capital, and busy with activities of prayer or holiday preparations.” Jewish Art includes his 1883 picture Evening Prayer, which shows a middle-aged married couple standing on their balcony: The man davens, holding a book and candle, as the woman directs a slightly insipid smile to the viewer. To Baskind and Silver, “their faces display exaggerated features, which in the hands of a non-Jewish artist might well be described as caricatural,” but in reproduction at least this is hard to see. Lévy seems to be trying, rather, for an effect of frank, unintellectual good-nature, such as we would find charming in 17th-century pictures of Flemish peasants.

If there is an element of domestic exoticism in this canvas, it is nothing compared to the full-blown Orientalism of pictures like The Mother of Moses by Simeon Solomon (1840-1905) or Jesus Preaching at Capernaum by the Polish Jewish artist Maurycy Gottlieb (1856-1879). As an Eastern European Jew—a native of Drohobycz, like the writer-painter Bruno Schultz—Gottlieb faced an even tougher path to acceptance than French or German Jewish artists did. By depicting Jesus in a synagogue—he stands before an unrolled Torah, wearing a tallis—Gottlieb tries to reinstate Christ in Jewish history, and thus heal the breach between Polish Catholic and Jewish traditions. Baskind and Silver quote his heartfelt plea: “How deeply I wish to eradicate all the prejudices against my people! How avidly I desire to uproot the hatred enveloping the oppressed and tormented nation and to bring peace between the Poles and the Jews, for the history of both people is a chronicle of grief and anguish!”

Which other novels by Jews should the president read?

• Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. Because Obama’s main job is to “win the future,” he should probably have a sense of what a future that he has lost looks like, and this bitter, dystopic novel will provide it. Plus, it can’t hurt Obama with the Russian vote.

• Amy Waldman’s The Submission. This hot new novel imagines that the winning design for the 9/11 memorial turns out to have been the work of a Muslim-American. So, um, it would seem relevant.

• Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night. Okay, so this is technically “history as a novel” and “the novel as history,” but still, Mailer’s depiction of the fully fractured society of the late ‘60s is what Obama should be shooting not to have happen on his watch.

• Franz Kafka’s Amerika. For an, er, different perspective on the country he leads.

• Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. If one of the United States is going to become the Jewish national homeland, Obama should probably be kept aware.

• Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. “I myself dreamed of a mammoth banner, dadaistically draped like a Christo wrapping from one end of the White House to the other and bearing the legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE.”

Obama Takes Along Novel by David Grossman on Vacation [JPost]
Related: Consolation Prize [Tablet Magazine]
Pen Pals [Tablet Magazine]
Books That Have Read Me [Nextbook.org]
The Unconsoled [The New Yorker]
Earlier: The Tailor David Grossman

In the summer of 1996, a struggling graduate student of Hebrew literature found Yaakov Shabtai. More specifically, he found the Israeli writer’s 1977 novel, Past Continuous, a challenging work written, quite literally, as a single paragraph. The complex, non-linear novel weaves through a series of intersecting moments with exhaustively detailed description. According to Todd Hasak-Lowy, who credits the book with the discovery of his own voice as a writer, Shabtai teaches the reader how to understand Past Continuous while in the midst of it. Its experimental form and its approach to time and space, Hasak-Lowy posited, reflect the political climate in Israel and voice a “post-Zionist view of Israeli society” while not dealing explicitly with politics.

Writing in 2008, the great Israeli novelist David Grossman echoed Hasak-Lowy’s praise of this remarkable paragraph. “I remember what I experienced when I felt I was under the rays of a vast and inspiring literary power—when I read Kafka’s Metamorphosis, for example, or Yaakov Shabtai’s Past Continuous, or Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers,” he wrote. “I have no doubt that some part of me, perhaps my innermost core, seemed to be in the realm of a dream. There was a similar intrinsic logic, and a direct dialogue conducted with the deepest and most veiled contents of my soul, almost without the mediation of consciousness.”

Shabtai, born in Tel Aviv in 1934, began writing late in his life. He is perhaps best known for Uncle Peretz Takes Off, a collection of short stories that included “Zikhron Devarim,” then translated more literally as “Memory of Things,” which would become the novel Past Continuous. Shabtai died of a heart attack in 1981, at the age of 47, and the posthumously published Past Perfect was his second, and final, novel.

Read The Paragraph That Changed My Life, by Todd Hasak-Lowy

• Expect an offensive from the White House, using trusted surrogates in the community, to persuade American Jews that President Obama is staunchly pro-Israel. Which is a sign that they are concerned about recent reports, but also that they think they can put themselves back in a good position with Jewish voters. [The Plum Line]

•From Athens: “Organizers say they see the long arm of Israel behind their improbable woes.” [NYT]

• Jonathan S. Tobin has a good rundown of where most of the likely GOP presidential candidates stand on Israel, concluding that except for Ron Paul, all stand at least a chance of stealing Jewish voters from Obama. [Contentions]

• Oh right, anti-Semitism lives. (Et tu, Switzerland?) [Ynet]

• This Kafka fable is newly translated for reading aloud, and is pretty clearly about the Jews’ Messiah. [NYRB]

• Midway through the season, Milwaukee Brewers slugger Ryan Braun is a legitimate MVP contender. The rest of baseball’s Jews, not so much (although how about Jason Marquis?). [Kaplan’s Korner]

Second day in a row for Bruce songs, but I mean, what else? Happy Fourth.

For fans of The Metamorphosis, our favorite pieces include a magnet that offers “Protection from Rebirth as an Insect,” and is captioned, “Keep Kafka-esque Futures at bay;” an elegant eight-by-ten-inch hand-cut paper silhouette from etsy user SadGiraffe’s Metamorphosis collection; and an adjustable silver Metamorphosis-themed ring displaying a scuttling orange beetle. Finally, a Franz Kafka Parable Vladmaster Set is also available featuring slides of intriguing images from Kafka’s lesser-known tales that are described by the seller as “brief and enigmatic re-imaginings of traditional mythic and historic figures.”

For more conventional gifts, we obviously recommend Rodger Kamenetz’s Burnt Books, published by Nextbook Press.

Burnt Books [Nextbook Press]

The most interesting thing about the diary is its Jewish subtext. Benjamin notes that it’s Passover, and that the pension he’s staying in is owned by a Jewish man who “kept saying, ‘So, what do we make for Yontev?’ ” Benjamin parses the word in a way that suggests it is new to him: “One does not say ‘Good day’ but ‘Good Yontev.’ ”

Similarly, the proprietor subscribes to the Israelitisches Familienblatt (“Jewish Family Journal”), and Benjamin notes that the magazine contains advertisements for “dishes for the Seder.” It takes his traveling companion to explain to him what these Seder plates are: “The latter are used for the Passover feast and have different compartments for different foods. So says Steinfeld.” Later Benjamin complains, “with coffee there was matzoh, and that’s how it will be; for … we are in Pesach week.” But while the pension seems to keep kosher for Passover, there is no actual Seder, which seems to both relieve Benjamin and disappoint him: “Thank God they didn’t do Seder. It might well have been very interesting and might even have moved me, but it would have seemed to me like theater, nothing holy.”

Much can be gleaned about Benjamin’s Jewishness, and that of his whole class, from this short diary. He is evidently completely unobservant—more, ignorant of the basic details of Jewish practice—and he feels a nervous disinclination to be “claimed” in any way by Judaism; a 20th-century man, he could find “nothing holy” in organized religion. Yet at the same time, it is impossible not to notice that Benjamin is surrounded by Jewishness like a fish by water. His traveling companion is Jewish; the house he’s staying in is Jewish. As his friend Gershom Scholem, a product of a similar background, would note, it was quite normal for assimilated German Jews never to enter a Gentile home or invite a Gentile to theirs. Jewish identity was much more durable than Jewish belief.

This would be of merely sociological interest were it not for the complicated ways that Jewishness and Judaism informed Benjamin’s brilliant and vastly influential work. His best-known writings—on Proust and Kafka, 19th-century Paris, the movies, “the age of mechanical reproduction”—came after the period covered by Early Writings. But even in these seven years, from the ages of 18 to 25, it’s possible to see Benjamin develop from a precocious, pompous adolescent into a daring and profound thinker. The latest pieces in the book—in particular “The Life of Students,” “Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” and “On Language as Such and the Language of Man”—lead directly to his most important insights into the nature of literature and history. In fact, the last of these, never published in Benjamin’s lifetime, can be seen as a kind of skeleton key to his mature work, full of overtly mystical beliefs that would go underground when Benjamin became a professed Communist.

Benjamin was not just young when he wrote the pieces in this book; as an activist in the German Youth Movement, he was, one might say, professionally young. The youth movement was a loosely organized phenomenon with many tendencies—its adherents were interested in curriculum reform, sexual liberation, and nationalist renewal, among other causes, and there is a definite flavor of the 1960s in its vague, tumultuous commitment to change. Benjamin was exposed to it starting at 13, when he began to attend the Free School Community—an experimental, progressive school founded by the prominent reformer Gustav Wyneken, who became his mentor. Until the outbreak of the First World War, Benjamin was active in youth organizations—he was president of the Berlin University chapter of the Independent Students’ Association, and several of the essays in the book first appeared in movement journals.

In these pieces, we sometimes find Benjamin writing as a muckraker, holding the German education system up to ridicule for its pedantry and mindless authoritarianism. In “Teaching and Valuation,” he complains of the “pious reiteration or regurgitation of unrelated or superficially related facts” and offers a “blacklist” of teacherly philistinism: “Apropos of Horace: ‘We have to read Horace in this class. It doesn’t matter whether we like it or not; it’s on the syllabus.’ ” When Benjamin quotes a teacher at a classical Gymnasium telling a student, “Please don’t think that anyone believes this enthusiasm of yours for the ancient world,” it’s hard to avoid suspecting that he himself was the student.

In response, Benjamin calls, in fairly platitudinous terms, for “a classical secondary school we could love,” where teaching would be related “to living values of the present.” But at heart, he was much too utopian to be contented with any actually existing reform movement. The title of his dispatch from a major youth retreat in 1913 is “Youth Was Silent”: “Excursions, ceremonial attire, folk dances are nothing new and … still nothing spiritual … we will continue, in the name of youth, to weigh the Youth Congress against the demands of the spirit.” It didn’t help that German youth were just as prone to anti-Semitism as their parents: “When the prizes for sports were being awarded, the name Isaacsohn was announced. Laughter rang out from a minority,” Benjamin notes.

The further one reads, however, the clearer it becomes that what Benjamin was really seeking, in the guise of school reform, was spiritual and social rebirth. Thus, in an essay on “Moral Education,” he concludes that “all morality and religiosity originates in solitude with God”—a prescription that seems to leave little role for school reform, or for schools in general. The tension between Benjamin’s private and public agendas becomes even clearer in the unpublished pieces in Early Writings, the poems and stories and sketches he showed only to a few friends. There, the rhetoric of the youth-movement essays clouds over into the dense, tormented prose that would be so characteristic of the adult Benjamin.

In “The Metaphysics of Youth,” for instance, he writes: “Greatness is the eternal silence after conversation. It is to take the rhythm of one’s own words in the empty space.” There is also a good deal of unresolved sexual anguish at work; Benjamin writes portentously about “the prostitute,” as in, “The woman is the guardian of the conversations. She receives the silence, and the prostitute receives the creator of what has been.”

Benjamin’s disenchantment with the youth movement didn’t become official until the beginning of the First World War. He was disgusted by the way the allegedly progressive movement rallied around the kaiser. Personally, he wanted nothing to do with the war, and he went to great lengths to avoid the draft, finally moving to Switzerland. In terms of his intellectual development, however, this disillusionment was a blessing, allowing him to unyoke his true concerns from the official cause of “youth” (and by 1914, he wasn’t so young any more). “The Life of Students,” from 1915, shows Benjamin bidding farewell to the student movement, while drawing on his experiences to frame a new, radically utopian vision of progress:

History rests concentrated, as in a focal point, something seen from time immemorial in the utopian images of thinkers. The elements of the ultimate condition do not manifest themselves as formless progressive tendencies, but are deeply embedded in every present in the form of the most endangered, excoriated, and ridiculed ideas. The historical task is to give shape to this immanent state of perfection and make it absolute, make it visible and ascendant in the present.

Already in these lines, it’s possible to hear the messianic tones of Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which he would write in 1940, just before he committed suicide in the face of the Nazi onslaught:

It is well-known that the Jews were forbidden to look into the future. The Torah and the prayers instructed them, by contrast, in remembrance. This disenchanted those who fell prey to the future, who sought advice from the soothsayers. For that reason the future did not, however, turn into a homogenous and empty time for the Jews. For in it every second was the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter.

When it came to his deepest political hopes, Benjamin seemed to fall instinctively into a Jewish vocabulary of messianism. So, too, with language and literature. “On Language as Such and the Language of Man” has at its core a reading of Genesis and advances an idea of divine language that sounds amazingly like kabbalism: “Language is therefore that which creates and that which completes; it is word and name. In God, name is creative because it is word, and God’s word is knowing because it is name.” One of the things that makes Benjamin so fascinating is the way he seems to translate Jewish ways of thinking into a post-Jewish intellectual culture. Early Writings shows that this fertile dualism was present from the very beginning.

By a grim irony, it was in Germany—where Kertész had connections as a translator of modern German literature into Hungarian, and where he eventually moved—that his work had the biggest impact. Even so, Kertész was obscure enough that it came as a surprise when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. Though Kertész was the first Hungarian writer ever to win the Nobel, the award earned him the hostility of right-wingers and anti-Semites at home, resentful that a Jew who wrote openly about his alienation from Hungarians should be so honored. In America, meanwhile, only a couple of his books had been published in small editions, and his name was almost totally unknown.

After the Nobel, Kertész’s books began to appear in new English translations by Tim Wilkinson, but out of chronological order. Fatelessness introduces Kertész’s alter ego, the teenager Gyorgy Köves, whose concentration camp experiences track his creator’s (but, Kertész has insisted, not with complete fidelity). Kaddish, the next book of Kertész’s to appear in the United States, was the third book in a trilogy, featuring a middle-aged Köves who explains, in a long, furious monologue, why he refuses to bring a child into a world capable of the Holocaust.

It is only now, with the publication of Fiasco (Melville House, $18.95), that we have the book that came in between, the second volume in the trilogy. If Fatelessness was written with a bright mock-naivety that led to comparisons with Candide, and Kaddish employed the harsh comic rant of Thomas Bernhard, then the presiding ghosts of Fiasco are clearly Beckett and Kafka, those 20th-century masters of confusion and despair.

In fact, they divide the novel between them quite neatly. The first third of Fiasco presents us with a middle-aged writer who is clearly Kertész, though he is referred to, with a combination of intimacy and disdain, only as “the old boy.” Like Kertész, the old boy is a writer and translator whose life work was an autobiographical novel about the Holocaust, which took him a decade to write and which was initially turned down by publishers. Now he is searching for a subject for another book, not because he really wants to write one, but because he has become a professional writer, more or less by accident:

with his other books (since by then writing books had become his occupation, or rather—to be more precise—things had so transpired that this had become his occupation) (seeing as he had no other occupation) he merely devoted the time that was absolutely necessary to get them written, which was essentially a function of their thickness, because (since things had so transpired that this had become his occupation) he had to aim to write books that were as thick as possible, out of carefully considered self-interest, since the fee for thicker books was fatter than that for slimmer books, for which—since they were slimmer—the fee was correspondingly slim.

This voice, this method of comically refining and qualifying the expression of banality, will be familiar to anyone who has read Beckett’s fiction. And the plot of the first section of Fiasco, such as it is, comes directly from Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape. Looking for inspiration, the old boy rummages through his file cabinet and reads out old notes and memoranda, only to deflate their pretensions with muttered exclamations—just as Krapp does while listening to his audiotaped reminiscences. The effect of these auto-interruptions—“Aha!” “My God!”—depends on a sure sense of timing and of the comedy of repetition, which Kertész happily possesses. But while Beckett must have brought something new to Kertész’s Hungarian prose, turning that prose into English only emphasizes how much it owes to Beckett. The result is that Fiasco sounds rather more familiar in translation than it must have in the original—one of the ironies of literary influence.

The memoir the old boy reads out—between interruptions from his wife, his nagging mother, and his upstairs neighbor (“a female Cyclops which fed on noise”)—dates from the time when he finished his first novel and could not get it published. This is the fiasco to which the title refers, and Kertész finds a perverse fascination in delving into the psychology, the existential implications, of his failure. He digs out the old rejection letter, whose date (“27/JUL/1973”) and descriptions suggest that it refers to Fatelessness—indeed, it may even be the actual letter Kertész himself received: “We consider that your way of giving artistic expression to the material of your experiences does not come off, while the subject itself is horrific and shocking.”

All this metafictional apparatus serves Kertész as a way of getting to the problem at the heart of this first section: What is Holocaust writing for? How can the imagination deal with facts and stories that we all too thoughtlessly call unimaginable? Even being a Holocaust survivor does not make Kertész immune to the odd unreality of reading about the Holocaust. For instance, he recalls reading a particularly horrifying story about the murder of 340 Dutch Jews at a quarry at Mauthausen: They were forced to carry boulders up a steep stairway, then beaten if the rocks were dropped, until they all succumbed to violence, injury, or suicide. He reflects:

I closed the book and put it aside with the feeling that this fact, which I came across at random among 400 pages of further facts … might rightly find a place among the symbols of the human imagination—but on one condition: only if they had not occurred. Since they did occur, it is hard even to imagine them. Rather than becoming a plaything, the imagination proves to be a heavy and immovable burden, just like those boulders in Mauthausen: people do not want to be crushed under them.

At the same time that he is unable to read about the Holocaust, however, Kertész is also unable to stop writing about it. In his description of what it was like to write Fatelessness, Kertész offers a vision of the writer’s psychology—caught between obsessive dedication and the suspicion of futility—that is, perhaps, applicable to serious modern writers of all kinds, even those not burdened with Kertész’s atrocious subject:

While my destiny was with me—which is to say, while I was writing my novel—I had no experience of these kinds of concerns. Anyone living under the spell of destiny is liberated from time. Time still marches on, of course, but its duration is irrelevant: its purpose is solely to accomplish that destiny.

But what happens when Kertész has accomplished his destiny—when he has transformed his Holocaust experience into Fatelessness, and sent it out into a largely indifferent world? He finds that he still has to write, because he can no longer do anything else. This is the second, subtler fiasco: the fiasco not of failure but of achievement. And so, despite all his protestations—that he has nothing to say, that his old notes don’t interest him, that he only wants to retire—the “old boy” does, in fact, sit down to the typewriter and produce a novel: the novel within a novel that constitutes the second, longer part of Fiasco.

Thus, on page 119 of the book, we are greeted with the heading “Chapter One,” and the “old boy” gives way to Köves, Kertész’s old narrative alter ego. At the same time, the Beckett atmosphere gives way to a dense Kafkaesque fog. Köves wakes up to find himself on an airplane, leaving Budapest for some faraway destination—“he had already been flying for sixteen hours.” But when the plane lands, he disembarks into what is plainly Budapest—only it is the city of the late 1940s, the city as the young Köves experienced it when he returned from Buchenwald.

None of this is explicitly spelled out; but unlike in Kafka’s fables, where we could really be anywhere, Kertész leaves no doubt that he is writing autobiographically. The purpose of the Kafka atmosphere is to emphasize the bewilderment of the returning refugee—in particular, his inability to navigate the mistrustful, arbitrary society of Communist Hungary. By now, the comparison between the unaccountable courts of The Trial and the irrational bureaucracies of the Communist state is a familiar one, and much of the second half of Fiasco plays out in expected ways. Köves is fired, hired, and transferred at the behest of unknown higher powers; people are afraid to talk openly about anything that happens to them; lovers attack one another with passion, then part with disdain. Everyone speaks in knowing, evasive abstractions:

‘And why would they haul you out anyway?’ Köves probed further. ‘Over the numbers?’
But the pianist merely smiled with sealed lips at that.
‘Is there any way of knowing over what?’ he then returned the question to Köves.
‘No, there isn’t,’ Köves admitted.

Cleverly, Kertész allows us to see how the “invented” story of Köves mirrors the “true” story of the old boy. In the novel’s last pages, Köves ends up in a philosophical dialogue with a man named Berg—a former war criminal, though we never learn exactly what he did—that echoes the ideas of the first part of Fiasco. And the image of the Dutch Jews carrying their boulders, with its cruel echo of the myth of Sisyphus, returns in a riddlingly literal form in the novel’s final pages. By the end of this tricky and powerful book, it begins to look like a Mobius strip or a snake swallowing its own tail—an apt emblem of a life devoured by art, and an art devoured by what its creator had to live.

• The Palestinians are planning to abandon the peace process in favor of nonviolent protests, U.N. action, and other gambits toward achieving statehood. [WSJ]

• Are you a Middle Eastern country? Wanna buy advanced weaponry? Business is still booming! [WP]

• Amazing pictures of Soviet Jews in the 1920s and ‘30s. [English Russia]

• Muammar Gaddafi and Charlie Sheen: Who said what? Fun quiz! [VF]

• Shimon Peres meets Florentino Perez, the president of the Spanish soccer team Real Madrid. I wonder if Perez just called Peres his given name—Perski—to make life easier? [JPost]

• Judith Butler on the Kafka papers. A certain type of reader will be very excited to read this. [LRB]

Loyal Scroll readers will know how bummed I am that I did not get to write the canonical article on observant Jewish Phish fans.

The book reviewed was Rodger Kamenetz’s Burnt Books, a Nextbook Press title that argues that Nachman and Franz Kafka had lives that, while different in many ways, took on haunting similarities. Myers, however, did not find Kamenetz’s premise haunting, and judged Kamenetz an unworthy investigator into Jewish mysteries.

In response, and writing from the afterlife, the rabbi begins his letter by praising—sarcastically, one imagines—Myers’s decision to focus on Kamenetz’s last book, 1994′s The Jew in the Lotus, a manifesto on the intertwined nature of Judaism and Buddhism. “It is important to make Kamenetz’s seventeen-year-old criticism of Jewish institutions, which doesn’t appear in Burnt Books, seem like a modern American phenomenon born of ill will and ignorance and not part of the self-examination that is as old as the Prophets and really even older,” Nachman writes. “Only the very very learned can be critical of the very very unlearned. Dr. Johnson—who I’ve become quite friendly with here in the afterlife (what a head for Talmud!)—was wrong when he said you don’t have to be a carpenter to criticize a table.”

Other bits of Myers’s review similarly pleased, or rather “pleased,” the dead rabbi. “I’m also glad you didn’t mention in your excellent review the part of the book where Rodger K. feels shame at his own inability to read aloud from the psalms in Hebrew,” Nachman wrote.

Shrewd not to reveal his own dissatisfaction with his Jewish education, his own desire to know more, just as Kafka desired to know more and to learn more in a literal straightforward way alongside all his deeper spiritual struggles. It would only have stirred up misplaced sympathy for the author, who is describing his book as if it were the beginning of the journey and not the end of the journey—and what kind of guide admits he doesn’t really know the way? Sure Dante got lost in a dark wood, but he was Catholic.

A Letter from Nachman [A Commonplace Blog]
Related: Burnt Books

Among other things, the clever set design reflected this tension, playing with an XYZ plane that challenged gravity to the points of laughter and awe. A house on two levels, the space occupied by the famous Gregor Samsa (played by Garðarsson) allows the otherwise business-as-usual man to embrace his spidery locomotion, suspended over the family’s classically normal living room.

Within the space, the actors channeled Kafka’s variously angst-riddled characters in stride, evolving with a fluidity that gracefully ushered in explosive conflict. Perspectives intermingled to create a re-wallpapering of the audience’s experience, reflecting the centuries of tumultuous Central European history that seem still-present in Prague.

Directors Garðarsson and David Farr united Kafka’s less sentimental Metamorphosis with their vision. Gregor’s bug-eyed perspective contrasts with those of his previously affectionate family. Ingvar E. Sigurdsson’s performance as Hermann Samsa recalls Kafka’s rocky relationship with his own father.

Sound design featured prominently as well, courtesy Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Indeed, Kafka is hot this year. Philip Glass has announced that he is composing an opera based on The Trial, and a London stand-up comic is adapting the same novel on stage next month. This month also saw the publication of Rodger Kamenetz’s Burnt Books from Nextbook Press, which reveals surprising parallels between the two tragically abbreviated and spiritual lives of Kafka and Hasidic storyteller Rabbi Nachman.

This Off-Broadway production of Spiderman is Central European suffering plus Björk, housed in the fitting mishmash of architecture of the Harvey Theater.

Metamorphosis is running at BAM’s Harvey Theater through Sunday. It is part of the 2010 Next Wave Festival.

“16 mm Postcards,” a new exhibition produced by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the Yeshiva University Museum, at the Center for Jewish History, demonstrates how different things were in the early 20th century, when the ancestors of most American Jews came here from Eastern Europe. This extraordinary show consists of home movies—all silent, mostly fragmentary—taken by American Jews who visited their relatives in Poland in the 1930s. (Many of the films can be seen at the exhibition’s website.) What makes these films so powerful is their extreme rarity: It was only a small handful of Jews who had the wherewithal, and the desire, to go back to the villages they had left behind decades earlier. And the encounters they document show how drastically the fates of American and Polish Jewry had diverged by the 1930s. In many films, we see the American cousin, prosperous and dressed in a Western suit, standing next to his poor, bearded, caftanned relatives; and it is impossible not to wonder what must have been going on in their minds and hearts.

Did the American cousin, clutching his camera like a badge of modernity, give thanks that he had been rescued from ancestral poverty and anti-Semitism—or did he feel nostalgia for the Jewish world from which he was cut off? Did the Polish cousin envy his American relative, or resent his intrusion, or long for his help? The pathos is infinitely greater, of course, because the viewer knows that all these Polish Jews—old and young, men and women and children—are just a few years away from the Holocaust. Virtually none of the people we see in these home movies was alive 10 years later. Because of the Holocaust, the natural growing-apart of the Old Country and the New World became an irreparable break, and a source of permanent guilt. Jews who came to America lived and flourished, while those who remained behind suffered and died: How can such a gulf ever be crossed?

The questions that “16 mm Postcards” raises, silently and by implication, are addressed head-on in a new book that might serve as a companion to the exhibition: The Glatstein Chronicles (Yale University Press). This is the title given by the volume’s editor, Ruth Wisse, to two novellas published by the great Yiddish writer Jacob Glatstein in the late 1930s, based on his own pilgrimage to the Alte Heym. Glatstein was born in Lublin in 1896 and came to New York in 1914. After working for a time in sweatshops, he established himself as a Yiddish journalist, while writing poetry that brought the influence of Joyce, Eliot, and Pound to bear on Yiddish literature. “The term experimentation,” Wisse writes in her introduction, “hardly suffices to describe the many subjects that Glatstein addresses, the poses he adopts, and the poetic variations he attempts.”

In 1934, Glatstein received word that his mother was dying in Poland and booked passage across the Atlantic to see her one last time. This journey provided the subject matter for two books that he published after his return to New York. The first, whose Yiddish title literally means “When Yash set out” (Yash is a nickname for Yankev, or Jacob), is rendered here as Homeward Bound; the second, “When Yash arrived,” is made into Homecoming at Twilight. A third volume was announced, but never written: “the ‘Yash’ scheme was conceived as filial homage to Polish Jews,” Wisse writes, “and did not survive their destruction.”

In fact, as the word “twilight” in the English title suggests, Glatstein was very conscious of writing about a Jewish community in decline. Homeward Bound opens on board the ship taking Yash and a motley group of fellow-passengers to France, and the first sentence speaks of the narrator’s sense of liberation: “No sooner did the ship pull away from the dock than I instantly felt myself subject to maritime law.” Yet it is clear that this freedom is only a temporary escape from the crises and factionalism of Jewish life: “But these past few years my mind is mired in the bloodstained world of politics. ‘I think, therefore I am’ is no longer enough. Am what? One must legitimate oneself by announcing a political creed: I am a liberal, a Fascist, a Social-Fascist, or a Communist, a Trotstkyite, a Lovestonite, a Zionist.”

In fact, politics quickly intrudes on the floating world of the ship, when the narrator reads in “the ship’s newspaper that Hitler had done away with his closest associates in the so-called Night of Long Knives.” (This infamous purge of the Nazi Party took place on June 30, 1934, allowing the story to be precisely dated.) The news reveals a fault line among the ship’s passengers, Glatstein observes. To the non-Jews, it is merely another news item, to be casually regretted or dismissed (“Hitler’s a damn fool!”). To the Jews, on the other hand, it is a terrible portent, and it drives Glatstein to seek the company of people who will understand his own sense of dread: “The casual reaction of my Gentile fellow passengers to the Hitler news was the first slap in the face I had received as a Jew on this floating international paradise.”

Cannily, Glatstein uses this minor episode to suggest the organizing principle of Homeward Bound. There is almost no plot, simply a series of encounters with his fellow passengers, in which he allows them to hold forth about their experiences and ideas; and in the course of these interviews (in this story, Glatstein the journalist dominates), we are given a panorama of Jewish existence at a historical turning point. We meet an assimilated Dutch Jew, who goes on and on about how he is a Dutchman first, a Jew second, and complains about the bad image of poor Jewish immigrants in Amsterdam. (“I swear, I turn red in the face whenever I see a Polish Jew. Why must they always attract attention to themselves …?”)

Then there is a hard-living Jew from Bogota, who complains about the difficulty of finding a Jewish wife there, even as he brags about his beautiful Colombian mistress. (Here, as throughout The Glatstein Chronicles, the sexual frankness is surprising: “The truth is that these gorgeous women are useless in bed, cold as icebergs. They just lie there, like royalty.”) And there is a Soviet Jewish engineer, who is embarrassed when Glatstein compliments him on his “Yevreskaya golova, a Jewish head!”: This kind of ethnocentrism is taboo in the worker’s motherland. Ironically, the Soviet Jew’s socialist universalism makes him a mirror image of the Dutchman who shuns his Jewishness. “Aboard ship it’s easier to appreciate the individual’s worth,” Glatstein writes, and he creates a wonderfully vivid gallery of eccentric portraits. Taken together, however, they show the inescapability of “the Jewish question,” the way it turns individual Jews, even against their wills, into a collective.

Homeward Bound ends with Yash’s train arriving in his hometown, as the conductor cries, “Lu-u-blin!” But when Homecoming at Twilight begins, we are surprised to find that the key event—the deathbed reunion with his mother, the whole reason for the trip—has been skipped over. Such a disorienting elision signals that, in the second novella, Glatstein the modernist will preside: The straightforward interviews of the first story give way to a collage of dreams, memories, and parables. The setting this time is a resort hotel, where sick and exhausted Jews (including a few mental patients) come to recuperate. It is, as Wisse points out, a parody of the Alpine sanitarium in The Magic Mountain (which was translated into Yiddish by Isaac Bashevis Singer); and there are so many echoes of The Castle that it seems Glatstein must have been reading Kafka as well.

Once again, Glatstein’s subject is the state of Jewry, as seen through conversations with different types of Jews. But this time his focus is strictly on Poland, and the people he meets seem like archetypes of Polish Jewish experience. There is the dying Steinman, a charismatic Zionist who knew Herzl: “I burst into tears when I was face to face with him. I’m not ashamed to admit that I kissed his hand.” There is the brilliant young son of a Hasidic rebbe, who seems destined to become a new Nachman of Bratslav: “Some day I’ll read you some of my new ideas, and you’ll see for yourself that they are simply extraordinary,” he says.

But in a montage-like series of interviews with Polish Jews, all asking Glatstein to carry messages home to their American relatives, we are shown how the whole Jewish community is caught in an insoluble tangle of poverty, anti-Semitism, and sheer despair. And America, now mired in the Depression and closed to new immigrants, can no longer offer them hope. All the supplicants are in the same position as the unemployed rabbi who shows Glatstein a yellowed letter he once received from Herbert Hoover, which he imagines will help him get to America. In fact, Glatstein and the reader realize, it is merely a meaningless form letter; the old promise of the New World can no longer be claimed.

By the time old Steinman dies, in a moving scene at the end of the book, he seems to foreshadow the death, spiritual or even physical, of Polish Jewry itself. “It seemed to me now, in the twilight, that I had reached the autumn of my life,” Glatstein reflects. “Even my mother’s death seemed to coincide oddly with the downward movement of my own life, and all this was in step with Jewish life as a whole, maybe even with the twilight now settling down over the whole world.” The Glatstein Chronicles is a remarkable portrait of that twilight moment—not just an invaluable historical document, but a literary work of great subtlety and power.

“Rabbi Nachman burned his writing in front of his followers’ eyes to teach a lesson,” Kamenetz wrote last month, on the occasion of the Florida pastor’s threat to burn a Koran. “The ultimate Torah is not a physical object, but a holy manifestation of the ineffable. To draw the primordial Torah down into letters and words is a supreme feat all in itself. Even if no one ever reads it.” Want more? Then check out the book.

Below the jump: Watch Kamenetz’s mishnah on his new work.

Rodger Kamenetz Discusses Burnt Books from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

Burnt Books [Nextbook Press]
Related: Close Encounter [Tablet Magazine]
Pilgrimage [Tablet Magazine]

Kamenetz spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the two men, about the relationship each had to the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, and about how Nachman’s fable about a turkey responds to Kafka’s tale of an insect. Running time: 17:57.

So, take your best shot! Send us your work, and we will exhibit it online and, possibly, physically, in New York City. Details here.

For more, you’ll have to listen to Monday’s edition of Vox Tablet, in which Kamenetz finishes this tale, and tells others, to host Sara Ivry.

Hanging over it all is the fact that, were it up to Kafka, none of this would be happening: Instead, his good friend Brod would have burned all of Kafka’s work, as per the author’s request. (Of course, as Tablet Magazine columnist Etgar Keret notes to Batuman, “The next best thing to having your stuff burned, if you’re ambivalent, is giving it to some guy who gives it to some lady who gives it to her daughters who keep it in an apartment full of cats, right?”)

Rodger Kamenetz, whose Burnt Books, forthcoming from Nextbook Press, deals with Kafka’s wish extensively, wonders whether the documents shouldn’t stay in Israel: “Kafka had found real love as he was dying, and he clung to the impossible fantasy of emigration to Palestine with real intensity,” Kamenetz writes. “So it seems a kind of fulfillment that after his death his manuscripts made it [to] the promised land, even if he never could.”

Adds Kamenetz, “But Kafka himself saw the issue as far more tortured and complicated.” He would have, wouldn’t he?

After the jump: Batuman on Kafka’s flirtation with Zionism.

Kafka’s actual relationship to Zionism and Jewish culture was, like his relationship to most things, highly ambivalent. (In 1922, Kafka compiled a list of things he had failed at, including piano, languages, gardening, Zionism and anti-Zionism.) Although Brod’s attempts to convert Kafka to Zionism were a source of tension in the early years of their friendship, Kafka grew increasingly sympathetic to the cause. As early as 1912, he discussed a journey to Palestine with Felice Bauer, a dictating-machine representative with whom he was to pursue a long, anguished, mainly epistolary romance. (The two were twice engaged to be married before separating in 1917.) In 1918, Kafka drew up his vision of an early kibbutz. The only nourishment would be bread, dates and water; notably, in light of recent developments, there would be no legal courts: “Palestine needs earth,” Kafka wrote, “but it does not need lawyers.”

Kafka’s plans to move to Palestine grew more concrete only as their fulfillment grew less likely. He began studying Hebrew in 1921. According to his teacher, Puah Ben-Tovim, “he already knew he was dying” and seemed to regard their lessons “as a kind of miracle cure,” preparing “long lists of words he wanted to know”; rendered speechless by coughing, he would implore his teacher “with those huge dark eyes of his to stay for one more word, and another, and yet another.” In 1923, Ben-Tovim visited Kafka and Dora Diamant in Berlin. She found them living in bohemian squalor, reading to each other in Hebrew and fantasizing about opening a restaurant in Tel Aviv, where Diamant would work in the kitchen and Kafka would wait on tables. “Dora didn’t know how to cook, and he would have been hopeless as a waiter,” Ben-Tovim observed. Then again, “in those days most restaurants in Tel Aviv were run by couples just like them.” Ben-Tovim left one of Kafka’s Hebrew notebooks in the National Library, where I saw it this spring: a long list of those words from which Kafka expected such miracles: “tuberculosis,” “to languish,” “sorrow,” “affliction,” “genius,” “pestilence,” “belt.”

Brod’s interpretation of Kafka as a Zionist manqué is now on trial: if not, technically, in the court of law, then certainly in the court of public opinion. “Why does Kafka belong here?” asks Mark Gelber, a literature professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. “Because the Zionist enterprise was important to him.” Gelber told me he considers Kafka’s animal stories to participate in a Zionist discourse, from which “Kafka removes the particularist markers, erases the particularist traces.” (This lack of “particularist markers” makes Kafka particularly susceptible to different interpretations and ascriptions: those same animal stories caused Elias Canetti to call Kafka “the only essentially Chinese writer to be found in the West.”) Many European critics—for example, Reiner Stach, Kafka’s most recent and thorough biographer—object to the view of Kafka as “a Zionist or a religious author.” “The fact that specifically Jewish experiences are reflected in his works does not—as Brod believed—make him the protagonist of a ‘Jewish’ literature,” Stach told me. Rather, “Kafka’s oeuvre stands in the context of European literary modernity, and his texts are among the foundational documents of this modernity.”

In a perfect world, Kafka could be both engaged with a specifically Jewish discourse and a foundational author of European modernity. As Brod himself observes of “The Castle,” a “specifically Jewish interpretation goes hand in hand with what is common to humanity, without either excluding or even disturbing the other.” But an original manuscript can be in only one place at a time. The choice between Israel and Germany could not be more symbolically fraught.

Kafka’s Last Trial [New York Times Magazine]
Related: Kafka Manuscripts: The Fight Over Kafka [Huffington Post]
Burnt Books [Nextbook Press]
Earlier: New Kafka Papers To Be Revealed

To make sure the righteous travelers catch no glimpse of the iniquitous world outside, a new group of entrepreneurial Bratslav hasidim devised a solution: A dark piece of cloth placed over the face. The ideal fabric, they wrote, was the stretchy and flexible lycra, and the ideal colors black, blue, or brown. The entrepreneurs promoted the veiled look in colorful pamphlets distributed throughout the haredi Israeli town of Bnei Brak, which featured the slogan, “Smiling all the way to Uman.” Wearing a thick sheet of fabric to cover one’s face, they added, may look strange, but “provides a bountiful reward” to those who do it.

By the end of the holiday, more than 14,000 of the late rabbi’s followers will have left Israel for Uman on nearly 100 flights. No word on how many of them will have worn lycra veils, but as you can see from the photograph, the number will be greater than zero.

This Year in Uman: Hasids Don ‘Veils’ En Route to Rabbi Nachman’s Tomb [Haaretz]
Related: Pilgrimage [Tablet Magazine]
Burnt Books [Nextbook Press]

It’s always fun to remember that there should not even be a dispute over Kafka’s papers: The great writer instructed Brod to burn everything. (Rodger Kamenetz explores this in detail in Nextbook Press’s forthcoming Burnt Books.) What does it mean to be quarreling over words that should no longer even exist? Again, I am reaching for the appropriate adjective, but it’s not coming to me.

No one knows exactly what documents will be found. Or perhaps inside the box there is another box, which can only be unlocked by a key, which is inside that very box …

Lawyers Open Cache of Unpublished Manuscripts [Guardian]
Related: Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka [Nextbook Press]
Earlier: Dispute Over Kafka’s Papers Is Transparent and Simple

The Binding of Isaac.
CREDIT: Will Deutsch

The Jewish mother we know: over-involved, long-suffering, a nag who gives her kids her all—and never lets them forget it.

Or at least we know enough to know, from our evolved 21st-century perch, that the old stereotype no longer applies and that the jokes it gave rise to have pretty much lost their zing.

The Jewish father is harder to place. He doesn’t even offer a caricature to debunk.

We can say this much: He’s at the office, in the study house, on the road. He is—or at least, historically, has been—a figure distinguished, as much as anything, by his absence. Even when home, he’s preoccupied—tuning the radio to news of far-off wars, hiding behind his newspaper, trying to obscure himself behind a cloud of cigarette smoke. And then there are instances when the Jewish father just ups and leaves. The Forward of yore published whole galleries of missing husbands, men so intoxicated—or perhaps overwhelmed—by the New World, they’d simply lost themselves in it.

Seen in this light, it’s no wonder the Jewish mother became such an overbearing figure. She had to pick up the slack.

***

The Jewish father’s aloofness is not a recent development. It can be traced back to the very beginning, to Abraham. He’s a man so devoted to his God—an abstraction no one else had come to believe in yet—that he’s prepared to kill his favorite son, Isaac. Some have attributed this willingness to a species of blind faith, but I’m partial to a different reading. Yes, it’s true that when called to action, Abraham appears ready. “Hineni,” he says. “Here I am.” But as father and son ascend the mountain together, and the horror of the task ahead comes into focus, Isaac calls to Abraham. “My father,” he says plaintively. And the reply is the key, for in responding to his boy Abraham employs the same formula he used to answer God. “Hineni,” he says. But this time around, the “here” signifies not the seeker’s readiness for duty but the father’s allegiance to his son. And this is the essence of Abraham’s trial: It springs not from undivided devotion, but a double pull—to God and to his son, to the celestial and the terrestrial, to the world of abstraction and the world of the real.

Even in the modern world, where God has come to occupy a less commanding place, the Abrahamic template persists. In what can be seen as the 20th century’s paradigmatic story of the tension between Jewish father and son—the relationship of Franz and Hermann Kafka—God’s diminished place (which, seen another way, can be understood as the shift away from religious observance) is central. In the 45-page lament that has come to be known as the Letter to His Father, Kafka bemoans the shrunken brand of Judaism that his father had passed on to him. “We might both have found each other in Judaism,” he says wistfully. Instead, they have estrangement, coldness, silence. In a way, Hermann and Franz Kafka invert the model established by Abraham and Isaac. With the Kafkas, it’s the son whose gaze is focused heavenward and the father who—with his appetites, his loud voice, his bourgeois respectability—is rooted to the earth. The roles are reversed, but the gulf remains.

As literary artifact, Kafka’s letter is extraordinary, but in the feeling it voices, it is far from unique. In his biography of Paul Celan, John Felstiner reports of the poet’s once having said that in Jewish homes Kafka’s anguished letter had to be written “over and over again,” generation after generation. That such a sentiment could have been voiced by one whose own father died while in Nazi captivity makes it doubly poignant.

***

Does a discussion of Jewish fathers and sons have to be so relentlessly bleak? It’s a vexed relationship, sure, but does it yield only tragedy? Not necessarily. There can be common ground. There is, after all, baseball.

Michael Chabon, who has written searchingly on the question of aloof fathers, has said that in spite of all the indignities the game has suffered since its mid-century heyday—artificial turf, the designated hitter, free agency, drugs—baseball “is still a gift given by fathers to sons.”

I’m not sure what Chabon was getting at here—my own father has never been a baseball fan—but I can venture a guess. Baseball may be a game of runs, hits, and errors, but it’s also a game of silences: the pause between pitches, the interval between innings. Following a game can mean eying the action on the field or watching the flag billow atop the flagpole. Sitting in the bleachers, the spectator, like Abraham on Mount Moriah, can be connected at once to heaven and earth.

Judaism has long offered its own version of this—you might even call it our national pastime—an activity that mixes close scrutiny with detached reflection, the concrete and the abstract, black and white: the study of text. Books are the gift that our fathers have bequeathed to us. The most notable example here, of course, is the five-volume set gifted by God (the aloof father par excellence) at Sinai. Notable, too, is that for all that kept Kafka and his father apart, it was with a sheaf of paper that Franz tried to bridge the gap.

There isn’t much of a tradition of home-schooling among Jews nowadays, of fathers and sons sitting and learning together, but it was once more than just a tradition: It was an obligation. The words avi and mori—my father and teacher—were once, like salt and pepper, a natural pair. It’s amazing—and more than a little humbling—to think that the great medieval scholar Rashi, commonly regarded as the “father” of all the commentators who followed him, was, from the age of 5 onward, taught chiefly by his own father, who was not a great scholar but a poor vintner.

***

My own son, Ezra, isn’t quite ready to be a full-time student—he’s not yet 2—but when the time comes, the economic realities of 21st-century life are most likely going to keep me from being his primary teacher. Instead, I’ll spend my days working in this ethereal realm, trying to figure out what it means to be a Jew today. Happily, every now and then, thoughts of something he’s said or the gallery of pictures I keep on my hard drive let me float down to earth, but, inevitably, after a few minutes, duty will call.

Even during the little time Ezra and I get to spend together each day, I’ll feel the pull of the greater world: the Blackberry, the bank statement, or, lately, the set of ruminations recorded here. But then, as bedtime nears, we’ll gather up a pile of books and lie together side by side. We’ll read and marvel, move swiftly through a book we’ve come to know well or, sometimes, linger on a familiar page and find things we’ve never seen before. As the time wears on and sleepiness begins to take hold of him, he’ll inch closer to me, sometimes so close that by the time he’s ready for bed—a moment he’s come to signal by declaring “Paci, Night-Night”—there’s really no room between us at all.

It’s Kafka rather than Joyce who haunts the final section of Witz, in which the world’s remaining Unaffiliated—that is, those who have not converted to the brand of something-like-Judaism that has come to dominate the post-apocalyptic future, or “not chosen to be chosen” in the Newspeak of this new order—are rounded up and sent to their deaths (by a reconstituted Sanhedrin, naturally) in the reopened concentration camps of Polandland. The new genocide victims are, simultaneously, tourists, and their journeys to Whateverwitz, Whywald, and Nohausen, though mandatory, are also luxury vacations. “Give them the Grand Tour, show them the sites, take it all in, the works, allinclusive: then, terminal transfer to extermination facilities situated at the outer limits of major metropolises throughout the Pale … and then to murder them, every one of them, dead, and so only the pure will be left; that’s the plan.” They are flown first-class to Eastern Europe; “gifted with oodles of ointments to apply to their new tattoos”; taken to barracks with minibars and flat-screen televisions. “They’re not scheduled but punctually leisured to death, that’s how we like to think of it.”

But that’s not the Kafkaesque part. Each Unaffiliate either initially passes through one of several gates that leads directly to death or instead gets to pass through the Tourist Gate, and this is determined by a series of gatekeepers on loan from K’s famous parable “Before the Law” (which, I am personally convinced, is a parable about rabbinic Judaism and which I’m also sure inspired the structure of A Serious Man).

In Kafka’s version, a man stands before the gateway of the Law. It’s guarded by a gatekeeper who tells him he can’t go in at the present time, but that it’s possible he will be allowed to enter later. The gatekeeper allows the man to bribe him with all he has “so that you do not think you have failed to do anything,” but still does not let him in. The man waits his whole life, and on his deathbed, he finally asks the gatekeeper why no one else has ever walked through this particular gate. The keeper says, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.”

In Cohen’s version, the guards at the Tourist Gate (one of whom keeps a bird called a Kavka on his shoulder) allow the Unaffiliated not only to bribe them, but to proffer explanations—as though they were applying for a spot on the March of the Living—of why they, personally, they wish to take a tour of Polandland. (Throughout their entire encounter no one exits through this Tourist Gate.) If an Unaffiliate plays his cards right, the guard will eventually give him the documents that will allow him to tour rather than be murdered in the gas chambers.

But once an eager tour group is assembled and stands before the gate, it will turn out the guards have marked their documents in disappearing ink. If only there were some adjective available to describe such a thing …

This has always been true for our vulnerable city, but in the nearly five years since Hurricane Katrina, the wrestling has gotten more furious. And all this time, I’ve been living with Franz Kafka in my head, writing a book about a man of doubt who lived at the border of faith. More than anyone Kafka brings a strange sense of humor to our search for meaning. In fact, according to Google, Kafka is invoked about 75 times per day. But during and after Katrina, I came to wonder if the haunted, angel-eared prophet had become a permanent New Orleans resident.

Then came the oil spill. And now I am convinced.

Look at the weirdness of former FEMA Director Michael Brown suddenly popping up to give his opinion of our disaster on Fox News. Or of actor Kevin Costner showing up to offer a solution to all our problems. Or at the sudden appearances of 400 beach cleanup workers in white Tyvek and color-coded T-shirts on Grande Isle the morning President Obama arrives for his photo-op. Or at drill-baby-drill Republicans like Senator David Vitter and Governor Bobby Jindal suddenly going all environmental on us. There’s no other word for it but Kafkaesque.

Writing a book on Kafka, I’ve come to lament as much as he would have the untrammeled abuse of the word. I’ve heard Kafkaesque attached to everything from city planning proposals to SUVs. But in this current oil-spill vaudeville, featuring incompetent and malicious officials mouthing blatant lies, Kafka is all too relevant. He himself might have found work in the Bayou state: When he wasn’t musing on the seeming absence of God, he investigated industrial accidents for a workmen’s-compensation insurance company.

It was an ideal day job for a writer whose fantasies often ran to the masochistic. At night, in his diaries, he vividly imagined himself tugged through the roof of his house and disintegrating. By day, he contemplated the long hair of women caught in the cogs of factory machinery and studied drawings of chopped-off fingers. His stories created a strange new 20th-century bible featuring a discoursing ape, a singing mouse, a talking dog, fierce jackals, circus freaks, and futility. Kafka often spoke through dying animals, like Gregor Samsa the insect, or Josephine the singing mouse: He would have felt his connection now for the endangered Ridley sea turtle and the oiled pelican.

He lived every day of his life with a persistent sense of doom—which in New Orleans in hurricane season is called watching the news. So, I think he would have had no trouble feeling his way into this hovering malevolent undersea black cloud of oil and dispersant waiting to strike. Meanwhile BP offers, for our entertainment and distraction, a dog-and-pony sideshow straight out of Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist.” Like the starving man in that famous story, the long-suffering people of Louisiana waste away while the media gawk for a moment, spouting theories and implications and then moving on to another form of entertainment.

So, how would Kafka react to the oil spill? He once imagined a great fist rising from the city seal of Prague to smash its towers into smithereens, but even he never came close to imagining the whirling mass of oil flood and environmental destruction that would follow a hurricane rolling through this mess. He would have loved the MMS (Mineral Management Service), a mysterious agency no one has ever heard of until now, that issues and regulates oil leases at the same time. The oil industry oiled Congress to write this little gem of a law: An environmental review must be completed within 30 days, but because such reviews always take longer than 30 days, all environmental reviews are waived. That’s pure Kafka.

Who will be our savior, then? Not Obama. Descending from the sky, kneeling on the beach, which BP cleaned only the day before, he shines and gleams like a remote official in Kafka’s The Castle and then whirls away in mysterious abstractions. How about BP’s Tony Hayward? According to this heartless pipsqueak, the environmental damage is minimal, workers who got sick cleaning up the oil were suffering from food poisoning, and the toxic plumes scientists are reporting are non-existent.

So, there are no messiahs. Kafka himself told us as much: “When the messiah comes,” he famously quipped, “he will no longer be necessary.”

Is there any hope in the situation? This is where on our darker days, Kafka is a bleak New Orleans prophet. He was often dark, though never a nihilist. He lived, always, at the edge of faith. Once, his friend Max Brod asked him if there was any such thing as hope in the universe. “Yes,” Kafka replied, “of course there’s hope, plenty of hope—for God. Just none for us.”

I know that punch line sounds grim, but right now it hurts so much it’s funny. In the land of disaster, even a bitter laugh is a start.

Rodger Kamenetz, the author of The Jew in the Lotus and The History of Last Night’s Dream, teaches at Louisiana State University. He has just completed Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka, which will be published as part of Nextbook Press’ Jewish Encounters series in October.

Kamenetz gets to use the planetarium at the venue, which is the (super-cool) California Academy of Sciences. “I will be co-piloting a tour of the universe, starting from Planet Earth and going out beyond the Milky Way,” he said. “I will be presenting moments from Genesis, Psalms, Talmud, and Zohar that reflect the feelings of awe and wonder, and how experiencing those feelings helps us feel into a connection to God. In a lot of cases, some of our advanced scientific cosmology, such as the theories of inflation and the Big Bang have remarkable parallels to three-fold story of creation put forth in the Lurianic kabbalah.”

This sounds almost eerily well-suited to a late-night study session, no?

Burnt Books [Nextbook Press]

I was seated at a table in the back, and had been for some time, getting nowhere on the whatever-the-hell it was I was struggling uselessly to write for some goddamn reason. I watched over the top of my laptop as one of the people from the group, a young woman who looked in her early 20s with close-cropped yellow hair and the practiced sincerity of a funeral director or a liberal arts post-grad, was shaking hands and exchanging warm smiles with each woman in turn. She carried a small black-and-red paperback in her hand—I tried to catch a glimpse of the title, but she clutched it, Holy Bible-style, to her chest. Then I noticed, with a shiver of horror, that the others were all holding their own copies of the same black-and-red volume.

Oh Dear God, I thought. It’s a fucking book club.

Every member, whether or not she had a shoulder bag, chose to carry her paperback tucked under her arm or clutched to her chest, like dead animals strapped to the roof of a brave hunter’s car.

With their free hands, they carried their coffees and took their seats around the table. Because I’m a glutton for self-punishment, I hit the mute button on my computer. The waiter took their dinner order—the No. 11 with chicken was a popular choice—and the young woman with the cropped yellow hair leaned forward and welcomed them.

“Some of you I know,” she said, which the women somehow found hilarious, “and some of you we’re just meeting.”

Yellow Hair went on to explain that if she seemed tired (she didn’t), it was because she had been up all night for three nights reading this wonderful book, which she adored. She really felt she had really like, you know, connected to the main character. It was such a complex, intricate story that she felt it would be a good idea to go around the table and have everyone say the one word they thought perfectly summarized it. She started the ball rolling by sitting back in her seat, folding her arms across her chest, and asserting, “Heartbreaking.”

Everyone nodded solemnly. “Mmm-hmm,” they said.

I should admit that this was a particularly bad time for me to run into a book trial such as this, having recently been the strung-up victim of one myself. The group that tried and condemned my writing, though, wasn’t made up of strangers. They were friends. I had had the temerity to write about a close friend of ours who was dying. Within the piece I examined the death of my beloved grandfather, the wasting away of my Alzheimer’s-ridden grandmother, the tragic death of a brother I never met, and anticipated my own rage that would surely follow my friend’s death. Our mutual friends declared it “opportunistic” of me to write about her. It was, they said, “in poor taste” and “wrong.” Perhaps I would have fared better with a jury of strangers.

“Gabby?” asked Yellow Hair to the woman sitting beside her.

“Moving,” said Gabby.

Everyone nodded. “Mmm-hmm,” they said.

“Very,” said Yellow Hair. “Sandra?”

“Touching,” said Sandra.

They all nodded solemnly. “Mmm-hmm,” they said.

“Danielle?” said Yellow Hair.

“Important,” said Danielle.

They all nodded solemnly.

“Important’s good,” said Yellow Hair. “Mara?”

“Funny,” said Mara.

A heavy silence fell over the court. The F word.

“Funny?” asked Yellow Hair. “I didn’t see it as funny.”

“Not funny,” explained Mara. “Comical. Comedic.”

People are funny, too, and by “funny,” I mean horrifying and detestable. Go visit our relatives at the zoo; there’s always that one monkey sitting calmly by himself, picking his feet, or gazing peacefully into the sky. Then the other monkeys come over, and everyone goes, well, apeshit.

“What are these?” my son asks, pointing up at the crazed monkeys.

“Your grandparents,” I say.

Yellow Hair shrugged and looked to the others. The others shrugged.

“But moving,” added Mara quickly. “Funny in a moving way.”

“Definitely moving,” said Yellow Hair. “I thought it was very moving.”

“Me, too,” said Mara. “Very.” Still feeling she hadn’t fully clawed her way back into respectability, she added: “Much more moving than the film.”

“Oh, definitely,” said Yellow Hair.

The ship of unanimity sailed on. Joyce went with “engaging,” Cheryl declared the book “brave,” and Nora proclaimed it “refreshing and absorbing,” which is actually three words, but since they were words everyone agreed with, her violation of the rules was overlooked.

I began to wonder just what this heartbreaking, moving, touching, important, funny in a moving way, refreshing, absorbing book was, when Yellow Hair called on Sally, a heavy, older woman at the far end of the table.

“Trite,” said Sally.

Uh-oh.

“Really,” she continued. “Just a big cliche.”

Sally didn’t like the book’s heavy female protagonist. She’d seen it before, heard it before; Sally wanted to know why all heavy protagonists are so pure and good, and if they are, why did it matter that they are heavy.

“I just saw it coming,” said Sally. “A mile away.”

“I can see that,” said Sandra.

Yellow Hair turned to look at her.

“You said it was touching,” Yellow Hair said.

“It was,” said Sandra. “But it wasn’t surprising.”

“No,” said Mara. “It definitely wasn’t surprising. That’s why I said funny.”

Only moments before, the black-and-red paperback looked like it was going to survive; now, the tide began to turn. Some of the group took Sally’s point of view, some took Yellow Hair’s; some tried to bring the group back into agreement by reminding everyone at the table how much better the book was than the movie, but those who disliked the book seemed to prefer the movie, and a woman at the far end of the table admitted she hadn’t even read the book, and had only seen the movie. Yellow Hair wasn’t giving up.

“I guess,” she said, “different people react to different things differently.” But this book, she insisted, was something special, particularly the heavy main character, who was so real and human that it was hard for Yellow Hair to not feel what she felt, to see the world through her eyes, and to internalize all the complex—

“No. 11 with chicken?” called the waiter.

He had returned with a large tray loaded with plates, cups, and bowls.

“Over here,” said Yellow Hair.

“I had a No.11 with chicken, too,” said Sandra.

“We all did,” said Danielle. Everyone laughed.

I was at a literary festival recently, and members of the audience were interested in writing. I told them to read Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” first. Franz probably meant it to be about family, or existence in general, but it’s a pretty dead-on description of the writing life: You sit in a cage, starve to death, and nobody cares because they’re all off watching Avatar.

If you’re looking for love, don’t write. Odds are you’ll be hated. The best odds are that you’ll simply be ignored.

“Everything good here?” the waiter asked.

I noticed that the black-and-red paperbacks had been put away.

“Great,” said Yellow Hair.

Everyone nodded enthusiastically. “Mmm-hmm,” they said.

If you’re looking for love, don’t be a writer. Be a No. 11 with chicken.

“To the Hoffes,” we are told, “the episode smacks of the heavy-handed statism about which Kafka wrote. Their mother’s entire will—estimated in the millions of dollars—is being held in limbo by the courts while the fight over the documents is litigated.” If you’re looking for an extra layer of irony, you may find it here: Max Brod might be considered one of the worst literary executors in history. After all, Brod published Kafka’s extant novels and stories, and kept all his papers. Kafka wanted everything burned.

In Israel, A Tangled Battle Over the Papers of Franz Kafka [WP]

I’ve often imagined how this little morality tale would have been turned into a story by various writer-physicians. Dr. Anton Chekhov would have written a subtle but sorrowful account of logical injustice, administering to his pained women the anodyne of peasant humor. Dr. Louis-Ferdinand Céline would have written it louder and angrier, its ironies punctuated with insistent exclamation marks. As it is, in 1924 Céline, then known by his birthname, Destouches, produced a thesis titled The Life and Work of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweiss (practicing in Paris’s impoverished Montmartre, Céline’s specialty was also obstetrics). In the early days of its modernity, medicine was as much science as art, and Céline’s doctoral thesis was as significant medically as it was literarily: it asserted that what we call objective tragedy is just an instance of subjective ignorance, a refusal to recognize our failings.

Situated somewhere between the two, between Chekhovian understatement and Céline’s shocked histrionics, we would find the treatment by Ernst Weiss, a doctor and writer from Austro-Hungary. His Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer, has just been published in English nearly 80 years after its German debut and, in terms of character and plot, it can be read as an extreme transference of the Semmelweissian figure: Weiss’s hero, the eponymous Letham, is such a competent, dedicated scientist that he is imprisoned—though, unlike Semmelweiss, as the author’s subtitle tells us, Letham’s zeal for free research has led him to murder.

***

Ernst Weiss—like not only Chekhov and Céline but also like Arthur Schnitzler, William Carlos Williams and, if we must, Michael Crichton—was a physician and creative writer, and he, more than any of his peers, found a way to integrate the disciplines. The best of his books concern medicine and medical workers: doctors, nurses, patients, doctors and nurses becoming patients, and test subjects both witting and not. Weiss was born in 1882 outside Brünn, Austro-Hungary, now Brno, Czech Republic, and grew up in towns throughout Moravia and, later, in Prague and Vienna, where he obtained his medical degree in 1908. After practicing in Berne, Berlin, and Vienna (in the last under Dr. Julius Schnitzler, Arthur’s brother), he contracted tuberculosis, and went to recover on voyages aboard the liner Austria to India and Japan. In the correspondence of Joseph Roth, a fellow chronicler of European infirmity, Weiss is described as “a man who traveled to the coasts of foreign lands as a ship’s doctor without setting foot on land, and who stayed in his cabin in order to write.”

Upon his return to Prague in 1913, Weiss made an impression on another Empire luminary, Franz Kafka. Here is a selection of Kafka’s diary entries about Weiss:

“Jewish physician, typical Western European Jew, to whom one therefore feels instantly close.” (7/1/1913)

“Artificial constructions in Weiss’ novel. The strength to abolish them, the duty to do so. I almost deny experience.” (12/8/1913)

Here Kafka is referring to Weiss’ first novel, Die Galeere, or The Galley, which concerns a radiologist and is among the first texts, literary or scientific, to link x-ray radiation with cancer. After a wartime career as a military physician, for which he was awarded a Gold Cross for bravery, Weiss settled into practice in Prague with his wife, Rahel Sanzara (a pseudonym for Johanna Bleschke), a dancer, actress, and novelist. In 1921 they moved to Berlin, but Weiss returned to Prague alone in 1933 to tend to his dying mother. Between 1913 and the end of his life, Weiss wrote nearly 20 novels, including Der Augenzeuge, or The Eyewitness.

That book, written in 1938, published posthumously in 1963, concerns a German veteran of World War I, referred to as A.H., obviously Adolf Hitler. A.H., suffering from “hysterical blindness,” is committed to a military hospital. Hitler himself was diagnosed with just such a condition, hysterische Blindheit, at the military hospital at Pasewalk in 1918, and Weiss is said to have had access to Hitler’s medical file, which was smuggled to Paris for safekeeping by Hitler’s wartime psychiatrist, Dr. Edmund Forster. (It is, of course, indecently funny to imagine Hitler submitting himself to Freud’s discipline, that derided “Jewish science.”) It was in Paris that Weiss lived after the death of his mother in 1934. On June 14, 1940, the Nazis invaded, and the writer either ingested poison or overdosed on barbiturates. But, curiously for a physician, the amount he took of either substance was not sufficient, nor was the subsequent slashing of his wrists immediately effective; his suicide was successful only 24 hours later.

***

George Letham, Physician and Murderer is only the fourth book of Weiss’ to be published in English (The Eyewitness, The Aristocrat, and Franziska preceded it), but it is the longest and most characteristic. Its 500 pages tell the story of a man who, in order to end his unhappy marriage and so to immerse himself in research, injects his older, wealthier, well-insured wife with a lethal poison known as Agent Y, then proceeds to botch a cover-up: The man leaves the syringe at the crime scene, and he immediately rushes off to confess to his father, a powerful official in municipal bureaucracy. (It sometimes seems as if all fathers in Austro-Hungarian fiction are “powerful officials in municipal bureaucracies.”) Letham, after being underserved by an inept lawyer, is sentenced to a tropical penal colony ravaged by Yellow Fever, known in the book as Y.F. (Joel Rotenberg’s translation is occasionally disappointingly faithful.) There, as prisoner, he finds the professional purpose that was unavailable to him in civilian life, as he begins to search for the origins of the epidemic. Formerly an isolated technician, in the colony he’s forced to interact with patients, especially with a young beautiful Portuguese girl—in addition to convicted murderers, rapists, thieves and, what’s worse, benign homosexuals such as his cellmate, March. (Georg Letham is notable among period novels for being entirely uneuphemistic in its treatment of homosexuality.)

Gradually, a mosquito—either Stegomyia calopus, or Stegomyia fasciata—is identified as the carrier of Y.F., and by novel’s end that insect is eradicated while the narrator, the wife-murdering Letham, insists on not being credited for his service to humanity. Indeed, as soon as Y.F. is neutralized, the book concludes, and Letham disappears, along with unresolved subplots about rat-catching (rats being the terrene version of mosquitoes, perhaps), expeditions to claim the North Pole, and the malevolence of paternal love.

Georg Letham is essentially an exploration of medical ethics—of what the limits of research can be. Is it ethical to perform experiments on animals? Is it ethical to perform experiments on people? Is it more ethical or less ethical to experiment on prisoners? These questions are not so much implied in the text as sincerely asked; this is a first-person-book, and Letham has no compunction about rhetorically, and even non-rhetorically, stating his concerns. Though writers today have convinced themselves of a greater sophistication than this, and tend to bury their philosophy within the flesh of their narratives, Weiss’s primitive address remains overwhelming: it doesn’t seek to fool or numb us with art; rather, it pushes us to consider and answer these questions, as opposed to just flattering us for having discovered these questions embodied in the characters and scenes of a novel.

Georg Letham itself is an experiment: it wants to investigate how fiction can, like a mosquito or rat, transmit the pathogen of fact; and how art can analgesce man’s relationship to nature. Reading Weiss, we’re reminded that the laws of nature are not the suggestions and insights of literature—natural law is infinitely more stark and remorseless—and that the truths of science cannot be refracted or bent; they can only, per Semmelweiss, be ignored. It was Weiss’ depressive achievement that he took these truths—the truths of infection, and disease—and, recognizing the peril of ignoring them, repurposed them as test cases: to demonstrate, through novels of exceptional directness, how fallibly we humans respond to the ultimate fact of our mortality.

Though based on 16th-century events and written two centuries ago, the story of Michael Kohlhaas resonates still. The hero, a fair but rigid Brandenburg horse dealer, walks his horses through Saxony one day and is detained by a wicked aristocrat who fraudulently asks Kohlhaas for a passage permit. Suspecting something isn’t kosher, Kohlhaas nonetheless has no choice but to obey the noble, and he agrees to leave behind a pair of fine horses as collateral. When he returns and discovers that the horses have been abused, he demands satisfaction. When satisfaction fails to materialize—the aristocrat has a few powerful relatives that keep him just above the law—Kohlhaas goes mad. He forms an army of renegades, devastating anything and anyone standing in his way. He murders and pillages and burns, ignoring even the pleas of his idol, Martin Luther, who comes preaching mercy and compassion.

Reading the a beautiful and affordable Melville House reissue of the novella a few weeks ago, I, too, felt like weeping. For someone swaying on the cusp of modernity, von Kleist is astonishingly adept at portraying the dark psychological abyss of a man driven mad by a futile quest for justice. Even as I wished Kohlhaas, a wealthy man, would forget all about his ill-treated horses, go home to his lovely wife, and unwind with a nice hefeweizen, I found myself cheering silently with each fresh slaying. The baddies were getting their comeuppance, I told myself. Grievances were redressed.

It would spoil very few of the pleasures of this fine book to divulge that Kohlhaas meets an unhappy end. The novella having been written by a German, that is a foregone conclusion. But unlike some other German literary heroes whose untimely demise brings a cool breeze of relief to the long-suffering reader—the young Werther comes to mind—Kohlhaas’s woes are stirring. We know that his horses had been treated unfairly, that he is within his rights to demand compensation, and, later, to exact retribution. And yet, when he does, we weep. Revenge, we learn, is only appealing until realized.

In this week’s haftorah, the prophet Obadiah delivers a similar message. An Edomite who’d converted to Judaism, he couldn’t have joined the fold at a worse time: with King Ahab and Queen Jezebel on the throne, idolatry was rampant, and Obadiah spent the entirety of his considerable fortune hiding more than a hundred righteous men, shielding them from the wrath of the evil queen.

With so much clandestine action, he had to have been a man of few words; the book containing his prophesy is the Bible’s shortest, consisting of only 21 verses. Still, its message is strong. Railing against the Edomites, Obadiah warns his former people to fear the wrath of the righteous, and he prophesies that the children of Israel, should they remain faithful to their covenant, will obliterate their enemies.

“And the house of Jacob shall be a fire,” he warns, “and the house of Joseph a flame, and the house of Esau for stubble, and they shall kindle in them, and devour them; and there shall not be any remaining of the house of Esau.” Esau, Jacob’s hapless brother, is the father of Edom. And Esau’s descendants, Obadiah thunders, shall forever pay the price of his sins.

But just what had Esau done? The simple brother, he haplessly sold his inheritance to the conniving Jacob for a mess of potage. The kind brother, he was out hunting for his father’s favorite meat when the cunning Jacob pulled a neat trick and got his father to bless him instead. Why, then, not punish Jacob? And isn’t it time to give some love to Esau?

This week’s parasha argues otherwise. It tells of a remorseful Jacob, dispatching notes of reconciliation to the brother he had wronged, and of an angry Esau, responding by marching toward his brother with 400 men and a steely resolve to avenge his mistreatment. Jacob sends his family away and gets ready to fight. He doesn’t have to wait for long: as he sleeps, an angel appears and wrestles with him all night long. Finally, and at the cost of a dislocated hip, Jacob forces the ethereal being to surrender, and for his efforts he is given the name Israel, or he who has prevailed over the Lord.

The angel, tradition has it, represents the spirit of Esau, and in fighting him, the righteous Jacob settles his scores spiritually, not materially. This, the Torah teaches us, is why he is superior to Esau; the red-headed hunter can only right his wrongs with swords and mercenaries, and his idea of justice is blunt and bloody. Jacob understands—as have many, from Paul to Bono—that love is the higher law.

Kohlhaas never got that, and, too often, neither do we. We look even at supreme values such as justice as firm and impregnable. It’s good, then, to have an Obadiah to remind us that only God knows true justice, and that our best course of action, more often than not, is to wrestle with the angel so we don’t have to wrestle our brothers. Such advice makes for lousy German drama, but a very good life.

Rosenberg’s aphorism was a way of asserting that this difference was purely formal—that the vocation of the intellectual, as a professional analyst of texts, was essentially the same as that of the Talmudic commentator. As Irving Howe noted in his memoir A Margin of Hope, it seemed fitting that when the immigrant Ivan Greenberg renamed himself Philip Rahv, he chose the Hebrew word for rabbi: as editor of Partisan Review, Rahv became “the chief rabbi,” as Howe put it, “of our disbelieving world.” They may not have believed in Judaism, but the New York Intellectuals were carrying on a Jewish tradition—the tradition of commentary.

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.

Benjamin and his friend Gershom Scholem agreed in seeing Franz Kafka as a kind of Talmudist manqué, and in parables like “Before the Law” Kafka deliberately imitates the Talmud, offering various interpretations of his own text. In a sense even Freud is a commentator, taking the recitations of the patient as his scripture and probing its hidden meanings. And when Jews entered American culture, they produced Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin, two of the most important critics of American literature; and Harry Levin, the major interpreter of Joyce; and Harold Bloom, who models his literary criticism on kabbalistic concepts. No wonder that when the American Jewish Committee founded a journal of Jewish American culture in 1945, they named it Commentary.

There is something appealing about the continuity this idea proposes: immigration and the Holocaust might have destroyed our ancestors’ way of life, but when the American Jewish critic sits at the table and examines a text, he is somehow following their example. Yet how can a commentator be said to belong to a tradition that, in fact, he does not possess? Certainly, when you look at the testimony of the great American Jewish critics, none of them link their own activity with any knowledge of the Talmud or rabbinic literature. Irving Howe wrote that his role models were not Rashi and Maimonides but “the fluent wit of Elizabeth Hardwick or the rhetorical plenitude of Alfred Kazin.” Lionel Trilling insisted, “I cannot discover anything in my professional intellectual life which I can specifically trace back to my Jewish birth and rearing.”

To suggest that, despite their personal ignorance of Jewish tradition, Trilling and Howe—or Benjamin or Brandes—were performing a Jewish role, seems to require us to believe that there is something about the Jewish mind that is instinctively, necessarily drawn to commentary and criticism. But no sooner is this idea stated than it becomes clear how similar it is to the old anti-Semitic belief that Jews are essentially uncreative, only able to manipulate the work that other peoples produce. The most influential proponent of this idea was Richard Wagner, who wrote in “Judaism in Music” that “the Jew can only after-speak and after-patch—not truly make a poem of his words, an artwork of his doings.”

This idea is obviously absurd—it would be degrading even to list the Jewish writers, composers, and artists who falsify it. But as Paul Reitter has shown in his excellent book The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe, it had a powerful impact on German Jewry, instilling a self-doubt that affected even its greatest minds. Ludwig Wittgenstein once worried in his diary, “Even the greatest of Jewish thinkers is no more than talented. (Myself, for instance.) I think there is some truth in the idea that I really only think reproductively.” How, then, can Jews take pride in their “mass production of intellectuals,” and see an affinity between rabbinic commentary and modern literary criticism, yet rightly reject the notion that the Jewish mind is restricted to “secondary” activities like commentary and criticism?

For help with this quandary, I turned to the new book Rashi by Elie Wiesel, which will be published in Nextbook Press’s Jewish Encounters series next month. Rashi, of course, is the prince of the commentators: on every page of the Talmud, his commentary appears in the center of the book, on the side closer to the binding. Wiesel’s brief book shows how Rashi—Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitzhak—emerged from the violently anti-Semitic milieu of 11th-century France to become one of the greatest minds in Jewish history. A polymath, a linguist, a mystic, and a rationalist, he applied his genius to producing a vast commentary on the Bible and almost the entire Babylonian Talmud.

Speaking to Wiesel by phone, I asked him whether he believed there was a lineage of the kind Rosenberg saw, from Rashi to secular literary critics and commentators. He was skeptical: “I hope so, anyway. But if the commentator doesn’t know who Rashi was, it’s impossible. What they are doing may be in the same line, but I wouldn’t say it’s a continuation or a result or a consequence.” Nor did he agree that, in some cultural sense, Jews are predisposed to commentary as a literary form: “I as a Jew would like to say that, I would be proud. But let’s be honest—other cultures also have their commentators. What was Pascal, what was Descartes? They are also commentators.”

Wiesel, of course, is a memoirist and a novelist, and so I was particularly interested to see the points of contact between his imagination and Rashi’s intellect. He told me that, while he still reads Rashi today, he does not turn to him for literary inspiration: “I’ve read it and studied it hundreds of times. But does it help my literary endeavor? I don’t think so.”

But perhaps the main thing I learned from Wiesel’s Rashi is that this kind of opposition—between intellect and imagination, commentary and creation—simply does not apply to Rashi. For one thing, the kind of love Wiesel clearly feels for Rashi is deeply personal, as he writes: “And why not say it? I discover I am sentimental. Ever since childhood, he has accompanied me with his insights and charm. Ever since my first Bible lessons in the heder, I have turned to Rashi in order to grasp the meaning of a verse or word that seems obscure…. A veiled reference from him, like a smile, and everything lights up and becomes clearer.”

In the middle section of his book, Wiesel shows how it is that a commentator can leave such a powerful impression of his own mind and sensibility, even when dealing with a canonical text. He does this by offering samples of Rashi’s commentary on the Book of Genesis, from the creation of Adam to the burial of Jacob. What Wiesel shows is that, while we might think of commentary as meaning explication and analysis, for Rashi it is something much more supple and original. Take, for instance, his gloss on the story of Jacob’s deception by Laban, the father of Leah and Rachel:

When he meets Jacob, his future son-in-law, he embraces him. What could be more natural? No, says Rashi: ‘He embraces him so he could go through his pockets which he thought were full of gold coins.’ Laban embraces him also ‘to see if he has precious pearls in his mouth,’ says Rashi.

Clearly, this is not just clarification of the biblical story; it is a creative retelling, adding vivid new details that both heighten the story’s immediacy—we can see Laban peering into Jacob’s mouth—and deepen its characterizations: Laban’s tricking of Jacob, by substituting Leah for Rachel, is foreshadowed in this sneaky embrace. Even when Rashi is focused narrowly on the text, he reads it in an expansive way:

‘And Jacob loved Rachel; and said (to Laban), I will serve thee seven years for Rachel thy younger daughter.’ Rashi’s commentary: Why so many details? Because Jacob felt that Laban was an inveterate liar. He said to him: I will serve for Rachel, but if you think you can tell me that we’re referring to another Rachel, off the street, let me be specific: ‘thy daughter.’ And in case you say you’ll change her name to Leah and Leah’s to Rachel, let me say to you right away: ‘your younger daughter, the youngest.’ But, adds Rashi, in spite of all these precautions Laban betrayed him.

Here Rashi demonstrates the basic principle of his commentary: the belief that, because the text is divine, its words are perfectly chosen and their meaning inexhaustible. It is impossible to say of Rashi, as we might of a secular critic writing about a poem or novel, that he is overingenious, interpreting things that need no interpretation. Today, reading the Bible as the flawed work of human authors, we might not wonder why it refers at one point to “all [Jacob’s] sons and all his daughters,” when in fact he only has one daughter, Dinah; we would simply chalk it up to scribal error. Rashi, however, must see the slip as meaningful, so he advances theories: each of Jacob’s sons had a twin sister, or else they were married and the Bible really means Jacob’s daughters-in-law. Instead of foreclosing possibilities of meaning, Rashi wants to hold them open. To borrow a phrase from Keats, he loads every rift with ore.

The lesson of Wiesel’s Rashi, then, is that while the tradition of rabbinic commentary may lie behind the Jewish intellectuals, it also lies behind Jewish novelists and dramatists and philosophers—perhaps even composers and painters, too. All of them can draw on it, because the kinds of imagination now put to work in all those genres were condensed, in the world of rabbinic Judaism, into a single activity, that of commentary. This was not because of any innate tendency of the Jewish mind, but because of the absolute coherence of the rabbinic worldview. If the Bible is God’s word, then all our human powers are needed to understand it—and, in fact, our powers need no wider field of activity. If the Bible is not God’s word, however, then it is possible to turn those powers to other purposes; what was once coherence begins to look like mere constriction. But even if he is no longer necessarily an authority, Rashi, and the tradition of commentary at whose head he stands, remains a resource for the Jewish—and, as Wiesel notes, the non-Jewish—imagination.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

I didn’t, however, think about the beliefs of these disciplines, but about their similar writings—their literatures. Indeed, while the theological differences between Zen and Hasidism appear irresolvably stark—Hasidism believes that the self is effaced by approaching God, whereas Zen holds that a denial of self also must mean a denial of God; Hasidism’s belief in Messianism appears to nullify Zen’s transmigration—the literary relationship between the two seems undeniable.

****

“The essence of wisdom is silence. If a word is worth a sela, silence is worth two. When I speak I regret, and if I do not speak I am not regretful. Until I have spoken I am ruler and master over my speech, but after I have spoken, the words master me.”

The above transgression of silence was not transcribed on a scroll by a monk, or delivered to an acolyte by a Zen Master from atop a Himalaya. It is, instead, the 86th section of the Sefer Hasidim (The Book of the Pious), attributed to Judah ben Samuel of Regensburg, known as Judah the Pious, founder of Ashkenazi Hasidism in the late 12th and 13th centuries. That collection of folk wisdom is also responsible for instructing its readers not to write notes in the margins of books—a proscription that covers, one would think, the margins of the Sefer Hasidim—and for forbidding the killing of lice at a table where meals are to be served.

Not just style and subject, however. Zen and Hasidic stories also share a handful of forms: a question-and-answer format reaching its highest expression in the Zen koan, which is a senseful question given an answer whose seemingly nonsensical aptitude confirms the student’s capacity to apprehend a Zen principle; a type of anecdote pertaining to a famous personage—in Zen a Master, in Hasidism a rabbi, known in Yiddish as a rebbe—often related after that person’s death by a student, or relative-disciple; and, most literarily, the miniature tale whose miracles can be taken either at face value, or in a spirit of allegory.

A monk asked, “What is the depth of the deep?” The master said, “What depth of the deep should I talk about, the seven or seven or the eight of eight?”—attributed to Zen Master Zhaozhou, 778-897, China

The Baal Shem said: “What does it mean, when people say that Truth goes all over the world? It means that Truth is driven out of one place after another, and must wander on and on.”—attributed to Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, founder of Russian Hasidism, 1698-1760, Polish Russia

Tellingly, in Zen, most questions are asked by one person to another, by Master to disciple or the other way around, whereas in Hasidism the rebbe tends to ask his own questions to and of himself; this rhetoric should give a sense of the explicit didacticism of Hasidic literature. This is absent from the writing of Zen, which, neither poetry nor prose or catechism, reads as rawer, more naturalistic, or less mediated—and this despite the linguistic distance between Chinese and Japanese and the translations read by the rest of the world.

Another attribute uniting these literatures might be called authority: literature gains authority from its authors, and from the publishing houses and outlets that publish them. But in an oral tradition, authority derives directly from the Master or rebbe. The text is what the text is because the Master or rebbe said it was that; it is up to the disciple to interpret the meaning. Then, when the disciple himself becomes the Master or rebbe, those interpretations will become simplified into primary texts whose meanings must be decrypted by subsequent disciples, and this is the way a tradition works—a tradition, which is continual, as opposed to a culture, which is reactionary.

A disciple told: whenever we rode to our teacher — the moment we were within the limits of the town — all our desires were fulfilled. And if anyone happened to have a wish left, this was satisfied as soon as he entered the house of the maggid [Dov Baer, the Maggid of Mezeritch, 1710-1772, Poland]. But if there was one among us whose soul was still churned up with wanting — he was at peace when he looked into the face of the maggid.

The Master [Ryōkan Daigu, 1758-1831, Japan] never displayed excessive joy or anger. One never heard him speaking in a hurried manner, and in all his daily activities, in the way he would eat and drink, rise and retire, his movements were slow and easy, as if he were an idiot.

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While noting aesthetic affinities between the two literatures, it should be remembered that the two languages of Zen’s codification, Chinese and Japanese, have no relation to Hasidism’s Yiddish and Hebrew; and, as if to disorient with obviousness, between them confounds the entire continent of Asia. However, Zen and Hasidic writings were separated not only linguistically and geographically, but also by centuries, nearly a millennium: Zen distinguished itself as a separate Buddhist school in sixth century China, before disseminating to Japan five hundred years later, just as European Jewry was afflicted with the first of the Crusades; while Eastern Hasidism arose in pogrom-ridden Polish Russia in the early part of the 18th century, by which time Zen literature had been widely anthologized.

But their origins bear many similarities. They both began as oral literatures of the peasantry, of the village and town as opposed to the city; they are literatures of the poor and uneducated (Hasidism’s founder, the Baal Shem Tov, was an indifferent Talmudist; Zen’s Sixth and last Patriarch, Huineng, was an illiterate woodcutter when he began studying under the Fifth Patriarch, Hungjen); they both grew out of a revolt against intellectualism, Zen as a meditative response to the increasingly elaborate tenets of Mahayana Buddhism, Hasidism as an ecstatic rejoinder to the rote primacy of scriptural interpretation; they are the oral musings of wandering peoples, or of peoples whose leaderships developed a habit of itinerancy, in order not just to attract adherents but also for the sheer sake of experience. They are both literatures of functional hierarchies: transmitted to novices from teachers serving as intermediaries between a public and the ineffable; and, they are both literatures of peoples politically compelled to withdraw from the world or, better, to create an ideally ascetic world within their own communities, in monasteries and rabbinic courts, and then, failing that, within private cenacles — within their own selves.

About their codifications. The Blue Cliff Record and The Book of Equanimity (also known as The Book of Serenity) were collated in 12th-century China, while The Gateless Gate was compiled a century later toward the decline of the empire’s hyperliterate Song Dynasty—at the time of the fragments of Kalonymos ben Isaac the Elder, Samuel the Pious, his son Judah the Pious, and the latter’s apostle Eliezer ben Judah of Worms, whose Ashkenazi Hasidism, centuries before that of the Russian Pale, was a consequence of the destruction of the Crusades, and the tragic conduct, commerce, and sumptuary laws that followed.

Hasidism’s canonical stories were assembled from their diverse sects for translation only at the turn of the 20th century, however, when the German-speaking Jews of Berlin and the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s three cities, Vienna, Budapest, and Prague, became involved with, because more alienated from, the ethnicities of their ancestors, and were negotiating their returns to the wilds of a modernized Hebrew, and Yiddish. Coincidentally, perhaps, this Jewish dream of a comprehensible patrimony emerged just at the apex of Europe’s interest in the Orient—in the folkways, literature, and esoteric philosophies of that other East.

European artistic penchant for the Orientalistik grew out of the design style known as “chinoiserie,” whose motifs were brought to the continent by emissaries of the Dutch East India Companies in the 17th and 18th centuries. Its manifestations included the decoration of porcelain vases with ostensibly Asian tableaux, and the erection, on British and French and German noble estates, of pagodas of a theoretically Buddhist architecture. In literature, this vogue culminated with Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, the bildungsroman of a boy’s spiritual progress in India during the reign of the Buddha, though its elements resound throughout all of the arts and are evident in the background patterning of paintings by Vincent Van Gogh and Gustav Klimt, and in the use of that imported percussion instrument, the gong, in the First Symphony of Gustav Mahler.

At the same time, Jews of the great European cities who’d become changed by what they considered to be the more authentic lives lived by their Pale coreligionists included not only Buber, amassing his landmark Die Erzählungen der Chassidim (Tales of the Hasidim, from which the selections in this essay are excerpted), but also friends Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, who immersed themselves in the contradictory doctrines of Messianic redemption (which early Hasidism was fascinated with) and Zionism (with which later Hasidism has maintained a skeptical relationship).

Foremost among those artistically converted by experience with Judaism’s East was Franz Kafka, who befriended Yitzchak Löwy, an actor of the traveling Yiddish theater, and the writer and dilettante Hasid Jiří Langer, an assimilated Jew but an occasional disciple of the third and fourth rebbeim of the dynasty of Belz. Kafka recounts in his diaries numerous tales told to him by both Löwy and Langer, Talmudic anecdotes and folk midrashim—and he manages to get many wrong, or confused—but aphorizes in a letter: “Langer tries to find or thinks he finds a deeper meaning in all this; I think that the deeper meaning is that there is none and in my opinion this is quite enough.” (Kafka also admixed the Oriental. His The Great Wall of China is a kabbalistic parable in Asian guise—its wall could just as well be Jerusalem’s Kotel, with each reader sharding together the meaning of the text made his own reduced Herod.)

By the time a warring Europe had become thoroughly existentialist – which is a philosophy that complicates the tenets of Zen with nihilism – West’s codification of East was so influential that it itself had become a kind of original: not an authentic thing to be sanctified, but a quality of hybridism to be emulated. Writers, after all, are readers, too, and though they might be cut off from an oral tradition, they do have recourse to regretting that estate by misrepresenting the oral in books. After Kafka there derives a host of Jewish, and especially Israeli, writers occupied with such conscious rewrites and blunt manipulations, with the free excavation of the overtly antiquarian in the hopes of finding whatever style next—and style has always stood as a proxy for life; the search for it being, at depth, the search for a meaningful future.

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Which brings us back to Yoel Hoffmann and his Curriculum Vitae, gracefully translated by the American-born poet Peter Cole. Hoffmann’s story begins at the end of Jewish Europe with its twilit escapes into other forms of being an Other; his is the tale of a life lived globally not in imagination but in actuality, his globalism a product of both historical circumstance and his own affinity and will.

Born in 1937 in Hungarian Romania, an infant immigrant to Palestine, Hoffmann is considered Israel’s most accomplished Nipponist, having translated a score of works from the Japanese: scholarly texts, and collections of poetry, including an important anthology of Zen Buddhist Death Poetry, or jisei, comprising the tanka and haiku Zen Masters write before dying naturally, or committing ritual suicide. Already in his forties, evidently obsessed with his family—who’d been dispersed if not murdered in the very fields and thickets in which Hasidism arose—Hofmann began writing a kind of poetic novel that is sentimentally affecting by way of memoir or confessional verse, yet recklessly fragmented in structure.

No such interpretations or even facts are to be found in this memoir-as-résumé, however—this Life of Hoffmann as Hoffmannesque fiction.

Instead, in Curriculum Vitae we find only quicksilver, gnomic glimpses of the author’s studenthood, love, and marriage; of his growth as an Israeli son, husband, and father whose nostalgia for a Judaism lost is satisfied only outside the borders of Israel—in an irresistible attraction to the foreign, and to the foreign’s conversion into intimate terms: “We’re reading Buddhist texts with master Hirano,” he writes. “The sound of one hand (he says) when there is nothing to strike. Everything strikes itself. If you see a flower—you don’t think of eyes. If you hear a sound—you don’t think of ears. It’s like a man who comes to Kiev and at the train station has his wallet stolen. Now he’s in Kiev and has no wallet. He wants to call the police, but there is no phone.”

This is the style of all Hoffmann’s books: They are composed of brief, joking remembrances that take the sorrows of origins’ Judaism, and offer them, in reparation, as hope, the detachment of Zen. The result is a fusion that doesn’t even need to take the Buddhistic as its deliberate subject to attain a sort of trancelike transcendence—a zazen whose silence still speaks with the accent of the shtetl.

Take this, from the novel The Shunra and the Schmetterling (Shunra is Aramaic for “cat,” Schmetterling German for “butterfly”; in this book, each vignette stands lonely on the page, as if in contemplation of the white that surrounds):

“At night the moon stands over the head of Andreas my father. He wants to depart from what he is and meanwhile writes “Y-H-V-H” on the display windows of a store for electric appliances.”

While Hoffmann’s father graffities the Tetragrammaton—a name of God that Hasidim spell in their minds in order to address the presence of God and so, to forget their own names—he does so not in any sacred context, but on the dingy plateglass of a Tel-Aviv shop. In Kyoto we still long for Kyoto; while in Israel, we are in Zion and yet still we crave Zion, and will for as ever long as Israeli literature is written.

Hoffmann’s is an exile literature in exile from itself: self-conscious, and humorously historicized, yet with none of its homage preserved obviously. In his pages, the oldest of folkish tropes are wryly revivified into a third literature, that of a new and Third East—an undiscovered continent of exotically compelling fictions.

In a real sense, then, the “Theses” are the work of a man who is on the brink of the abyss, and knows it. The ninth thesis, especially, has called out to later writers as an unforgettable emblem of a world that could not save itself. In it, Benjamin meditates on a Paul Klee painting he owned, Angelus Novus, which “shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grow skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

It is not just poetic license that made Stephane Moses, the Franco-Israeli scholar who died in 2007, use the title “The Angel of History” for his study of Benjamin and his contemporaries, Gershom Scholem and Franz Rosenzweig. For in Benjamin’s little parable or midrash, we can find all the major themes that, Moses shows, obsessed these three German-Jewish thinkers. There is the savage rejection of progress, the old 19th-century liberal dream, which the First World War and its aftermath turned into a hideous joke. There is the sense that History, which German thinkers since Hegel had seen as the deliberate unfolding of Absolute Spirit, is actually a meaningless chaos. Above all, there is the inverted sense of the sacred, in which God and the angels still exist but no longer seem able to function or help humankind.

The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem, which first appeared in France in 1992 but has just been published in English by Stanford University Press (in a translation by Barbara Harshav), is a brilliantly lucid introduction to the work of these three figures. They are writers who definitely need an introduction, because their originality, and their deep involvement in the tradition of German philosophy, make them very challenging to read. So, too, does their creative reinvention of Jewish traditions and concepts. All three are profoundly, unmistakably Jewish thinkers, yet none was raised with any knowledge of Judaism. Products of assimilated German-Jewish families, they had to struggle to reacquaint themselves with their Jewish origins; as a result, they thought about Judaism in ways that no traditional Jew ever would.

In fact, Moses writes, the rupture in the transmission of Judaism—in the chain of generations, “l’dor va’dor”—is at the heart of their work. In a chapter on “Kafka, Freud, and the Crisis of Tradition,” Moses uses Kafka’s Letter to His Father to illuminate the situation in which Rosenzweig, Benjamin and Scholem found themselves. One of the bitter complaints Kafka makes against his father is his failure to provide him with a living connection to Judaism: his father’s Jewishness was “a mere nothing, a joke—not even a joke.” In his longing to assimilate into German culture and leave behind his shtetl origins, Kafka’s father reduced Jewishness to a few flimsy gestures,” absurd residues.” Yet, crucially, Kafka felt that this empty faith still had an iron grip on him, that he could not be free of a Judaism that had become meaningless.

To Scholem, who came from a similarly Germanized family, the only solution to this dilemma was to return wholeheartedly to Judaism, by becoming a Zionist. For this sin against assimilation, he was expelled from his family home. He moved to Palestine in the 1920s, and spent the rest of his long life trying to unearth the buried tradition of Jewish mysticism, writing about the Kabbalah and the radical heretic Sabbatai Zevi. Yet as Moses shows, he continued to view the Jewish past through the lens of Kafka: Scholem would tell his students that “to understand the Kabala today, we must read the works of Kafka, mainly The Trial.” That novel, in which Joseph K. is at the mercy of a law he cannot recognize or understand, seemed to Scholem a parable of the modern Jewish fate. As Scholem wrote in a long poem that Moses analyzes, Kafka captured a world where God is both present and absent:

Only so does revelation
Shine in the time that rejected you.
Only your nothingness is the experience
It is entitled to have of you.

Benjamin, who was Scholem’s closest friend, followed a different route to Judaism. Benjamin often mused about joining Scholem in Palestine, and repeatedly resolved to start learning Hebrew. But he was not truly interested in making the leap to a strictly Jewish vocation that Scholem had made. Instead, Moses shows in the densest and most interesting section of The Angel of History, Benjamin preserved his Jewish-theological ways of thinking even as he became a critic of secular German literature, and finally a Marxist revolutionary.

For Benjamin, a Jewish perspective on language and history meant challenging the prevailing scientific view of each. Language, according to linguists then and now, is a purely conventional system—words stand for objects arbitrarily, which is why French “pain” and German “Brot” can both mean the same thing as English “bread.” For Benjamin, however, language had to be envisioned mystically, as the decayed remnants of the divine language that God used to create the world, and that Adam used to name the animals. Literature, in this view, has a kind of sacred obligation of tikkun olam, repairing the world: as Moses writes, “The progress or decadence of humanity will no longer be measured by the distance separating it from an original Good but by its lapse from an original state of language.” In a similar way, Benjamin came to believe, the revolutionary should not try to abolish the past, but to redeem it—to recapture the lost potential for goodness that exists in every moment, even if it is mostly wasted and forgotten.

In this emphasis on redemption, Benjamin echoed Franz Rosenzweig, whose theological work The Star of Redemption both he and Scholem praised very highly. Rosenzweig, Moses explains, nearly converted to Christianity before deciding to reclaim his Jewishness, by redefining Judaism’s purpose on earth. “I as an individual,” he wrote, “take upon myself the metaphysical destiny, the ‘yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven’ to which I have been called from my birth.”

A crucial stage on this journey, Moses shows, was the correspondence between Rosenzweig and his friend Eugen Rosenstock, a Protestant of Jewish origins who urged him to abandon Judaism altogether. In responding to this challenge, Rosenzweig began to understand Judaism as a religion in some sense outside of history. Where Christianity, and its secular philosophical heirs, believed that history was progressing to a utopian future, Judaism stands for a different kind of salvation—not progress but redemption, which interrupts history instead of completing it. The Jewish calendar, Rosenzweig believed, lifted the Jews outside of Christian time; cyclical rather than linear, it allowed the Jews to live symbolically in union with God. In this sense, Judaism has already achieved what Christianity still hopes for: the Jewish people, Rosenzweig wrote, “is separated from the march of those who draw near to it (redemption) in the course of centuries.”

As even a brief summary shows, The Angel of History offers an introduction to some of the most brilliant and influential Jewish thinkers of the last century. Anyone who is interested in how German Judaism responded, at the highest and most passionate levels, to its imminent destruction should start by reading Stephane Moses.

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 a large pointed nose. Approaching the guard gingerly, the man asks if he will be allowed to enter. “It is possible,” replies the guard, “but not now.”

And so the man sits. And waits. Weeks go by, then months. The man peers at the gateway, contemplating a daring dash past the guard. This only makes the guard laugh: there are more guards down the corridor, he tells the man, one more fierce and menacing than the next; try breaking in, and they will break your bones.

Growing desperate, the man tries bribing the guard. The guard accepts the gifts, but still forbids the man from entering into the law. “I am taking this,” he tells the man, “only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.”

Years pass, and the man is now on his deathbed. With a shaking finger, he motions to the guard, asking him to come near. And with his dying breath, the man asks the question that has been haunting him his entire life. “Everyone strives after the law,” he chokes out. “So how is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?”

“Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you,” says the guard. “I’m going now to close it.”

As with all things Kafka, this parable has many interpretations. My favorite one, however, is this: the law is freedom, a vast hall in which nothing ever happens and nothing ever will unless we take action. Charge past the guard, goes this particular analysis, and you may die, but you may also get your way. Sit and wait, and you’ll undoubtedly perish, dissatisfied and alone.

Judging by this week’s parasha, the Israelites would have nothing to do with this kind of thinking. They’re no Joseph K: in fact, as they stand on the foothills of Mount S, having just received the Ten C, they display a certainty, a commitment, a clarity that is decidedly unkafkaesque.

It all boils down to one simple sentence. As they receive the laws God gives them, governing everything from civility toward slaves to the slaying of sorceresses, the Israelites promise to obey: “All that the Lord spoke,” they swear, “we will do and we will hear.”

This logically confusing formulation—ordinarily, of course, people hear first and only then do—was a favorite formulation with Tomer, my sergeant at the Israel Defense Force’s basic training camp. Although more than a decade has passed since I first put on uniform and reported for duty, I can still hear Tomer’s surprisingly high-pitched voice in my mind, informing us that as we—trembling and tearful new inductees—were scum, and as he—tan and trim and a good ten months into his military career—was, well, God, we should respond just as the Israelites had in their moment, promising to obey blindly, to do first and only then, if at all, bother to hear.

Needless to say, this demand for oafish obsequiousness bothered me greatly at the time, and, reading this week’s Torah portion, it chafed me anew. Why couldn’t the Israelites, I asked myself, take a page out of Joe K’s book and learn to see the law not as something to be upheld without question but as something to be stormed, to be grappled with, to be interpreted at will?

Only they did. Rereading the parasha, I paid attention to its opening line, which God speaks to Moses: “And these,” He says, “are the ordinances that you shall set before them.”

For a deity who has been known, when the mood strikes Him, to make large bodies of water split in half or send frogs tumbling down from the heavens, this is a mild way of putting things. These, after all, are His laws, the very rules He believes must govern all human interaction; one, then, might expect a bit of a stronger statement, something more along the lines of “Thou shalt do as I sayeth or I shalt have no choice but to do some of that smiting I clearly enjoyeth so much.”

And yet, nothing. All God commands is that the law be set before the people. A soft sell, this, like one of those persistent folks standing at a street corner and handing out fliers for a new dry cleaners that just opened around the block: take it if you so wish, heed it if you want. Nobody’s making you do anything.

Which, of course, sounds a lot like freedom. Sure, the laws themselves are very detailed, but you could just as easily choose to reject the whole bundle. If, on the other hand, you choose to engage with the divine will, you must take concrete action; the doing truly comes before the hearing.

Accept, then, or reject, it almost doesn’t matter: the worst thing you could possibly do is sit and wait a lifetime for the law to call on you. Remember: this entrance was assigned only to you, and it won’t be long before they close it down.

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 class, but all I got out of it was a deep and abiding sense of puzzlement. (Divine emanations? Broken vessels spilling forth holy light? From this you build a universe?)

A little reading later in life didn’t help much. I’ve always identified with the rational, logical side of Judaism; give me a good, old-fashioned, obsessive-compulsive Talmudic argument any day. Ideas like the transmigration of souls and the magical manipulation of words and numbers—those, I just can’t wrap my head around.

I’m not proud of this. Kabbalah has deep roots in Judaism, and it is said to inform even non-mystical, mainstream aspects of the tradition in ways that I am certain never to appreciate. I have had to reconcile myself to this secret shame, this inability to penetrate the deeper mysteries of my heritage. Madonna, I’m not.

Jonathan Keren

But having recently heard the Israeli composer and violinist Jonathan Keren introduce a new, Kabbalah-inspired work, On the Bridge of Words: A Triple Concerto for Narrator, Clarinet, Piano and Chamber Orchestra, I no longer feel quite so bad about my failure to pierce the veil of Jewish mysticism.

Keren is not the first contemporary Jewish composer to address arcane spiritual concepts in his work; the recently deceased Moshe Cotel, for example, incorporated both Torah study and Kabbalah in his compositions. Unlike Cotel, however, Keren is not a rabbi, and the task he set himself might have been daunting even for a scholar: On the Bridge of Words sets to music six different snippets of text by writers and philosophers who were involved with or inspired by Kabbalah, from the 13th century Spanish mystic Abraham Abulafia to Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik and Franz Kafka. During a pre-concert talk, Keren”a young, bespectacled figure with the kind of unruly hair you’d expect from a professional artist or a serious pothead”explained why he avoided using phrases plucked from actual Kabbalistic texts like the Zohar: they were incomprehensible. So instead of going to primary sources “that, honestly, I tried to read but couldn’t understand,” he decided to crib from people who ostensibly did. Hey, graduate students in the humanities do it; why not composers?

The excerpts Keren chose all related to language or music, and he tried to evoke their content in his compositions. Those intended connections were lost on me—do dissonant, stabbing piano chords and sustained string notes really conjure the “steel bridges over still waters” of Bialik’s The Explicit and the Allusive In Language?—but I enjoyed the music for its own sake. Keren is a modernist with a gift for dramatic gestures, and On the Bridge of Words commanded attention, even if it didn’t quite seem to fulfill its programmatic agenda.

Daniel David Feinsmith

In a different musical take on Kabbalah, California-based composer Daniel David Feinsmith doesn’t wade around the edges of Jewish mysticism; he dives right in and rolls around in it. A former Zen monk who has cobbled together his own brand of “meditative Judaism” from both Jewish and Buddhist sources, Feinsmith sees music as a “magical tool” that can be used to affect, and to improve, the world around us. He achieves this musical tikkun olam using techniques that are straight out of the Kabbalistic playbook; his works are intended, through a careful balance between contrast and repetition, to foster a trance-like state among listeners.

Drawing on the Sefer Yezira (“Book of Creation”), a 1000-year-old work of speculative philosophy that ascribes the creation of the world to the divine manipulation of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, Feinsmith generates his tones and rhythms using the numerological values of the names of God and of select biblical passages. The piece “Yahweh,” for string quartet and handbell choir, was created using the numerical sequence 10, 5, 6, 5, which corresponds to the letters in the Tetragrammaton. A medieval Kabbalist would recognize this as a form of gematria, which reveals the hidden meanings of words through their numerical equivalents, while a modern composer would see in it a compositional algorithm that turns numbers into music. (Come to think of it, mystics and “serious” composers have a lot in common: both tend to attract small groups of fanatical devotees, and no one really understands what they do.)

Abulafia in particular might have admired Feinsmith’s method: According to Gershom Scholem’s Kabbalah, Abulafia advocated a particular brand of textual manipulation, or hochmat ha-zeruf (“the science of combination”), that used the letters making up the names of God for meditative purposes. He even compared this technique to music, “which too could conduct the soul to a state of the highest rapture by the combination of sounds.” That seems like something the Hasidim, who have done more than any other group to popularize Kabbalah, would appreciate: their wordless chants, or niggunim, are intended to induce a state of spiritual ecstasy.

Feinsmith’s music might not have quite the same effect, but it is powerful stuff nonetheless, and his hypnotic melodies and driving rhythms can be appreciated without understanding the arcane processes through which they are derived. That in itself seems rather Kabbalistic: After all, the goal of all this mind-bending mysticism is not to win the gold medal for the most complex intellectual gymnastics, but to achieve a closer union with the divine. For a rational secularist like me, a transcendental musical experience is about as close as I’ll ever come.

Asking a fan to burn your work is a request that we might now, after Freud, characterize as passive-aggressive,” and might seem to us to be a mark of extreme egoism—a good friend like Brod will always refuse what is bad in you, and Kafka had to have known that, yet still made his wishes known. He made his wishes known possibly knowing that those wishes, too, would eventually be made known along with the novels and stories.

They are fastened securely, unaffected by any strain, and the blades can never snap out, any more than they will be flung out or bent.”

If Kafka didn’t want his manuscript fiction read, we can be sure that he never once hoped that his salaried memoranda might one day find an audience. And yet here we are, having just spent the last four days reading Kafka, and reading the worst of him—the most tedious, the most straight-faced, the facts.” Almost a century after Kafka’s death, we read him and he does not know that we read him, and we read what we want of him, and he has no say which page we flip to—whether to the first page of The Metamorphosis, or to his many love letters, to Felice, to Milena, or to his diary entries, or his report to the Second International Congress on Accident Prevention and First Aid in Vienna. Wherever we read him, however, the language is familiar. It is a language that derives from the personalities, many and varied, which we ourselves assume for the purposes of public functioning, and it is this common deceit—a conceit?—that compels us to read Kafka today. That in the future we will still read more of his fiction, of his Home Writings,” than of his Office Writings, is only because the fiction has managed to retain a spark of individual life, burning in defiance against, while also illuminating, any stricture imposed from above.

Finally, about that imposition: what does it ultimately mean that the essential fiction of modernity—actually, the first great fiction of modernity, the fiction of the airplane, and the submachine gun, of the Battle of the Somme and the sisters, three of them, Elli, Valli, and Ottla, who perished in the Łódź Ghetto and at Auschwitz; the fiction of the first mass-produced automobile and telephone and film, and of the first typewriter and computer”—what does it mean that such suggestive work had its genesis not just in the language of business, but in the very diction or grammar of bureaucracy?

Here, where we live, in Postmodernity, which is just the name for final market ascension over individual expression, Office-influence means that art has become work, and work has become art. In literature especially—an art that, more than any other, takes an investment of time and thought for its appreciation—the effects of this merger have been devastating. With the rise of MFA and other professional writing programs, people—young people who should be thinking and doing on their own—diligently apply themselves instead to learning how to write, and learning how to write well, as if that standard existed, and was the purview of the Academy, or the market. Literature is not life, though, or not all of life, which has itself been assailed by work’s prepotency.

Life has become work, too—”a lifestyle.” Today, every aspect of our existence has been overtaken by ideas of achievement, of productivity. We talk to each other, even to ourselves, of fulfillment, of goals. It was inevitable that our personal language would become that of managerial motivation, that we would administer seminars to the self. The home has become an office—”the home office.” People have begun bringing their computers into their beds. It is regarded as not just good practice but salutary to be “always connected.” Kafka the insurance scribe knew this was coming. He knew this, too: That the only way out was to get sick and die.

Wherever the Castle was, though—if anywhere—Kafka worked for it. He made the language and protocols of its bureaucracy his own. More than for the Institute, more than for his own sense of self, Kafka worked for this ideal ministry, this ideal apparatus of oppression. The writing he did during the day at his workdesk would be transcribed into the margins of the writing he would do at his other desk at home and at night, constraining even his most fanciful imaginings with appropriate Castle form, and Castle diction. Kafka’s business writing became, in effect, Kafka’s writing business, and Kafka Inc. became Kafkan ink as his best stories found themselves straightened into assumed styles and genres. The essay, the speech, the Report to an Academy, the travelogue parody—Kafka’s fiction is anything but fiction. It was subsidiary work, always, of a “limited liability.”

What should be investigated, then, is Kafka’s embrace of the Castle—of his employer’s language, and rhetorical techniques. Such adoptions have almost always been accomplished in a spirit of subversion, and examples are copious, and brilliant: Andrei Platonov, who incorporated Stalinist slogans into his novels; mid-century American poets as diverse as Frank O’Hara, and Allen Ginsberg, who co-opted advertising language into verse practice; one also thinks of Lenny Bruce, who composed entire comedy routines reading from transcripts derived from his trials on obscenity charges. Kafka’s example is more ambivalent, however. It is not subversion so much as an author himself being subverted.

But this phenomenon of speaking in the voice of one’s superior, of eventually surrendering oneself to the voice of one’s superior, is best examined in extremis —through Nazism. It has become a commonplace to say that Kafka’s work prefigured, in image, or predicted, in word, the horrors of Nazism. That argument is most often advanced by a litany of external congruencies between Kafka’s fictional world and the Third Reich: bureaucracy (though the Nazis were always more efficient than the authorial imagination), the infringement of technology on daily life, random violence, unappealable official destinies, fates based on birth, etc. Kafka’s intuition of Nazism was far more personal, however, far more inwardly directed. It can be found in his characters’ desires to join something, to become part of something, whether a style or form of being, or even a Volk (which, in Kafka’s case, would have, perversely, been Judaism). Kafka’s people want to become one with another, but especially with a mass, or a power. They long to find a voice, a place, or station, to join an office, a ministry, a selfless Gemeinschaft or selfish Gesellschaft, a family, a religion. Their question at the door of the Law is Rainer Maria Rilke’s: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?” For natives of Austro-Hungarian Prague, like Kafka, like Rilke (they were born eight years, and ten blocks, apart), angels come in hierarchies—Ordnungen in German, “orders”; the celestials have rungs and levels, too.

Kafka was desperate to link his art and life to each other, and to link his destiny in both to a respectable institution. This desperation derived from a desire to please his parents, perhaps, as if to satisfy a God he did not believe in. For a time, at the advent of the First World War, he even attempted to enlist in the army, but was refused as an essential worker in the service of State. The decisiveness with which the nervous, suffering Kafka attempted military service, and then the energy and application with which he campaigned for veteran’s rights and benefits after the War, seems obsessive, even pathological (he advocated to establish a sanatorium for veterans’ recovery in a resort called, of all things, Frankenstein).

“Some people have claimed that reconditioned square shafts are an adequate alternative to the newer cylindrical shafts.”

This desire to lose himself in another’s approval was almost animal, instinctual, as if a remnant of the impulse to herd, to disappear into the flock. It should be remembered that old Jewish cities such as Prague are still organized not by congregation but by communities. In Prague one could not, and still cannot, “belong” to a synagogue, but, instead, to the Prague Obec, the Jewish Community of Prague, which has a board of directors and president answerable only to the Chief Rabbinate of Bohemia and Moravia. To this day Prague’s Jews carry blue identification cards, though registration has been made wholly voluntary. There is safety in numbers, but danger in being counted, and there is absolution in both. One has only to think of the demonic heir to Kafka’s officialdom—the Desk Murderer of Nazism, the unaware, or half-aware, Schreibtischmörder. He is competent. He is useful. He and thousands of archons exactly like him decimated almost the entirety of Prague Jewry. People want to “belong.” People want to be hated and abused.

A person who works as a Nazi is just that, a Nazi, and everything he does is infused with the spirit of Nazism. Like that historical unfortunate, we, too, have learned the lessons of work, and incorporated them into our lives. The public has long penetrated the private, and the two spheres are now virtually indistinguishable. It is as if we repeat the words of Shakespeare’s Shylock: “The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.” Lately, though, we “execute” this instruction directly on ourselves.

This is only a poetic version of Marx’s thought, that bureaucracy manages to translate all social relations into a grammar of formal relationships between offices and ranks. Marx’s assertion can be transposed onto the community, or family. In our time, all relations, even the most intimate—those between lovers, those between a writer and a piece of paper—have been invaded with foreign language. This invading, adulterating force is today characterized as “the Media,” though its particular expression has historically been called many things: technical jargon, Amtsstil (the official Empire term for “officialese”), Orwellian Newspeak. Today, the individual has access to an unprecedented array of linguistic and identificational guises and feints—ways in which one might, through the Word, disappear into the mass. In The Metamorphosis the bugman Samsa goes from being a “he” to an “it.” His sister Grete says: “‘I won’t utter my brother’s name in the presence of this creature, and so all I say is: we must get rid of it. We’ve tried to look after it and to put up with it as far as is humanly possible, and I don’t think anyone could reproach us in the slightest.’”

At the time he was writing The Metamorphosis, Kafka jotted in his diary: “In the next room they are talking about vermin.” Yes, they were, but in a new language. In translation, they were talking about Samsa. In translation, they were talking about him.

In 1908, after two years of employment, Kafka left that firm to take up a more prestigious position with The Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague, a semigovernmental institution responsible for administering insurance in the province of Bohemia, but answerable to Vienna k.u.k.—kaiserlich und königlich, imperial and royal,” its autocratic description—crownseat of the Crownlands. Bohemia was just one of 18 provinces of an Empire that stretched from the German Reich to the Russian wilds, and Prague, Bohemia’s capital, Kafka’s home and birthplace, was only the third city of that Empire, after Vienna, capital of Cisleithania, and Budapest, capital of Transleithania, or the Kingdom of Hungary—dealings between provinces were complicated; the Empire’s fetish for organization led only to chaos.

A cylindrical safety shaft from the engineering works of Bohumil Voleský, Prague-Lieben.”

Prague, then, was half-metropolis, half-provincial, a dark, Gothic city where German-speakers lived alongside ethnic Czechs, while political allegiance was split between German-language fealty to Empire and Czech desires for self-determination, finally realized by T.G. Masaryk in 1918 with the founding of the first Czechoslovak Republic. These two factions were united by an envying mistrust of the Reich, and also by the mediating presence of Socialists and Jews—two minority designations that often applied to the same set of people. They could be found at solidarity meetings one day, then on the next night at the Altneu synagogue, in whose attic lives the Golem. Across the Vltava River, known in German as the Moldau, loomed The Castle”—Das Schloß, also known as the Hrad.

Workers’ Accident Insurance was first established in Europe due to a multitude of factors, not least this rise of socialism. The Germanic Socialist workers’ movements of the late 19th century—practical embodiments of Marxist thought, infused with French esprit as perfected in the insubordination of the 1871 Paris Commune—arose in response to the growth of industry, which demanded practical and fair relief from its efforts to effectuate Modernity. A balm had to be found in this newly technological Gilead to heal workers’ injuries incurred in the service of the Industrial Revolution. The Empire’s comprehensive workers’ accident insurance plan was based on that of the German Reich, which unified in the same year as the Commune appeared, 1871. Marx began his work in the 1840s in the Reich’s strongest territory: Prussia.

Unlike the multinational Empire, however, Germany was a nation-state: It was both a state responsible for practical administration, and a nation interested in preserving national character—a character defined by perceived mental and physical fitness, and even superiority, suffused with folk vestiges of the Romantic movement. Accordingly, the welfare of Germany’s workers was intimately bound up in ideas of commonweal, and common origins. The Empire, by contrast, was a multinational hodgepodge that had to create a social welfare state if not out of concern for its disparate workforce, then to maintain its fractious coalitions—to placate its competing nationalisms and political platforms, and to counteract the agitation of anarchist and secessionist groups (such as the one that spawned the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand early in the next century). It might follow, then, that workers’ insurance helped keep the Empire together at a time of divergent allegiances. It might follow, also, that Marx’s Socialist doctrine can be read as a pretext—truly, a pre-text —to legislation that provided insurance to workers helping to bring about a revolutionarily capitalist, consumer society.

In 1887, four years after Kafka’s birth, the Empire implemented its policy of workers’ accident insurance, and founded its Institutes. Unlike in the Reich, the Empire’s insurance was organized according to geographic territories, and not by types of trades. Whereas Germany established a Metalworkers’ Trade Association and a Textileworkers’ Trade Association, the Empire established Prague’s Bohemia branch, which covered all trades throughout Bohemia, and which accepted Kafka for employment after he was finished insuring the best boats, and wealthiest companies, of Trieste (Assicurazioni Generali’s was the oldest type of insurance: Modern commercial insurance was founded two centuries earlier in London to indemnify the first private firms interested in international maritime shipping).

Now, however, Kafka worked not for the mutual benefit of large industry and the Crown, but as a mediator between the concerns of the working class and its management, between that management class and the Institute, and, lastly, between the Institute and Kaiser Franz Joseph in Vienna. Initially, Kafka’s Institute job was as a deputy clerk, or assistant secretary, but he was eventually promoted to become Senior Legal Secretary—an Obersekretär —the indispensable righthand man, a sort of Court Jew, to the organization’s Director, Doctor Robert Marschner (a note about titles: in the office he was always addressed as “Herr Doktor Kafka”). As Obersekretär, Kafka’s responsibilities included risk classification (which involved evaluating the degree of danger of a certain job, and so setting the level of premium to be paid by business owners), and improving the Institute’s efforts at accident prevention. The latter duty required Kafka to dabble in public relations, writing informative bulletins and even popular newspaper articles—his chief outlet was the proletarisch, large-circulation Tetschen-Bodenbacher Zeitung—hoping to educate management, labor, and the general public in advances in workplace safety.

‘The blades of the square shaft are screwed directly to the shaft, and their exposed cutting edges spin at 3800-4000 revolutions per minute.’
“The blades of the square shaft are screwed directly to the shaft, and their exposed cutting edges spin at 3800–4000 revolutions per minute.”
While at night Kafka was writing stories about the infinite and eternal construction of The Great Wall of China, and about a Flying Dutchman set adrift on a deathship, floating forever amid ports of call, during the day he was writing interminable pages about the perils of wood-planing machines (“the introduction of the cylindrical safety shafts in wood-planing machines is finally progressing well”), the perils of chimney-sweeping, and brandy consumption in quarries, problems with automobile insurance (as the majority of cars were then driven by chauffeurs, the vehicles themselves had to be classified as businesses), and the risk classification quandaries posed by the recently electrified elevator (Where is the electrical generator stored? Who, exactly, has access to the elevator’s switches?).

To read these 18 examples of office writing without the context of Kafka’s other work, without knowing who, in fact, Kafka ever was, is essentially to go to work. Here is a sampling of their titles, some provided by the book’s three editors, and others by Kafka himself, or by his newspaper editors: “Fixed-Rate Insurance Premiums for Small Farms Using Machinery”; “On the Examination of Firms by Trade Inspectors”; “Petition of the Toy Producers’ Association in Katharinaberg, Erzgebirge”; and “Help Disabled Veterans! An Urgent Appeal to the Public.” Their style, even more so than the style of Kafka’s stories and novels, is neutral. Their subject matter is expectedly worse: specialist, abstruse, culled from the most humdrum and desiccated of corporate genizahs.

Then again, we should remember that nobody asked us to read them. Sigmund Freud’s laundry lists probably aren’t any better (though they might prove equally as revealing). Indeed, to read the office writings as one is supposed to, like a good student of the Kafkaesque, or a diligent K.-like worker, is instructive: it is to understand Kafka’s art anew, and to be reminded of the discreet, double-life of modern working man, whose true, pleasure-giving interests lie almost entirely outside of the workplace. The Office Writings are the Ur texts to Kafka’s extracurricular fiction, Kafka’s precursors as much as Talmud (which he did not know well), and Hasidic wonder stories, Hamsun and Kierkegaard and von Kleist and Flaubert, Dostoyevsky’s psychological murderers, and Dickens’ urban grotesquerie and grit.

‘The blades of these shafts are completely protected between the flap or between a wedge and the solid frame of the shaft.’
“The blades of these shafts are completely protected between the flap or between a wedge and the solid frame of the shaft.”
The examples of this connectivity are simple—of how the work-work influences the artwork—but the interpretations, and the ramifications, are not. In the aforementioned “Measures for Preventing Accidents from Wood-Planing Machines” of 1910, Kafka argued that the square shafts that supported the blades used to plane wood were responsible for a regrettable number of accidents and maimings, including the loss of parts of fingers, or, rarer, the severance of entire appendages. Because these shafts were square, gaps would appear between the blades screwed to a turning shaft and the lip of a worktable. A worker’s finger would become stuck in these gaps—four gaps for each single revolution of a square shaft, revolving 3800 to 4000 times per minute—resulting in debilitating injuries. Kafka’s solution was innovative, but seems elementary: He proposed to introduce a newly patented model of cylindrical shaft—a round shaft (with its blades hidden under flaps or between wedges) that obviously lacked sharp quadrilateral corners, and so lacked the gaps that would trap, and — in the days before plastic surgery—irreparably harm. Kafka describes how his solution would benefit workers and management (workers would be healthier, and so more productive; the cylinders were even more “cost-effective”), while emphasizing the carnage of such accidents with what, at the time, was a novelty: images, illustrative plates showing both injured hands, and multiple views of the cylindrical shaft. This commissioning was one of the first uses of illustrations in a business report—Franz Kafka, father of multimedia.
‘Even if fingers are caught in the slot, the resulting injuries are slight, consisting merely of lacerations that need not even interrupt work.’
“Even if fingers are caught in the slot, the resulting injuries are slight, consisting merely of lacerations that need not even interrupt work.”

This report can be convincingly linked to Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony.” In that story of inscription as incision, a convicted felon is punished by torture, and death. The vast, unwieldy apparatus that accomplishes this punishment inscribes on the body of this convict the exact nature of his transgression; the sin becomes internalized through the medium of the flesh, in a mark of Cain for the Machine Age. While no introduction of “cylindrical shafts” could overturn such a metaphysical damnation, there is no doubt that the image of a body inscribed by technology springs from Kafka’s arbitrating experience with traumatized workers. Kafka’s deskbound milieux of inscription and accountancy is also where we first hear about the first primitive computer, a variety of calculator known as the Hollerith machine, used for the processing of statistical data using the technology of the “punch card” (the machine’s process was inspired by the practice of punching a railway ticket, and so encoding it with information; the Hollerith’s best success was with the Nazis, in their use of it to schedule the train deportations of European Jewry). In Kafka’s fiction the human body is the Punch Card of Modernity. In modern life, the body has become the storage, “the muscle memory,” and so the casualty, of the workplace—both physiologically, and psychologically.

Another example of Kafka’s appropriation of insurance work is more direct. Often the attractions of philosophical influence, the wisps and correspondences of ideas, and complex technologies, obscure mundane inspirations and models. In 1914, the same year as he wrote “In the Penal Colony,” Kafka wrote a report editorially entitled “Accident Prevention in Quarries.” In it, he faulted quarry owners for paying wages in alcohol, and for allowing workers to work when drunk, and without the proper safety equipment such as goggles (“It is true that safety goggles are frequently issued to the workers, but the men find them impossible to use, or they are prejudiced against using them, so that the goggles are usually found in the workers’ pockets during the workday. Such a situation can exist because supervision of the operation is either inadequate or altogether lacking.”)

Kafka condemned the entire quarrying industry as under-regulated, and accused the sector’s inspectors of not reporting problems, and not recognizing the fundamental nature of the dangers that quarrying posed: “Quarries call for a kind of inspection that differs from that required by other operations. In this work, it is not a matter of safety devices that, once acquired, will last and be useful for long periods of time; what matters is efficient excavation, which has to be planned over and over so as to fit with the ever-changing soil conditions.” These inspectors comprised an inspectorate class emplaced in response to the legal prohibition against the Institute inspecting the premises of any business it insured, in order to protect the businesses’ trade secrets. These inspectorates would prove “independent” in other ways, too, often settling upon widely divergent meanings for workplace safety ratings of “satisfactory,” and “normal”—to Kafka’s displeasure, and the Institute’s incomplete evaluation. Here, in this report, Kafka also introduced photographs, now of delinquent quarries, noting depictions of unsafe conditions such as teetering boulders, and precarious piles of rock.

He writes, about Fig. IV:
“At the very top to the right in the debris, marked with ‘B,’ a loose stone block, 1 cubic meter in size, lies almost suspended above a projecting rock wall. At the center of the picture, marked ‘S,’ a man can be seen working at a dangerous spot, 4 meters above ground, without being attached to a rope. Debris is not removed, and quarrying work has been pushed forward almost to the edge of the walkways shown through the railing.”

With “a loose stone block, 1 cubic meter in size,” we are reminded, palpably, of the chilling last scene in “The Trial”—the execution of Joseph K. This is his sacrifice by two unknown men, his diabolical akeidah.

“Not to leave K. standing motionless, exposed to the night breeze, which was rather chilly, he took him by the arm and walked him up and down a little, while his partner investigated the quarry to find a suitable spot. When he had found it he beckoned, and K.’s companion led him over there. It was a spot near the cliffside where a loose boulder was lying. The two of them laid K. down on the ground, propped him against the boulder, and settled his head upon it.”

This quarry is the site of martyrdom, character’s and author’s—a wounding for the working cause.

This is where one held K.’s throat, “while the other thrust the knife deep into his heart and turned it there twice.”

His origins lie before industry certainly, before widespread centralization. He began, in fact, when people stopped working for themselves and started working for others; when individual or familial subsistence gave way to earning a living. Work, in the 19th century, became largely an indoor activity, making daily labor—not in the fields and farmlands, but behind four walls in a plant—seem contained, a place where behavior could be scrutinized, and surveilled. Then, with the demise of the aristocracy and church estates as the markets opened to the previously disenfranchised, a middle-class emerged, grown out of the ranks of lowly employees promoted off the factory floor and behind desks.

At this juncture, deskwork had become almost totally detached from the real physical work it controlled. The European bourgeoisie never made much of anything, ultimately: they administered, administrated, directed. The typical officeworker or bureaucrat made nothing, but he made money, whereas his son, who would become an artist, made “something”—an artwork—that was worth “nothing.” The typical generational reaction to the values of the fin de siècle middle-manager was just this—art.

This was Kafka’s reaction, but he would have it both ways. He would be doubly representative, both of his generation, and of the generation earlier. Throughout the 19th century, merchant-managerial fathers groomed their sons to take over their businesses, but Karl Marx’s father was a lawyer; Gustav Mahler’s father managed a distillery; Walter Benjamin’s father was a banker and a dealer in antiques; Gershom Scholem’s father was a printer, and Karl Kraus’ father manufactured the paper on which his son wrote. The redoubtable head of the Wittgenstein dynasty was an industrialist, with interests in iron and steel.

Here then, is Kafka, the last of the line. As Theodor Adorno noted, the last of the Modernists were also the last of the bourgeoisie; Adorno’s father sold, but did not make, wine. Kafka would become another sort of last, too: He became the representative writer of the last generation of continuous Jewish life and art in Europe, almost two centuries after the beginning of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, when Jews first began clawing out of the ghettos. Kafka was an administrator who could not stand up to his parents (he was especially afraid of his father), whose relatives’ reputations—as Benjamin might have put it, their “auras”—intimidated him. He was the petit, clerkish son of a family that had had physical power (Kafka’s paternal people were schochets, Jewish ritual slaughterers from Osek, or Wossek, in provincial Bohemia), and spiritual authority (his mother’s side were rabbis). Hermann Kafka, pater familias, was a small business owner, the supervisor of a dozen employees; his shop on the Zeltnergasse (now Celetná ulice) sold haberdashery, gloves, slippers, and umbrellas. He also founded an asbestos factory, the Prager Asbestwerke Hermann & Co. His son, however, was devoid of a proprietor’s practicalities. Kafka didn’t just live in his head—he lived two lives in his head.

Into these bifurcations we should cleave two more: not just Kafka’s Judaism but the officially sanctioned anti-Semitism of Austro-Hungary, and then the exigencies of Kafka’s later Prague life, split between German, which he wrote in, and Czech, which he spoke fluently, and which became, after the War, his employer’s primary language. After the Empire’s fall, and Czech independence, Kafka stayed on at his reorganized company, known as The Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for Czechoslovakia. Just like with women—Kafka was engaged three times, to two different women—he was a willing slave, and would serve any master.

As for anti-Semitism, it nearly prevented his career. Kafka thought himself lucky to have made it into Prague’s Charles University despite an unofficial numerus clausus—“the closed number” that imposed a quota on a university’s Jews—and so felt compelled to comport himself with respect and attention to his studies. That sense of election and duty would quickly disappear. Kafka began his study of law with an almost theological seriousness, only to degenerate in his practice into routine prosecutions of corrupt hotel owners in Marienbad. This disconnect between the Law’s authority and the law’s application bred cynicism, as did the bias of a modern social welfare state that supported workers’ equality but not equality for Jews; such contradictions had to be daily resisted for Kafka to function at either one of his desks. The initial idealism, even optimism, that characterized his university study also characterized his first attempts at writing stories; tellingly, Kafka began his writing life in earnest at the same time as he began his coursework in law. Once employed, however, that youthful energy was suffocated, destroyed.

Soon, the utopian, picaresque spirit of his first novel, America (also known as The Man Who Disappeared), was deadened, numbed by the grind. Work constantly obtruded on Kafka’s enthusiasms, as his most private occupation—the writing of stories, the invention of worlds—found itself annulled in the selflessness of legalistic formulations. Such technical prose matured Kafka, which is to say it also leeched from him any plentitude of spirit. While legalisms allowed him to strip his stories, along with his personality, permitting him to present his fictions along with his terrible depressions and psychosomatic illnesses as mere recountings of the “facts,” the law’s recursive, casuistical constructs also served to entangle Kafka more terminally in his loneliness, and his failure. Need anyone be reminded that none of Kafka’s novels were ever finished? Why? Because they could never be proven. They could never be definitively adjudged.

Kafka’s career finally ended in 1922, when he retired early due to illness, on a miserly pension of 10,608 Czech crowns per annum. Toward the end of his tenure, friends had begun calling him František, the Czech version of Franz; he was still one of two Jews allowed to work at the Institute (he did not enjoy the company of the other). Meanwhile, the world had fallen apart. Forty million people had died throughout Europe, millions more had lost limbs in accidents amid the workplace of history, and, above all, literature now had the movies to contend with: Kafka enjoyed The White Slave Girl, The Heartbreaker, The Thirsty Gendarme, and Theodor Körner. We are far from the first fields, and the eclogues of pastoral poets.

G.S., because these are his rooms, says, “Good day, sir. What can I do for you?” He says this in German, or maybe in Czech; our setting is the Prague of Austro-Hungary.

The other man, slight and sharp, says, “I’m here about insurance, and do I have a deal for you!”

G.S. says,” Yes? Come to think of it, I’ve been considering a new life-insurance policy . . .”

“I don’t sell that type of insurance,” says the man. “I sell a different kind.” He takes a breath, begins: “I sell insurance against lengthy legal proceedings; I sell insurance against abuse for land surveyors; insurance against being used as a human bridge, and insurance against being turned into a giant insect . . .”

Needless to say, the man—perhaps he’s an angel—has the door slammed in his face.

What happens next?

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” The first line of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.

In the story’s modern rewrite, set in our world where all wrongs are rightable, and the law is always accountable, the unfortunate G.S. might not be turned back into a human, but—if a policy-holder—would certainly be compensated generously for this accident, with extra for “pain and suffering.”

* * *

Franz Kafka wrote as insurance against suffering the fates of his characters. It was as if every hour he spent writing, by candlelight and, later, by electric light, was an installment paid against darkness. He knew that with a stroke of the pen he could conceivably, at any time, have restored to Joseph K. his easy life before The Trial, and obtained for land surveyor K. a better position with a gentler Castle. But this is what makes Kafka the great writer of what has been called Modernity: That he stayed true to his fictions, and retained their tragedy.

“An original cylindrical safety shaft for wood-planing machines using the Schrader system, a product of the engineering works of Emil Mau und Co. in Dresden.”
Also, it should be said that no penstroke was ever that simple for Kafka, especially when it came to the writing he did at night. Kafka worked most days of his adult life as a lawyer in the insurance industry, and this in an age when what a lawyer did more than anything else was write: intra-office correspondence, reports, and official briefs. The only time Kafka wasn’t working, the only time he wasn’t writing for the workplace, he was on-leave, recovering from various ailments, including the tuberculosis that eventually killed him in 1924, at the age of 40. Those leaves—spent both in sanatoria and at home, where he lived with his parents—were also intended as opportunities for Kafka to labor on his fiction, especially on his novels, but paradoxically, or inevitably, most of those occasions were squandered, or uninspired, and Kafka would return to the office, and so to his office writing, not refreshed, but disappointed anew.

A selection of Kafka’s office writings has just been translated for the first time into English, and published by Princeton University Press as Office Writings, appended with the obligatory commentaries, charts, prefaces, and postfaces, by a triumvirate of scholars: two professional Kafkans, Stanley Corngold, and Benno Wagner, accompanied by Jack Greenberg, a law professor and civil rights attorney famed for his work in the desegregation case of Brown v. Board of Education, whose Supreme Court ruling overturned the Kafkaesque logic of “separate but equal” in American schools.

This event—finally, the translation and publication of the last known scrap of Kafka’s work left untranslated, and unpublished—brings us to the subject of this series: how Kafka’s office writings influenced his fiction, and what that influence means. Kafka’s office writings, as presented here, cannot be read on their own (they are incomprehensibly boring) but, instead, must be read as companions, to demystify the three novels and stories (which are anything but boring). Taken together, though, both workaday fact and masterwork fiction create a network of connections that exposes not just the concerns of a single writer, but also that of a singular culture—the culture of the Office, which has imposed itself on what used to be our lives.

The four sections that follow, to be published over the next four days, proceed chronologically. On Tuesday, we’ll post Before Kafka, in which we’ll explore Kafka’s antecedents, and the societal girders and politics that were behind his workplace life. On Wednesday, in Kafka, we’ll read about the man himself, about his particular workplace, while addressing the office writings directly. On Thursday, in After Kafka, we’ll read about the culture of the workplace that burgeoned in the years after Kafka’s death, and examine parallels between Kafka’s bureaucracy, and that of the Third Reich. Then on Friday, we’ll conclude amid the pessimistic future of Office Life—and, exhausted, we’ll rest.

Jacques Derrida

The news of his death two weeks ago came as a shock. (“Abstruse Theorist Dies in Paris at 74,” read The New York Times, a front page headline unlikely to be repeated soon.) Derrida, who taught us that all binary oppositions were fallacies (spelling the word with a “ph” to stress its link to Western, phallogocentric thinking); that each opposing pair of ideas, when examined closely enough, contained the seeds of its own undoing; Derrida—whose writings were alive with traces and haunted with ghosts, who was “always already” (“toujours, déjà“) confounding the march of time itself—could he possibly, definitively, pass to the other side?

My second feeling was one of regret, for I was never a good enough student, and I had held myself apart from the orthodoxies surrounding him. Derrida’s lecture style (the primary means by which I came to know his work) was unlike any other, betraying a machine of thought so powerfully regulated according to its own logic that it seemed to me his students had but two choices—to acquiesce (i.e., to mimic his themes), or to stand outside and ponder. I opted for the latter, yet hearing the news of his death, I felt a lingering nostalgia for the family I belonged to but could never bring myself to join.

Derrida’s Jewishness was not something he wore on his finely cut sleeve in those days; for us, I’d say, it was part of his general Otherness, at one with his Continental savoir faire and the jarring impact of his thought. (Philosophers with a sense of style were rare in Puritan New England.) Jewish writers and thinkers such as Spinoza, Kafka, and Levinas were certainly stars in his intellectual firmament. But this was before he’d published his study of the poet Paul Celan (Shibboleth: For Paul Celan, 1986), who survived a Nazi forced labor camp and wrote of the Shoah in German. Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, the poet’s widow, an artist and my friend, told me in Paris when the book came out that she’d found it “too much Derrida.” If true, was that a failing or the mark of a great intellect? It seemed that everything he touched he transformed into himself.

It was also before he’d published Circonfession. Written in collaboration with Geoffrey Bennington, this anti-memoir of sorts is an extended meditation on the philosophical and linguistic implications of his own circumcision. We learn that his Hebrew name was Elie; that his Algerian-Jewish mother interrupted a hand of poker (a game she passionately loved) in order to give birth to him; that in his acculturated Sephardic family, they called Bar Mitzvahs “communions,” etc.

Several pages from Circonfession are inserted into the middle of author Hélène Cixous‘ curious tribute, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint (2004), which finds traces of Derrida’s assimilated Franco-Algerian Jewishness—roots that Cixous shares, she tells us, apart from the circumcision—manifested in his writing. Acolytes may find this volume fascinating, like listening in on a conversation between two lovers, and others barely readable.

A far more user-friendly introduction to the man and his work is Derrida (2002), the documentary directed by Amy Ziering Kofman (a fellow student whom I knew in graduate school) and Kirby Dick, which returned to Manhattan’s Film Forum for a five-day, posthumous homage and is available on DVD. My affection for this film stems partly from its great charm and the elegance of its citations, and partly from the seriousness with which both its makers and subject approach an impossible project—a biographical essay that questions every naturalistic premise of both biography and documentary.

In it, Derrida speaks of experiencing anti-Semitism in wartime Algeria, then under the sway of the Vichy government. At the age of ten, he was expelled from school along with other Jewish students and teachers. The Jewish community formed new schools for its children; he attended, but felt ill at ease in that closed world, remaining doubly an outsider.

The documentary passes over in silence the scandal that erupted in 1987 at the revelation of anti-Semitic articles published by the late Paul de Man, a noted teacher and Derrida’s close colleague at Yale, when he was a young man in wartime Belgium—the repressed of history returning with a vengeance to wreak havoc on Deconstruction’s reputation.

The last time I saw Jacques Derrida was following a lecture at New York University, where he was a visiting professor in the 1990s. He greeted me with the warmth and delicacy that marked his relationships with former students. By then, I was no longer teaching; he seemed surprised. “So you’ve left the academy,” he said. “I’m not sure if I’ve left it, or if it’s left me,” I replied. “Ah,” he said with empathy, “in divorces, it’s always like that.”

The New York Times continues to report on the consequences of Derrida’s demise; another recent article announced the parallel death of Theory. His words from Violence and Metaphysics (1963), quoted in his film portrait, may make a fitting rejoinder.

That philosophy died yesterday, since Hegel or Marx, Nietzsche or Heidegger, and that philosophy should still wander toward the meaning of its death; or that it has always lived knowing itself to be dying; that philosophy died one day within history, or that it has always fed on its own agony, on the violent way it opens history by opposing itself to non-philosophy, which is its past and its concern, its debt and wellspring; that beyond the dead or dying nature of philosophy, or perhaps even because of it, thought still has a future…these are problems put to philosophy as problems philosophy cannot resolve.

Antonio Muñoz Molina

How do you explain your interest in the history of Jews in Spain?

A writer doesn’t write about just anything. He writes about things he has an affinity for. For some reason, I feel that affinity. Don’t ask why. Well, there is a historic reason. There was an extraordinary community that was unjustly expelled. And the disappearance of that community was a tragedy for culture and life and Spain. Because immediately after came the limpieza de sangre of strict Catholicism. Many like me are victims of this strict Catholicism. This rebellion against Catholic orthodoxy lets you feel close to those who have been excluded by the same orthodoxy.

You spent many years collecting the stories that appeared in Sepharad.

For a long time, I was interested almost obsessively in this kind of story: of Primo Levi, Jean Améry, this kind of writer. One story led to another. In Spain there was not a lot of information about this.

About the Holocaust? Both Levi and Améry recounted their experiences at Auschwitz.

About the great tragedies of the 20th century. Spain was very isolated politically, and the Civil War isolated it more. So this consciousness that you find in France or the United States—or, of course, in Germany—about these things is very vague here. Many of the books I read, I had to read them in French, English, or Italian, because they hadn’t been translated into Spanish. I discovered the diaries of Victor Klemperer when they were translated into English, and they had a great impact on me. Later, I started to write a story based on the story that a woman had told me in Copenhagen.

The woman in the book with the intriguing name, Camille Pedersen-Safra?

That’s not her real name, but I had it in my head a long time to write about her. It was very novelistic: the girl who returns to France with her mother after the war, they get locked in a hotel room, and it turns out to have been the Gestapo’s room. Why can’t they open that door? It’s almost like a story by Henry James. And when I was writing, I remembered another story I had heard in Tangiers many years before.

About the Sephardic man from Budapest who escaped with his son to Morocco after the Spanish consul in Hungary gave them citizenship papers.

Yes. And I thought, there was a clear relation between the two things. So I thought of the word Sepharad—that is the name of Spain.

Because these people were Sephardic?

And because they were people in exile, people who were lost in the world. I had also read a lot about the Spanish Jews. I thought that what they had in common, apart from ethnicity and religion, was the experience of loss and exile. And somehow, many stories I had read before came together. I didn’t really have to invent anything. I found the connection between Milena Jesenska, who knew Margarete Buber-Neumann, and Willi Münzenberg, who was married to Margarete Buber-Neumann’s sister. It seemed like the book was writing itself. All the documentation that I had been acquiring suddenly had meaning. I had been preparing to write a book without knowing it.

You talk about how Münzenberg, Buber-Neumann, and several other characters were respected Communists who fell from grace with the Party and suddenly found themselves in a terrifying limbo. How far can you push Sepharad as a metaphor?

It functions in a number of ways. It functions in a literal manner, because Sepharad is a concrete thing: The persecution and expulsion of the Jews from Spain is something historically concrete. And it functions as a metaphor of destruction, expulsion, or loss. As the place one wants to come back to.

The Sephardic longing for Sepharad is quite different from the nostalgia most Ashkenazis might feel for Eastern Europe.

Recently, I was in Paris to receive a literary prize from a center for Jewish studies at the Sorbonne, the Centre Alberto Benveniste. It was amazing how people there spoke an antique Spanish, and the tenderness with which they spoke of Spain. And these people have never lived in Spain. This is the paradox: Those who left preserved what those who remained lost. Spain has been very cruel to democrats, to progressives. So many of them, the best, had to go. Not only in the 15th century when the Jews left, but in the 19th century, in the 20th. I am a grandchild of the generation of García Lorca, of the great writers of the Civil War era. These artists are like the new Sephardim in the sense that they have been expelled from their country. And they have preserved the best of Spanish culture. The Spanish culture that remained after the war, during Franco’s dictatorship, was repulsive.

Aren’t you reducing the idea of Sepharad to a sophisticated culture of exile?

I’m saying that there is a metaphorical parallelism, not an identification. And a kind of historical continuity. I know perfectly that you can’t compare the culture of a person of the 15th century to one from the 20th. But I do know that when the Jews were expelled from Spain in the 15th century and later from Portugal, Spain lost a fundamental thing. This loss led it to obscurantism, to the loss of what is called diversity. In the 20th century, a similar thing happens.

How was the book received?

The reviewers thought it was well-written, a different kind of book, and so on. I didn’t find they established a real dialogue about the deeper meaning. The French reviewers have been much more accurate because they are far more familiar with those issues. In Spain, as elsewhere in Western Europe, there is often a strange kind of anti-Semitism, from many people apparently of the left. And I consider myself of the left. It’s not presented as anti-Semitism, but as opposition to the state of Israel. Often, people who have read my book say, “Why didn’t you write about the Palestinians?”

Aside from the question of Israel, how do you see the image of Jews in Spain today?

It is confused and vague. A neighbor of mine said to me, “What do you know about this? Are the Jews good or bad?” And I said, “There are good ones and bad ones.”

Well, they hardly know Jews in Spain.

Of course. Because there isn’t a real presence. There are only ghosts.

In Sepharad, you often ask direct questions: “What would it be like to arrive at a German or Polish station in a cattle car?”; “What would you do if you knew that at any moment they could come for you?” Are these directed at a Spanish audience that has never considered these questions?

No, they are directed at any reader. There are many examples in history and the present of people to whom this has happened. It happened in Yugoslavia in the nineties; it happened in Uganda; in Argentina in the seventies. In my book there is a story of a woman, granddaughter of a German Jew who lived in Uruguay and then Argentina. And she had to go into exile again. Here in Spain, there are Argentine Jews, children and grandchildren of immigrants of Jews who fled Germany or Austria in the thirties and in the seventies during the dictatorship, they had to go into exile again.

How faithful is the book to your sources? Is there really a house with Stars of David carved on the lintel in your hometown, Ubeda?

There are two types of stories: public and private. The public ones are totally faithful. I didn’t invent anything about Primo Levi or Willi Münzenberg. The house in my native town exists. But yes, I invented things about private people. I didn’t literally recount the story of the woman from Copenhagen or the man from Tangiers.

When I read that the Hungarian family had the key to their ancestral home in Toledo, I also wondered if you had invented that part. Many people make such claims, but they’re often apocryphal.

That’s what the man told me. But I never saw the key.