Tag: Franz Kafka

Kafka, Sholom Aleichem, Peretz

In this respect Sholom Aleichem and Peretz are more like Kafka  than any of the three are like most modern writers. The Yiddish masters are largely unconcerned with the psychology of individual difference;   Kafka…

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,…

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: 1918-1922Edited 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 highlight…

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…