Searching
It was in Kafka that Scholem discovered a kind of heretical, secular Kabbalah, a literature paradoxically at once canonical and nihilistic. With Max Brod and Walter Benjamin, Scholem saw in Kafka a deeply Jewish writer,…
Tag: Franz Kafka
Reading Jewish
In 1994, I purchased Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, and would peruse it from time to time, and pick a book off of Bloom’s four lists. He got me back to Shakespeare and sparked…
Harvard Joke about Jesus
“A fine teacher, but didn’t publish.” –Quoted by George Steiner, in Lessons of the Masters, p. 33. Steiner observes, “A cardinal definition of genius points, I believe, to the capacity to originate myths, to devise…
The Patron Saint of All Outsiders
This French version of Kafka, this cross between Pascal and Orwell remains unclassifiable. She is intellectually stateless, prophet without any country in which she can be sure of honor. A Catholic Jewess who criticized impeccably…
State of Emergency, January 2003
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and ReflectionsEdited by Hannah ArendtSchocken Books, 1988 The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that “the state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We…
A Thousand Letters Behind
Marcel Proust, Selected Letters, volume 4: 1918-1922 Edited by Philip Kolb, translated and with an introduction for Joanna Kilmartin Months ago, I read volume 4 of Proust’s selected letters translated into English. As the Buddhists…
She Should Have Won the National Book Award
But then I think What do these awards mean They gotta serve somebody I’ve checked the libraries It’s her only book On this—or any— subject Why should the luminaries and guardians honor her Which is…
Authors for Reading Alongside Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading…
Kafka
I am looking, as I write of Kafka, at the photograph taken of him at the age of forty (my age)—it is 1924, as sweet and hopeful a year as he may ever have known…
Appreciating Kafka
The marvelous thing is that the bareness brought him not to self-denial or self-hatred but rather to a kind of tense curiosity about every Jewish phenomenon, especially the Jews of Eastern Europe, the Yiddish language,…