Download or read book Kafka and Kabbalah written by Karl-Erich Grözinger and published by Burns & Oates. This book was released on 1994 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In one of Kafka's most famous stories, Josephine the Singer plays the role of the rebbe, or tzaddik: the person who takes on the role of theurgist (or intercessor) for the community.
Download or read book On the Threshold of a New Kabbalah written by Walter A. Strauss and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1988 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of the last phase in Kafka's short career, concentrating on his intensive preoccupation with the problem of writing (and of self-regeneration): the attempt to link himself to the Jewish tradition as well as to the literature of the past, and at the same time to renovate it radically because it no longer adequately served the «truth» that writers search for. This paradoxical quest, whose nucleus is the parable and the short fable, is the «New Kabbalah» to which the title refers and which was suggested by an entry into Kafka's diary in 1922.
Download or read book The Mystical Life of Franz Kafka written by June O. Leavitt and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2012 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: June O. Leavitt offers a fascinating examination of the mystical in Franz Kafka's life and writings, showing that Kafka's understanding of the occult was not only a product of his own clairvoyant experiences but of the age in which he lived.
Download or read book Burnt Books written by Rodger Kamenetz and published by Random House Digital, Inc.. This book was released on 2010 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dual portrait of Hasidic storyteller Rabbi Nachman and iconic writer Franz Kafka reveals unexpected parallels between their lives, tracing their respective writings about an illogical world and searches for spiritual meaning.
Download or read book Kafka s Jewish Languages written by David Suchoff and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-11-29 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Nine Gates written by Jiri Langer and published by Lutterworth Press. This book was released on 2022-03-31 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1913, just before the outbreak of the First World War, a 19-year-old Czech Jew named Jiri Langer left his assimilated family to live in the remote village of Belz, Galicia (now Ukraine). He had gone to live under the Chassidic (or Hasidic) Rokeach dynasty, a line of Rabbis that survives to this day. Nine Gates is the autobiographical tale of Langer's time amongst these isolated Chassidic mystics of Eastern Galicia. He tells of their enthusiasm, their simple faith, their ecstasies, their austerities, their feasts, their wonder-working Holy Rabbis and their esoteric wisdom. Alongside this narrative sits a collection of shrewd and earthy folk tales told by the holy men who ruled these little spiritual kingdoms for generation after generation. Over 80 years since its original publication in Czech, this translation by Stephen Jolly remains the definitive English version of this towering work of Jewish introspection. Nine Gates is a document from another time and place, and yet it captures the same spirit of religious longing and exploration that attracts a growing number of seekers today.
Download or read book Gershom Scholem written by David Biale and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a lifetime of passionate scholarship, Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) uncovered the "domains of tradition hidden under the debris of centuries" and made the history of Jewish mysticism and messianism comprehensible and relevant to current Jewish thought. In this paperback edition of his definitive book on Scholem's work, David Biale has shortened and rearranged his study for the benefit of the general reader and the student. A new introduction and new passages in the main text highlight the pluralistic character of Jewish theology as seen by Scholem, the place of the Kabbalah in debates over Zionism versus assimilation, and the interpretation of Kafka as a Jewish writer.
Download or read book The Jewish Mystic in Kafka written by Jean Jofen and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1987 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on Kafka's use of Jewish mysticism. It is the first major contribution to Kafka studies in this field. Jofen's findings shed new light on many of Kafka's works and illuminate some of the more obscure passages. Her original interpretations, especially of The Castle open up new avenues of research. The book depicts the world of the Hasidim as revealed in the works of Martin Buber and J.L. Peretz. The artistic drawings of Dr. Hans Guggenheim add an exciting and original dimension to the book.
Download or read book Kabbalah and Literature written by Kitty Millet and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2024-01-11 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focuses on a range of Jewish and non-Jewish writers to examine the intersection of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, and secular Jewish literatures. Kabbalah and Literature shows how the Jewish mystical tradition contributes to the renewal of literature in a modern, global, and increasingly disconnected age. Kitty Millet explores Kabbalah's conceptual underpinnings, aesthetic principles, tenets, and signifiers to demonstrate how literature's absorption of kabbalistic material has altered its ontology, function, and the tasks it sets for itself. Reading writers from Europe and the Americas, Kitty Millet maps how the kabbalist's desire to "recover Eden" transforms into a latent messianic drive only intuitable through text. Thus it charts a journey of sorts, a migration of Jewish mystical material embedded surreptitiously within text in order to shift ever so slightly at times the range of the literary to encompass an aesthetic vision not easily reducible to the literal, the known, the allegorical, or even the philosophical. In this way, Kabbalah and Literature proposes a novel, intuitive approach, shifting focus away from the Jewish text's epistemological elements to embrace its "secrets."
Download or read book Kafka s Last Trial written by Benjamin Balint and published by Picador. This book was released on 2019-08-22 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend and champion Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfil Kafka's last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted the rest of his life to canonizing Kafka as the most prescient chronicler of the twentieth century. By betraying Kafka's last wish, Brod twice rescued his legacy - first from physical destruction, and then from obscurity. But that betrayal also led to an international legal battle over which country could lay claim to Kafka's legacy: Germany, where Kafka's own sister perished in the Holocaust and where he would have suffered a similar fate had he remained, or Israel? At once a brilliant biographical portrait of Kafka and Brod and the influential group of writers and intellectuals known as the Prague Circle, Kafka's Last Trial offers a gripping account of the controversial trial in Israeli courts - brimming with dilemmas legal, ethical, and political - that determined the fate of the manuscripts Brod had rescued when he fled with Kafka's papers at the last possible moment from Prague to Palestine in 1939. It describes a wrenching escape from Nazi invaders as the gates of Europe closed; of a love affair between exiles stranded in Tel Aviv; and two countries whose national obsessions with overcoming the traumas of the past came to a head in a fascinating and hotly contested trial. Ultimately, Benjamin Balint invites us to question: who owns a literary legacy - the country of one's language and birth or of one's cultural and religious affinities - and what nation can claim a right to it.
Download or read book Stranger in a Strange Land written by George Prochnik and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking his lead from his subject, Gershom Scholem—the 20th century thinker who cracked open Jewish theology and history with a radical reading of Kabbalah—Prochnik combines biography and memoir to counter our contemporary political crisis with an original and urgent reimagining of the future of Israel. In Stranger in a Strange Land, Prochnik revisits the life and work of Gershom Scholem, whose once prominent reputation, as a Freud-like interpreter of the inner world of the Cosmos, has been in eclipse in the United States. He vividly conjures Scholem’s upbringing in Berlin, and compellingly brings to life Scholem’s transformative friendship with Walter Benjamin, the critic and philosopher. In doing so, he reveals how Scholem’s frustration with the bourgeois ideology of Germany during the First World War led him to discover Judaism, Kabbalah, and finally Zionism, as potent counter-forces to Europe’s suicidal nationalism. Prochnik’s own years in the Holy Land in the 1990s brings him to question the stereotypical intellectual and theological constructs of Jerusalem, and to rediscover the city as a physical place, rife with the unruliness and fecundity of nature. Prochnik ultimately suggests that a new form of ecological pluralism must now inherit the historically energizing role once played by Kabbalah and Zionism in Jewish thought.
Download or read book Kafka s Contextuality written by Alan Udoff and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Borges and the Kabbalah written by Jaime Alazraki and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1988-08-26 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a collection of essays on Borges by leading scholar Jaime Alazraki. Together the essays constitute an introduction to important aspects of Borges' oeuvre, including the influence of the Kabbalah, structure and style in the fiction, Borges' poetry, and Borges' impact on Latin American literature.
Download or read book Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism written by Gershom Scholem and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2011-08-17 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of lectures on the features of the movement of mysticism that began in antiquity and continues in Hasidism today.
Download or read book Parables and paradoxes written by Franz Kafka and published by . This book was released on 1958 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Animal in the Synagogue written by Dan Miron and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-09-06 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Animal in the Synagogue explores Franz Kafka’s sense of being a Jew in the modern world and its literary and linguistic ramifications. It falls into two parts. The first is organized around the theme of Kafka’s complex and often self-derogatory understanding and assessment of his own Jewishness and of the place the modern Jew occupies in “the abyss of the world” (Martin Buber). That part is based on a close reading of Kafka’s correspondence with his Czech lover, Milena Jesenska, and on a meticulous analysis, thematic, stylistic, and structural, of Kafka’s only short story touching openly and directly upon Jewish social and ritual issues, and known as “In Our Synagogue” (the title—not by the author). In both the letters and the short story images of small animals—repulsive, dirty, or otherwise objectionable—are used by Kafka as means of exploring his own manhood and the Jewish tradition at large as he understood it. The second part of the book focuses on Kafka’s place within the complex of Jewish writing of his time in all its three linguistic forms: Hebrew writing (essentially Zionist), Yiddish writing (essentially nationalistic but not committed to Zionism), and the writing, like his, in non-Jewish languages (mainly German) and within the non-Jewish religious and artistic traditions which inhered in them. The essay deals in detail with Kafka’s responses to contemporary Jewish literatures, and his pessimistic evaluation of those literatures’ potential. Essentially, Kafka doubted the sheer possibility of a genuine and culturally tenable compromise (let alone synthesis) between Jewishness and modernity. The book deals with topics and some texts that the flourishing, ever expanding Kafka scholarship has either neglected or misunderstood because most scholars had no real background in either Hebrew or Yiddish studies, and were unable to grasp the nuances and subtle intentions in Kafka’s attitudes toward modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature and their paragons, such as the major Zionist Hebrew poet H.N. Bialik or the Yiddish master Sholem Aleichem.
Download or read book Freedom and Confinement in Modernity written by A. Kordela and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-05-09 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kafka's literary universe is organized around constellations of imprisonment. Freedom and Confinement in Modernity proposes that imprisonment does not signify a tortured state of the individual in modernity. Rather, it provides a new reading of imprisonment suggesting it allows Kafka to perform a critique of a modernity instead.
