Kafka and the Yiddish Theater PDF Download

Author: Evelyn Torton Beck
Publisher: Madison : University of Wisconsin Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Author: David Suchoff
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812205243
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
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. Suchoff shows how "The Judgment" evokes Yiddish as a language of comic curse and examines how Yiddish, African American, and culturally Zionist voices appear in the unfinished novel, Amerika. In his reading of The Trial, Suchoff highlights the black humor Kafka learned from the Yiddish theater, and he interprets The Castle in light of Kafka's involvement with the renewal of the Hebrew language. Finally, he uncovers the Yiddish and Hebrew meanings behind Kafka's "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse-Folk" and considers the recent legal case in Tel Aviv over the possession of Kafka's missing manuscripts as a parable of the transnational meanings of his writing.

Author: Nahma Sandrow
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815603290
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Proceedings of a May 1994 symposium held to present cutting edge multidisciplinary work on the characterization of ancient materials; the technologies of selection, production, and usage by which materials are transformed into the objects and artifacts we find today; the science underlying their deterioration, preservation, and conservation; and sociocultural interpretation derived from an empirical methodology of observation, measurement, and experimentation. Over 70 contributions discuss topics that include the visual appearance and the imitation of one material by another; stable protective coatings and materials stability; resource surveying, source characterization, and cultural implications; and process reconstruction as essential to understanding of condition and conservation. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Author: Iris Bruce
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299221904
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Author: Sander Gilman
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1134715617
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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This is the first book about Kafka that uses the writer's medical records. Gillman explores the relation of the body to cultural myths, and brings a unique and fascinating perspective to Kafka's life and writings.

Author: Vivian Liska
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253353084
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Taking as its starting point Franz Kafka's complex relationship to Jews and to communities in general, When Kafka Says We explores the ambivalent responses of major German-Jewish writers to self-enclosed social, religious, ethnic, and ideological groups. Vivian Liska shows that, for Kafka and others, this ambivalence inspired innovative modes of writing which, while unmasking the oppressive cohesion of communal groupings, also configured original and uncommon communities. Interlinked close readings of works by German-Jewish writers such as Kafka, Else Lasker-Schüler, Nelly Sachs, Paul Celan, Ilse Aichinger, and Robert Schindel illuminate the ways in which literature can subvert, extend, or reconfigure established visions of communities. Liska's rich and astute analysis uncovers provocative attitudes and insights on a subject of continuing controversy.

Author: David Pinski
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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CONTENTS.- D. Pinski: Abigail, Forgotten souls.- S.J. Rabinowitsch: She must marry a doctor.- S. Ash: Winter, The sinner.- P. Hirschbein: In the dark.

Author: Alyssa Quint
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253038626
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Jewish Book Award Finalist: “Turns the fascinating life of Avrom Goldfaden into a multi-dimensional history of the Yiddish theater’s formative years.” —Jeffery Veidinger, author of Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire In this book, Alyssa Quint focuses on the early years of the modern Yiddish theater, from roughly 1876 to 1883, through the works of one of its best-known and most colorful figures, Avrom Goldfaden. Goldfaden (né Goldenfaden, 1840-1908) was one of the first playwrights to stage a commercially viable Yiddish-language theater, first in Romania and then in Russia. Goldfaden’s work was rapidly disseminated in print and his plays were performed frequently for Jewish audiences. Sholem Aleichem considered him as a forger of a new language that “breathed the European spirit into our old jargon.” Quint uses Goldfaden’s theatrical works as a way to understand the social life of Jewish theater in Imperial Russia. Through a study of his libretti, she looks at the experiences of Russian Jewish actors, male and female, to explore connections between culture as artistic production and culture in the sense of broader social structures. Quint explores how Jewish actors who played Goldfaden’s work on stage absorbed the theater into their everyday lives. Goldfaden’s theater gives a rich view into the conduct, ideology, religion, and politics of Jews during an important moment in the history of late Imperial Russia.

Author: Hanns Zischler
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226986715
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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"Went to the movies. Wept. Matchless entertainment." So wrote Franz Kafka in one of his diaries, giving us but one hint of his little-known passion for the cinema. Until now, Kafka aficionados have been left to speculate about which films moved Kafka so powerfully and how those films might have influenced his writing. With Kafka Goes to the Movies, German actor and film director Hanns Zischler draws on years of detective work to provide the first account of Kafka's moviegoing life. Since many of Kafka's visits to the cinema occurred during bachelor trips with Max Brod, Zischler's research took him not only to Kafka's native Prague but to film archives in Munich, Milan, and Paris. Matching Kafka's cinematic references to reviews and stills from daily papers, Zischler hunted down rare films in collections all across Europe. A labor of love, then, by a true man of the cinema, Kafka Goes to the Movies brims with discoveries about the pioneering years of European film. With a wealth of illustrations, including reproductions of movie posters and other rare materials, Zischler opens a fascinating window onto movies that have been long forgotten or assumed lost. But the real highlights of the book are those about Kafka himself. Long considered one of the most enigmatic figures in literature, the Kafka that emerges in this work is strikingly human. Kafka Goes to the Movies offers an absorbing look at a witty, passionate, and indulgently curious writer, one who discovered and used the cinema as a place of enjoyment and escape, as a medium for the ambivalent encounter with modern life, and as a filter for the changing world around him.

Author: James Rolleston
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271072814
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Can one speak of Kafka's heroes as "characters"? If so, why is it so hard to define their characteristics? If not, how is the reader persuaded to accompany them on their existential journeys, accepting their behavior as falling within the realm of human logic? This study argues that Kafka's fiction has two conflicting premises: the subjective impossibility of human existence, foreclosing all hope of "meaning" in individual actions; and the ordered structure of human thoughts which assign meaning to the smallest event and analyze endlessly the behavior of other people. Kafka's characters are always, either potentially or actually, moving in both directions at once, earnestly building up a continuous logic to their actions while skeptically dismantling their own pretensions to existence. The device of the circumscribed narrator, congruent with the hero, knowing only what the hero knows, yet not identical with him, enables Kafka to contain both fundamental tendencies in a single sentence. Although Kafka is widely read, his works seem to give rise very easily to misconceptions; this study is designed primarily to facilitate an intelligent reading of Kafka. Without imposing answers of its own, it seeks to foster an awareness of the problems of perspective and presentation which Kafka engages.