Kafka`s Jewish Languages: The Hidden Openness of Tradition, David Suchoff

After Franz Kafka died in 1924, his novels and short stories were published in ways that downplayed both their authors roots in Prague and his engagement with Jewish tradition and language, so as to secure their place in the German literary canon. Now, nearly a century after Kafka began to create his fictions, Germany, Israel, and the Czech Republic lay claim to his legacy. Kafkas Jewish Languages brings Kafkas stature as a specifically Jewish writer into focus.
David Suchoff explores the Yiddish and modern Hebrew that inspired Kafkas vision of tradition. Citing the Jewish sources crucial to the development of Kafkas style, the book demonstrates the intimate relationship between the authors Jewish modes of expression and the larger literary significance of his works. Suchoff shows how The Judgment evokes Yiddish as a language of comic curse and examines how Yiddish, African American, and culturally Zionist voices appear in the unfinished novel, Amerika. In his reading of The Trial, Suchoff highlights the black humor Kafka learned from the Yiddish theater, and he interprets The Castle in light of Kafkas involvement with the renewal of the Hebrew language. Finally, he uncovers the Yiddish and Hebrew meanings behind Kafkas Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse-Folk and considers the recent legal case in Tel Aviv over the possession of Kafkas missing manuscripts as a parable of the transnational meanings of his writing.