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

Hardcover. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth with gilt lettering on spine, 266 pages. Ex-lib with a small stamp to title page and top edge, label on spine. Otherwise a clean, bright copy. After Franz Kafka died in 1924, his novels and short stories were published in ways that downplayed both their author's 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. Kafka's Jewish Languages brings Kafka's stature as a specifically Jewish writer into focus. David Suchoff explores the Yiddish and modern Hebrew that inspired Kafka's vision of tradition. Citing the Jewish sources crucial to the development of Kafka's style, the book demonstrates the intimate relationship between the author's Jewish modes of expression and the larger literary significance of his works. No dust jacket.