What’s Jewish About…Franz Kafka?

Ross Benjamin is the accomplished translator of “The Diaries of Franz Kafka.” He has received the prestigious Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

What attracted you to Franz Kafka?
When I first discovered Kafka’s fiction, as an adolescent, I was attracted to his themes of alienation and anxiety, the plights of his characters, and the nightmarish worlds they inhabited. At the time, I didn’t necessarily identify what I found so enthralling about Kafka’s work with Jewish themes, but I later recognized that they were present, for example, in his preoccupation with questions of communal belonging.

As a translator, tell us about your Jewish background.
I grew up in a Jewish family in New York. My strongest connection to Judaism came from my grandfather, Aaron, who, at the age of eight, fled pogroms in Ukraine with his mother. His story of persecution, fear, flight, and new beginnings was inseparable from the larger, perennial Jewish story.

How did you come to translate Kafka’s diaries?
When I read the German edition of his complete, uncensored diaries, originally published in 1990, I was astonished by its revelatory richness. I couldn’t fathom why, after decades, we still had in English only a 1948-49 translation based on a bowdlerized German version, prepared by Kafka’s close friend and literary executor, Max Brod, who had cut a substantial amount of material and made other intrusive alterations to the text that drastically misrepresented it.

Tell us about Franz Kafka and how he impacted the literary world.
Born in 1883 in Prague to middle-class, assimilated German-speaking Jewish parents, Kafka was one of the most groundbreaking writers of the 20th century. For most of his life, he lived in the city of his birth, where he was employed at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. From 1917 until his death in 1924, at the age of 40, he suffered from tuberculosis. While alive, he published several collections of his stories, but never completed the novels he’d begun. He had a limited but enthusiastic readership in his lifetime, particularly among prominent literary and cultural figures of the day.

How did Kafka rise to such importance as a writer?  
Despite Kafka’s testamentary instructions to burn all his papers, Max Brod brought (Kafka’s) posthumous writing into print, including his unfinished novels, “The Trial,” “The Castle,” and what Brod titled “Amerika.” Together with Brod’s editions of the diaries, letters, and aphorisms, these publications brought Kafka worldwide renown. His visionary work has long been enshrined in the pantheon of modern literature.

Can you share Kafka’s relationship to his Jewishness?
Growing up, Kafka went to synagogue with his father four times a year, and had a bar mitzvah, which, testifying to his father’s assimilationist tendency, was announced in the local newspaper as a “confirmation.” He later wrote about how all this seemed to him mere formality, and his bar mitzvah just an exercise in learning by heart. But, in his diaries, we witness him, as an adult, taking an intense interest in a traveling Yiddish theater troupe. Later, he took Hebrew lessons and, while living in Berlin near the end of his life, courses on the Bible. Occasionally, he toyed with fantasies of moving to Palestine. It’s clear he was deeply engaged with the question of what it meant to be Jewish in his time and place.

What did you find in his diaries that was most interesting? 
I found the fragmentary, unpolished nature of the writing in the diaries especially interesting and appealing because it opened a window into his creative process. His constant reworking of literary drafts, false starts, even his spelling errors and missing punctuation, give us an intimate sense of the haste, spontaneity, and restless inventiveness with which he wrote in his diary notebooks. I was fascinated with the complex relationships to his body, sexuality, and Jewishness that are revealed in the unexpurgated diaries.

Who will benefit most from reading this book? 
Anyone whose life has been made richer and whose mind and imagination have been electrified by reading Kafka. And anyone who may not have read him yet but who likes to be jolted by literary genius.   www.rossmbenjamin.com