The Animal in the Synagogue

Reviews / Votes

This excellent book offers a bright discussion of Kafka's being-Jewish, revealing the complexities of his life and letters as a German-Jewish author-dealing with "Kafka's impossibilities", illuminating the poetical and political aspects of his animal-writings, engaging so well his wit and darkness. -- Galili Shahar, Tel Aviv University There is no dispute that Dan Miron is the most important scholar and critic of the 20th and the 21st century of Jewish literature as it materializes in Hebrew, Yiddish and German. From a bird's view at the richness, the wisdom and the brilliance of his scholarship his new book, The Animal in the Synagogue: Franz Kafka's Jewishness, shines as the pinnacle of a scholarly project, the pillars of which Miron planted dozens of years ago. His courage and his scholarly greatness can be defined by his critique of the axiom that Jewish literature should be judged against the Zionist achievement of the establishment of Jewish sovereignty based on national territorialization. True to his personal and political pact with Modern Jewish literature, the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish nation was an option that as a Zionist he tied his life with. But his obligation to Jewish literature, in Hebrew and in other tongues, is clear-eyed and never blurs his rigorous stance as a philologist and as a historian. Well-versed in each and every detail of the vast spaces of Jewish literatures he turns now to tackle the Jewishness of Kafka's oeuvre as part of the enormous variety and the richness of Jewish literatures while resisting their reduction. Thus, in a brilliant discussion of the Modern Jewish literary context, he studies the way in which literature expresses Kafka's Jewishness. -- Hannan Hever, Yale University Dan Miron combines huge erudition with interpretive courage that reminds what humanist interpretation should be about. Miron provides us with a deep, insightful, and inspiring reading of Kafka. Miron takes the reader on a courageous and convoluted literary and philosophical journey. A significant, imaginative, unique and bewildering journey, in which a Jewish version of the Nietzschean image of "dancing upon the abyss" is performed perfectly both by Miron and his hero. -- Shoshana Ronen, University of Warsaw