This morning I read a Kafka letter from 1923, a year before he died, in which he apologized to his good friend Oskar Baum for missing his son’s bar mitzvah because he did not realize it was on a Saturday. "Only yesterday I learned–and should have known all my life… that the ceremony can only take place on a Saturday." Kafka had been bar mitzvahed himself, 27 years before, but he had obviously never set foot in a synagogue in years.
The misunderstanding demonstrates how different Jewish identity was in Europe then from what it is today. No one would ever deny that Kafka was Jewish. He was as Jewish as they come. Almost all his friends were Jewish, he read Jewish publications, he spoke of being Jewish constantly as the central condition of his social/political and even economic existence. It is true that his uncle was a Catholic convert and one of his great loves, Milena Jesenska, was a Catholic. But conversion held no temptation to him.
In his ultra-sensitive way, Kafka saw that Jews were bringing Europe into modernity and that Europe was reacting to it.
But if gentiles were suspended in pre modern anti-Semitism, the Jews were also suspended, between traditional religious practices and modernity. The idea that identity is fluid–the idea in Obama's first book about his changing sense of blackness–was an idea that Kafka understood. Here is his unforgettable portrait (from another letter in 1921) of a neighbor at one of the sanatoriums he virtually lived in during the three years before his death:
[U]nder my balcony, his face turned toward me, a young half-pious Hungarian Jew lies in his reclining chair, comfortably outstretched with one hand over his head, the other thrust deep into his fly, and all day long cheerfully keeps on humming temple melodies. (What a people!)
That says it all. You can see in the half-pious Hungarian the American Jewish performers, Philip Roth, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce.
I find the Kafka statements liberating. They remind me that there is hardly one way to be Jewish. Here is one of the greatest Jewish writers at the height of anti-Semitism, and he is in love with a Catholic woman and has no idea when bar mitzvahs take place.
Today no Jew would not know that a bar mitzvah takes place on Saturday. And neither would the gentiles in New York. The privileged gentiles all go to bar mitzvahs all the time. It is a big part of elite New York childhood.
And meanwhile the precarious modern suspension of Jews that Kafka experienced has been resolved. Jews are no longer suspended. We are firmly in the cities. In 1922 he called Prague and Berlin the “medicines” for the sick European Jew. In the cities there was the civilization that Jews had made and craved; and how frightening his statement is when you realize that ten and 20 years on those cities would be overrun by the Nazis. They would have the same view of the cities, as medicines for the sick Jews, and they would have their own cure.
It is odd to think that the most enduring aspect of Kafka’s Jewish identity is his Zionism. He dreamed of Palestine constantly. He never actually took the step of moving there, but it was an important dream to him of Jewish wholeness. He marveled at the farmers and mechanics of Palestine, he subscribed to Zionist periodicals and was close to their editors. The Neue Freie Presse—Herzl’s Austrian newspaper—was often on his desk. He met several of his girlfriends through Zionist conclaves. He studied Hebrew, presumably so he could speak when he went to Palestine. His closest friend, Max Brod, was an ardent Zionist. Kafka was dismayed when people he was close to were anti-Zionist.
Spiritually, Kafka was a Zionist. And today Jewish identity is concentrated around that feature of Jewish existence, a place that most American Jews have never been to. At least in Kafka’s case it was a real fantasy; it drew on the real terrible facts of European life.
The lesson of Kafka’s bar mitzvah story is the lesson of Obama's book on his changing black identity–group identity is extremely fluid. The group can reshape it as necessary to suit its needs. But it is always the group’s needs. Today the group maintains its cohesiveness by proclaiming Jewish religiosity and Jewish adherence to Palestine. Because it has lost the central element of cohesion that existed in Kafka’s time, anti-Semitism. That tragedy is available to us now, on Holocaust remembrance day, only as a narrative. It doesn’t describe our lives. We are not sick, we are strong.
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The family name Kafka indicates that Franz was almost certainly a descendant of Czech Hussite converts.
A bar mitzvah celebration could be held in conjunction with any Jewish service in which there is a Torah reading, to wit, Sabbath morning, Sabbath afternoon, Monday morning, Thursday morning, Rosh Hodesh morning.
In theory a Bar Mitzvah celebration could be held in conjunction with a holiday Torah reading, but I do not know of such a case.
RE: "Kafka didn't know that bar mitzvahs took place on Saturday"
MY COMMENT: A very interesting and thoughtful post!
Today no Jew would not know that a bar mitzvah takes place on Saturday.
Well–I had no idea that Bar Mitzvahs occur as a rule on saturdays and plan to promptly forget the fact, as it is of zero consequence for me.
Further, I'm uncomfortable with this constant preoccupation with Kafka's Jewishness. It's there, it plays a role, but you don't hear people going on ad nauseam about how the architecture in Prague influenced Kafka, (though one can be pretty sure it did). I suspect that what we are really talking about is OUR jewishness, and how we're like Kafka and have a spiritual bond with Kafka and are mystically linked with Kafka. It's a form of self-flattery. That's because Jews are unwilling to look at the truth, which is that most Jews have far more in common with Bernie Madoff than they do with Franz Kafka, an utterly unique, in so many respects, inscrutable figure. I feel it's a reduction of Kafka to harp on his Jewishness. He's so much LARGER than that. The same is true of any great artist. We'd never mistake Shostakovich for anything but Russian. But at the end of the day, so what? He transcended his Russianness to become Shostakovich, just as Kafka transcended the terms of his existence, his dreary legal paperwork, his stultifying Jewishness home life, to become Kafka.
Imagine what would be lost to the world if it judged all Jews by the Zionists, and consequently demanded they be put in a social straight jacket and stomped on at every opportunity in order to disable their latent Judeofascism.
Wait a minute: that's what Jews have done to Euro-Christian identity and Western civilization! But I guess from the ethnocentric Jewish perspective, Western civilization has never produced someone so esteemed as Kafka, so it's really no big deal.
Of course, Jews haven't been the only ones stomping Western civilization. Jewish Bolsheviks and Stalinist Communists really got the ball rolling, and left-liberals enthusiastically joined in, all before the Holocaust, not just since. So I wonder what motivates their hatred? Could it possibly be arrested development and jealousy? No…that's what motivates gentile hatred of Jews, never vice-versa.
ed. Jews have brought a lot of non-Jewish literature to the eyes and ears of the world, as translators, critics, etc. What you're saying is just nonsense. Nor can you escape the fact that The Enlightenment and the values espoused in the Enlightenment are left-liberal values, without which we'd remain in the subterranean world the Christian persecutors of thought and reason have ever sought to keep us in.
It is true that many Jews are particularly tribal and this carries over into their reading habits. They want me to believe that as a Jew, I ought to have a far greater affinity for Franz Kafka than for Fernando Pessoa. That, of course, is absurd.
You don’t get it rykart. Weiss, is toying with the idea of calling for the end of Israel, which is increasingly the Leftist position. But he wants to be able to do it while still plausibly maintaining that the essence and spirit of Judaism will be kept alive in guys like Kafka (and himself). Yet you’re screwing things up by arguing that Kafka wasn’t really even Jewish. Get with the left-wing program, punk. You want Israel gone too, right?
Me, I guess I’m an just an old fashioned multi-culturalist libertarian who wants to see Christianity survive, Judaism survive, Islam survive…but not all rendered together by the State Combine and turned into sausage. But that makes me a heretic in the “post-tribal” world of State-enforced “progressivism” (read: Communism).
Re "the Christian persecutors of thought and reason":
Ever hear of a little thing called the Reformation? The Enlightenment was just another example of Christianity splitting off from itself and reforming, that time in a secular incarnation. It has gone through the same process thousands of times in thousands of different ways, which is why there are so many Christian denominations and Christian-ethos based groups, hospitals, charities, institutions…many of them even secular.
Only dogmatic Communists profess to believe that the Enlightenment was a final repudiation of Christianity. You're just repeating old Communist tropes, whether you know it or not.
I enjoy your posts, ed. They're so giddily convoluted, I get a sort of contact high from reading them.
Luigo Nono was a communist.
Awesome composer. Way better than anything America has ever come up with. Walter Benjamin was a devoted Marxist. It's as silly to cast out great communist thinkers because of Stalin and the Soviet state as it is to cast out great Jewish thinkers because of some imbecile like Judge Judy.
"You're just repeating old Communist tropes, whether you know it or not"
Ed
And you, Ed, just keep on repeating the old Birch society anti-Semitic tropes and I'm sure you do know it. I expect you to inveigh against "secular humanists" any time now.
"You can see in the half-pious Hungarian the American Jewish performers, Philip Roth, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce."
The fact that you did not find, for any reason, it necessary to include yourself in that list is very telling.
I feel it's a reduction of Kafka to harp on his Jewishness. He's so much LARGER than that. The same is true of any great artist.
thank you, rykart
"And you, Ed, just keep on repeating the old Birch society anti-Semitic tropes"
C'mon Mooser, admit it. Here you're just repeating Rowan Berkely's Mondoweiss tropes.
@ rykart,
I never said all Communists are stupid or untalented. But they simply have no idea what it takes to hold a country or a civilization together (let alone the entire world). And neither do left-liberals. Hell, they can hardly keep together their own co-ops.
Ed, perhaps prosperity of co-ops is regional. Many are successful in California, some are even booming.
Ed, your ignorance in incredible.
Incredible….
Ed: Me, I guess I’m an just an old fashioned multi-culturalist libertarian who wants to see Christianity survive, Judaism survive, Islam survive…but not all rendered together by the State Combine and turned into sausage. But that makes me a heretic in the “post-tribal” world of State-enforced “progressivism” (read: Communism).
Very well put, Ed.
There's nothing new under the sun. The competing secular movement to Zionism that arose in the late 19th century was the Yiddish Bund. Unfortunately, the Bundists in Europe were mostly wiped out by the Nazis, and with them the Yiddish language and culture were lost.
Kafka, from what we know, identified more with the Zionists.
the reason we have kafka so prominent and not other equally good or even better writers is that kafka was a jew.
jewish professors glut their classes with works of jewish writers.
Wow "5 dancing shlomos", I bet that's what the Nazis were saying as they burned Kafka's books!
"Unfortunately, the Bundists in Europe were mostly wiped out by the Nazis, and with them the Yiddish language and culture were lost."
Hell no, not by a long shot! Yiddish culture flourished, and reached new heights in America. Newspapers, theater, magazines.
Me, I just kick myself every day that I didn't hang on my cousin Helen's every Yiddish word. And since my Mom always dropped into Yiddish when she discussed any "adult" matters on the phone, I reached the age of consent never really knowing just what I was supposed to consent to. Oh, well.
Od course many Americans, like Bobby Hill, think Yinglish was spawned in the hot dry deserts of Arizona. What can you do?
Only this- go to:
http://www.pass.to/glossary/Default.htm
and try to make up for lost years. And try to keep your hands out of your fly, I guess.
"Here you're just repeating Rowan Berkely's…"
Eddy, old pal, if you think I ever, ever read any more than the first couple of sentences of the first Rowan Berkely comment I ever saw, and then never read his comments again, you are sadly mistaken, or are trying to be purposely insulting.
And Ed, I like your tropes. They bring me back to the fifties and the early sixties, make me feel young again.
But please, don't let me bother you. Holding the "whole world together" is a big job, and I wouldn't want to distract you. I might mongrelise the culture or something like that.
Mooser, the very fact that neither you nor the majority of American Jews speak Yiddish today is testament to the fact that it is gone – a dead language – except amongst the ultra-orthadox.
The culture is also dying. Even the food is going the way of Yiddish. And the Jewish comedians are disappearing. The only thing left in America is the religion – which is why "Bundists" like you, Phil and Rykart have become so obsessed with Israel.
"Once again the Jewish people are at a terrible crossroad. Because of Israel. Because of Israel and the way that Israel endangers us all. … The majority of Jews don't choose Israel. … I repeat: Israel only endangers everyone. … Pollard is just another Jewish victim of the existence of Israel because Pollard enacted no more, really, than the Israelis demand of Diaspora Jews all the time. I don't hold Pollard responsible, I hold Israel responsible Israel, which with its all-embracing Jewish totalism has replaced the goyim as the greatest intimidator of Jews in the world; Israel, which today, with its hunger for Jews, is, in many, many terrible ways, deforming and disfiguring Jews as only our anti-Semitic enemies once had the power to do."
—philip roth
phil–you said a mouthful!
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