In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Kafka After Kafka: Dialogical Engagement with His Works from the Holocaust to Postmodernism ed. by Iris Bruce and Mark H. Gelber
  • Abigail Gillman
Iris Bruce and Mark H. Gelber, eds., Kafka After Kafka: Dialogical Engagement with His Works fr om the Holocaust to Postmodernism. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Rochester: Camden House, 2019. 231 pp.

Kafka After Kafka contains eleven remarkably productive and thoughtful essays by a mix of well-known and younger Kafka scholars. The introduction opens by cataloguing the global artistic reception of Kafka, from the Japanese Kōbō Abe, to South Africa's Achmat Dangor, to dramatic works by Alan Bennett (Kafka's Dick) and Sally Clark (The Trial of Judith K.). The editors claim that much recent art inspired by Kafka is about "violence and humiliation" at the expense of the "modest, elegant, playful, ironic Kafka of real life" (3). Not so in these pages, where the "dialogical engagement" promised in the title prevails. The chapters open up fruitful new connections and perspectives, which yield original interpretations of works we thought we already knew. The volume began as a conference at Ben-Gurion University, and the section devoted to "Kafka in the Israeli Cultural Space"—an exciting new avenue of Kafka research—is a highlight. Like all the excellent volumes in this Camden House series, the book is carefully researched and well ommitted, with detailed footnotes and an index.

A strength of the collection is the authors' recounting of postwar cultural and intellectual history. Caroline Jessen's essay on Werner Kraft's 1968 Franz Kafka: Durchdringung und Geheimnis recounts the career of this German Jewish man of letters. Like Scholem and Benjamin (whom he knew), Kraft viewed Kafka as a writer of parables, and so he sought to "wrest Kafka away from literature." Jessen calls the book "an itinerary of reading" (19) that takes the form of "interweaving of literary text and commentary" (20)—a style evocative of rabbinical writing but also of great works of retrieval motivated by loss, such as Benjamin's Passagenwerk. Amir Engel analyzes Hannah Arendt's lesser-known Kafka essay ("Franz Kafka: A Revaluation," in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954)—one of the first she published in German after World War II. Arendt finds in Kafka a source of optimism: Even as The Trial and The Castle depict totalitarian societies, worlds of "made-up necessity," the two protagonists are "truth-tellers," who resist simply by asserting their humanity. [End Page 133]

Two chapters make critical contributions to Kafka's contemporary reception in Israel. As an Israeli Arab writer, journalist, and television writer who writes in Hebrew (now living in the United States), Sayed Kashua is the quintessential insider/outsider. As Iris Bruce demonstrates, Kashua incorporates many of Kafka's themes, both in the novel Second Person Singular (the basis of the film A Borrowed Identity) and in "Herzl Disappears at Midnight," which features an Arab-Israeli, Gregor Samsa. Bruce proposes, "Kashua's postmodern metamorphoses are fluid, predictable, humorous, and ultimately have a didactic function" (126). Mark H. Gelber offers a new perspective on the trial to determine the fate of newly discovered Max Brod's Nachlass. Moving beyond the question of whether the Israeli Supreme Court's decision to award the collection to the Israeli National Library is just, Gelber wonders whether there is also "poetic justice" in retaining Kafka's manuscripts in the Jewish State rather than in Marbach. The question becomes an occasion to reassess Kafka's Zionism or, more exactly, the numerous aspects of Zionism with which Kafka did connect.

Two chapters break new ground by opening up Kafka's influence on lyric poetry. Poet Tali Latowicki examines the Kafkan sensibilities of two challenging Hebrew poets, the modernist Ya'akov Steinberg and the postmodern Hezy Leskly, neither of whom is well known in translation. In this series of powerful close readings, Latowicki finds that the three writers "share the same suspicion toward 'natural' symbolic expression. They also share the same wish [ … ] to create an antilanguage, a language that is united with the concrete. As part of this utopian project, the writer himself must undergo a metamorphosis of some sort. He has to die in...

pdf