Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

The series of little books, "Jewish Lives," would have interested Kafka. Although he preferred autobiographies, letter collections, and journals—lives [End Page 148] from the pen of those who lived them—it was a keen pleasure and a somewhat urgent need for him, throughout his life, to vacation in the lives of others. He reread and recommended to family and friends life-writing by Dostoyevsky, the proto-feminist and socialist Lily Braun, Salomon Maimon, and many others. At one point he developed a little theory of the effect of this type of "life-reading." One reads these things not in order to confirm one's convictions, not in order to find kindred spirits or to discover how a genius became what he is. One does it for what happens afterwards, "when, by closing the book, one is brought back to oneself again after this excursion and this rest and recuperation, one feels healthy again in one's newly discovered, newly shaken-up very own being, after beholding it for a mere instant from a distance, and which now stays at home, but with a freer head." Estrange yourself in another and you will open a space beyond yourself in your self.

Saul Friedländer's latest addition to the "Jewish Lives" series does not hold back from analyzing the truly strange vacation one takes in Kafka's life. I say it analyzes, and this mode has the effect of both showcasing its strangeness and in certain ways taming it. The book is a perfect introduction to Kafka's relationships with women, with his father, with Jews, Jewishnesses, and Judaistic religions. It should become the first place students in college courses or the general public get an immediate sense of how Kafka is being read by scholars now. The old categories—death, fear, God, sin—and the somewhat newer ones—language, law, power, authority—are gone, or almost. In their place is a Kafka for the present day, caught in a net of ambivalences toward ethnic, gender, political, and aesthetic denominations.

The new categories—Prague, Sons and Fathers, Jewishness, Sex, Writing, and Meaning—leave room for many of the complexities and indeed paradoxes of Kafka's positions. Friedländer does not let a single contrary fact go unremarked. He shows how complicated it was to call yourself "Jew" in Prague at this time, but he never tries to name once and for all Kafka's position vis-à-vis Jewishness in all its modalities—Zionist, eastern European, religious, secular, assimilated, cultural Zionist, anti-Zionist, and the list goes on. In effect Kafka is the perfect expression of the crisis and the real opening in the concept, insofar as he refuses to commit to any one of the modalities. Things are a bit less open in the chapter on "The Son." Friedländer acknowledges the historical schism that separated Jewish sons from their fathers. Kafka's father had to forge a career by compromising [End Page 149] on Jewishness, while Kafka, with a college education and a job working for the state, could afford, like some of his writer and artist friends, to reassess how Jewish he could and wanted to be. Regarding his attitude toward his father, a rather moralistic tone creeps in. "On occasion, indeed, Franz's complaints are literally hard to comprehend" (26). The father is normal, the son abnormal. Friedländer attributes the complaints about his father ultimately to an oedipal struggle (32). The early stories "The Judgment" and "The Metamorphosis" he sees as representation of it. But in fact the stories do not fit this Freudian mold. In neither is the son a rival for the mother's affections; in this regard, and perhaps only in this regard, Deleuze and Guattari were right. What they call anti-oedipal, and I would call non-oedipal, is more explanatory. In any case, these stories have little or nothing to do with the inner workings of the psyche.

Even if...