Kafka's nostalgia for Yiddish

At the time when Kafka was writing, most of the Jews in the process of emancipation in the German-speaking countries had abandoned Yiddish under the influence of the economic-social movement and under the pressure of the Haskalah, that movement of the Jewish Enlightenment of the end of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries which was the champion of the emancipation of the Jews of Europe. This rationalist movement fought for the Europeanization of the Jewish masses, for their spiritual and material exit from the ghetto or from the Pale of Settlement in Russia where they had been confined since the most distant Middle Ages; for the modernization of Jewish society and culture, which implied a will for economic and social reforms doubled with religious reforms; for the education of the masses, so that they might acquire, in addition to the knowledge of tradition — acquired since time immemorial in the traditional schools — modern practical knowledge, a genuine contemporary secular learning. In short, all its nuances taken together, the Haskalah fought for the economic, social, cultural and political advancement of the Jewish masses.

The Haskalah was born in Germany. The symbolic figure of this first period is Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786). Born in Dessau, Saxony, in 1729, it is said that he survived an illness while still young but remained a hunchback, disfavored for the rest of his days, which he doubtless compensated by an uncommon intelligence. Not only did he acquire a mastery of Hebrew and German, but he also learned Latin, Greek, English and French. His friendship with Lessing would open to him the doors of the intellectual milieus of Berlin, where he obtained the right to reside in 1763. He made himself famous with his Phädon, which earned him the nickname of “the German Plato.” He received a prize from the Royal Academy of Prussia, was elected a member of the Academy in 1771, but Frederick II refused to ratify his election. The hour of the emancipation of the Jews had not yet struck. His principal work would be the translation of the Bible into German in Hebrew characters with commentaries in Hebrew (the Biur). He devoted himself further to a fundamental work, Jerusalem, published in 1783, which is like the summa of his thought in matters of religion. Interested as much in the founding of schools that would teach the Law and secular learning as in the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas through the first Hebrew journals of the time, Mendelssohn took an active part in the struggle for the emancipation of the Jews. He was not to see his efforts crowned. In Prussia the first edicts relating to the emancipation of the Jews did not see the light of day until 1812. After the Congress of Vienna, the German Confederation knew a period of reaction that would be followed by a new dark period after the failure of the revolutions of 1848. It was only in 1869–1871, at the moment of the unification of Germany, that political emancipation was proclaimed. Mendelssohn had, however, devoted himself to the first spiritual and cultural exit of the Jews from the ghetto. In 1781, Joseph II in the Austrian lands promulgated the Edict of Tolerance. As regards the Jews, it concerned the abolition of the body-toll, their authorized access to schools and universities, the permission to exercise certain manual and agricultural trades hitherto forbidden them. The Edict was, however, attended by a number of limitations: it decreed measures against the use of Yiddish in business and in the public registers. Wessely, another great figure of the Jewish Enlightenment, as soon as the Edict appeared, militated in its favor; he enjoined the Jewish community of the Habsburg States to respond favorably to the Edict, to send their children to school where German would be taught. He approved the measures taken by Joseph II against Yiddish. Another Maskil, or partisan of the Enlightenment, David Friedländer officially requested that Yiddish be forbidden as a language of instruction in the Kheder (the traditional Jewish elementary school) and in the modernized schools. Hurwitz advocated that Yiddish be banished from the language of commerce and from the accounting registers. One sees thereby that the struggle against Yiddish sometimes exceeds mere invective, however violent. The Maskilim make themselves, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, the counselors of the prince. Yiddish was for them like the materialization of the representation that the non-Jewish world made of the Jew, in that Yiddish focused notions, images of illegitimacy, of impurity, of irregularity… With the example of the account books, one is dealing with the same problematics. The Jews, for historical reasons on which we cannot dwell here, had specialized in certain artisanal trades and in commerce. The traditional antisemitic image refers to the idea of avarice, of greed for gain and of fraud. Now, Yiddish being their mother tongue, the Jews kept their accounting registers in Yiddish (a super-Hebraized Yiddish, moreover, for a great number of terms relating to commercial transactions were Hebrew terms). No one but them could therefore have access to them — no one could verify, and they themselves could not prove their good faith. Hence the idea of the Maskilim to keep the accounting registers in German, a language which, among other qualities, would make it possible to render commercial transactions transparent — to pierce the mystery of those books rendered esoteric by the language used. Yiddish, finally, because it is an impure mixture, a jargon, an agrammatical dialect, is a danger to morality, to mores, to religion, for true religion, true morality have their basis in precise concepts, hence in a clear and ordered language. Linguistic corruption can only issue in moral and religious corruption; hence the idea in Friedländer of translating into German the Yiddish prayer books (one would not touch the Hebrew prayer books). In their struggle for emancipation the Maskilim fight against the stereotyped image of the Jew. It is against this image that they collide constantly. In the struggle against this image, they encounter the problem of language. As they share, as men of the Enlightenment, a certain number of postulates about language (about grammar, regularity, aesthetics), they can only wish for the disappearance of the troublemaker, of the one who prevents speaking smoothly, integrating into German society: Yiddish. But what must be underscored, and what the German Maskilim did not expect, is that Hebrew itself disappeared within a few years. The journal Me’assef, inaugurated in 1784, no longer exists in 1794. By the end of the eighteenth century German had submerged everything. Four years after its creation, the Society of the Friends of Hebrew had to change its name. In 1787 one finds it under the designation Society for Welfare and Wisdom, then Society of Friends. The change of name here is characteristic. Hebrew can no longer serve as a referential frame. The Me’assef is succeeded by Sulamith, a periodical written in German advocating a humanist ideology and devoting itself to the emancipation of the Jews.

In a few years German Jewry thus found itself monolingual, and the path of emancipation gave way to the process of assimilation. This is why, after the Jewish nationalist awakening (in particular in the 1880s of the nineteenth century), the German Haskalah found itself charged with the immense responsibility of having led the Jews to the loss of their identity.

Smolenskin, in Russia, subsequently set himself with particular relentlessness against the symbol that M. Mendelssohn represented. One knows the sequel: the epidemic of conversions that shook German Jewry into the very family of Moses Mendelssohn, and, subsequently, the difficulties of a true assimilation. H. Heine bears witness to it — converted, he found himself no more accepted for all that. There then begins the period of the “in-betweens,” to which Kafka would still bear witness at the beginning of the twentieth century.

A few years ago, I wrote a book entitled Le deuil de l’origine. Une langue en trop, la langue en moins. (The Mourning of the Origin. One Language Too Many, the Language Lacking.) (PUV, 1993).¹ The title already indicates that my reflection turned around “a language, the indefinite, and the language, the definite.” Now language is the place of inscription of the maddest fantasies, on the individual as well as the collective scale. The place of the imaginary constitution of identity, it is also the place of its deconstruction, insofar as, in order to test itself in writing, the subject needs alterity, whether this alterity be given to it by a multilingual environment, or whether, within a single language at the outset, the subject hollows out a specificity for itself, transforming its language into a foreign language or into a strange language.

No writer steeped in German has managed to “get out” of German, no German Jewish intellectual in any case. German is their language, that of W. Benjamin as well as that of Kafka, that of A. Zweig as well as that of Scholem, that of Celan as well as that of Freud, of a wholly other generation it is true. Now, their relation to German is of the most varied.

Kafka makes of it a borrowed language that he does not love. Everyone knows the famous passage from his journal where he says that if he does not love his mother enough, it is because he is obliged to call her “Mutter” in German:

“Yesterday it occurred to me that if I have not always loved my mother as she deserved and as I was capable of, it is solely because the German language prevented me from it. The Jewish mother is not a ‘Mutter.’ This way of calling her makes her a little ridiculous (the word ‘Mutter’ is not so in itself since we are in Germany); we give to a Jewish woman the name of German mother, but we forget that there is here a contradiction, and the contradiction sinks all the more deeply into the feeling. For Jews, the word ‘Mutter’ is particularly German; it contains, unbeknownst to them, as much Christian coldness as splendor. This is why the Jewish woman called ‘Mutter’ is not only ridiculous, she is also foreign to us. ‘Mama’ would be preferable, if it were possible not to imagine ‘Mutter’ behind it. I believe that only the memories of the ghetto still hold the Jewish family together, for the word ‘Vater’ does not by far designate the Jewish father either.”²

Though he masters Czech relatively well, he never writes in Czech, he does not fantasize about Czech, he manages with difficulty to make of Hebrew a language of reading. As for Yiddish, I have shown, I believe, that for Kafka, Yiddish is a language without grammar, a mish-language, a lost language, a fantasmatic language, a language to be kept foreign.

Thus the writer invents, in his language or languages, what he has not known, what he believes he has lost. The other must therefore traverse the language(s) of the writing. What do I mean by that? There are several degrees in strangeness or strangeness-of-being. The foreign language is the one that can make an edge.

Certainly, this integration in the countries of gradual and difficult emancipation is lived in the pain of the in-between. It is again Kafka who best represents this figure of the in-between. One knows the famous sentence drawn from a letter to Max Brod of 1921.

“Better than psychoanalysis I like, in this instance, the observation that this paternal complex on which more than one feeds spiritually does not bear on the innocent father, but on the Judaism of the father. What most of those who began to write in German wanted was to leave Judaism, generally with the vague approval of the fathers (it was this vagueness that was revolting); they wanted it, but their hind legs still stuck to the Judaism of the father, and their forelegs found no new ground. The despair that ensued constituted their inspiration.

An inspiration as honorable as any other, but which, looked at closely, presented nonetheless a few sad singularities. First of all, that into which their despair discharged itself could not be German literature, which it appeared to be from the outside.

They lived between three impossibilities (which I happen to call impossibilities of language, it is simpler, but one could also call them otherwise): the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, the impossibility of writing otherwise — to which one could almost add a fourth impossibility, the impossibility of writing. […]

It was therefore a literature impossible on all sides, a literature of gypsies who had stolen the German child from the cradle and had, in great haste, dressed it up one way or another, because someone after all has to dance on the rope (but it was not even the German child, it was nothing, one simply said that someone is dancing).”³

Hybridity of language, which refers back to those multiple figures of monsters or chimeras in the Kafkaesque universe.

An ape named Rotpeter delivers, before an audience of academicians, a report on the way in which he became a man and on the feelings he experiences at the idea of evoking his “metamorphosis.” He was captured on the Gold Coast, wounded in two places, on the cheek, which earned him his name — Red Peter, or the Red — and below the hip, which is much more troublesome. When he woke up he was in a cage on the deck of the steamer Hagenbeck. In his despair, he sought a way out and quickly understood that the only one available consisted in renouncing being an ape, in becoming a man and therefore in setting about imitating men so as to acquire as quickly as possible the average culture of a European. He therefore imitates people and serves his apprenticeship, or rather his training. He learns to shake hands, to smoke a pipe, to drink a bottle of schnaps, which does not happen without difficulty; he even learns to speak. Once arrived at the quay, he becomes aware that he must choose between the zoo, which implies once again the cage, and the music hall. It is this second path that he chooses; there he is, an artist, neither happy nor unhappy, he has simply found a way out. He says it in these terms: “I fear that what I mean by way out is not well understood. I use the word in its ordinary sense and in all its amplitude. I intentionally avoid speaking of freedom. It is not this great feeling of freedom in every sense that I have in mind… As freedom counts among the most sublime feelings, the deception that corresponds to it passes for sublime as well… No, it is not freedom that I wanted. A simple way out…” He rejoins a young chimpanzee only in the evening, for the look of distress that he reads on her when he looks at her during the day reminds him that something is not quite right, or that the amnesia of which one has made an ascesis in order to survive is not without flaw. Something is amiss. Without reducing this polysemic text to a single dimension, that of the fictionalization of Jewishness, one can, by stopping for a first time at this register, understand that what is played out there are the problems of an assimilation not entirely successful. This assimilation has demanded considerable unconscious and conscious efforts, sometimes insurmountable, sometimes in an illusory way. In the text two passages allude to the double bind of the assimilated intellectual: “the second bullet hit me below the hip. A grave wound, it is because of it that I still limp a little. I read recently in the article of one of the ten thousand dogs who unleash themselves in pursuit of me in the newspapers, that my ape nature was not yet completely stifled…” As soon as a problem arises (here, the fact that the ape wants to show his wound to his visitors and that to do so he must remove his trousers), one will always say that the assimilation is not total, that something of the old “skin” remains. Discourses familiar to Western Jews. The other passage bears on the absence of guarantee: “no one promised me that the gate would open if I became like them; one promises me nothing in exchange for achievements that seem impossible…” A cultural cleavage doubled with a psychic cleavage, with an alienation of the self, with an in-between of two personalities.

The ape therefore tells the story of his training. He had to adopt the mores, the usages, the customs of the men who were on the boat, then exhausted numerous teachers, had to pass through moments of nausea, of anguish. Totally acculturated, he has a name that does not suit him and that the others gave him (allusion perhaps to the change of the Jewish first name into a “European” first name from the Christian calendar, obligatory at the time), the mores of a human being, the talents of an artist that are very far from ape-life. Through imitation, through the mimicry of posture, of gesture and of speech, he has acquired the average culture of a European. This depersonalization, this becoming-other procures for him a certain peace: “When I cast a glance over my evolution and over the goal it has pursued until now, I neither complain nor rejoice. Hands in the pockets of my trousers, the bottle of wine on the table, I hold myself half lying, half sitting in my rocking chair, and I look out the window. Does a visit come to me, I receive it as is fitting. My impresario stands in the antechamber; when I ring for him he comes and listens to what I have to say.” Rotpeter adds: “in the evening, there is almost always a performance, and my successes can doubtless no longer be surpassed. When I return at a late hour from banquets, from learned societies, or from a pleasant tête-à-tête, a half-trained young chimpanzee awaits me at home, and I abandon myself with her to the pleasures of our race…” But something holds him back from being happy. Certainly, the tempest has calmed within him. “Today it is no more than a draft of air that cools my heels, and the hole of the horizon through which it comes and through which I came one day, is so small that I would tear the skin from my body to pass through it, supposing that I still had enough strength and will to return there.” There is nonetheless this little hole that marks the fact that there is no return, but that suffices to designate the existence of a before. There is a trace, the wound on the hip. It is not without evoking that of the young boy in A Country Doctor. This wound has a double function. Evidently it evokes sexuality. The wound makes him limp, it is the reminder of his capture and therefore prevents the movement of amnesia from being total. For this amnesia is indeed the program he had assigned himself: “my feats would not have been possible had I wished to persist in dwelling on my origins and on my memories of youth. The first of the commandments I had dictated to myself was precisely to renounce every kind of stubbornness.” It is therefore that acculturation is never total and that something resists.

A cultural and psychic cleavage, the story by the problems it poses refers back to this in-between of languages and identities so strongly inscribed in Kafka’s work.

This cultural cleavage is to be found all along the work in the most varied forms. Marthe Robert says it excellently: “Kafka knows no limits to the invention of these figures floating between two realms, between two states, between two worlds, which by themselves make his reputation as a fantastic author — quite wrongly, since they represent nothing other than the schema of his own reality. Astride two realms, like Gregor Samsa and the ape-man of A Report to an Academy; astride the here-below and the beyond, like the hunter Gracchus, whom a mysterious fault prevents from living as well as from dying; astride two animal species, like the hybrid of cat and lamb having nowhere its like and to which the butcher’s knife is forbidden, because it comes from an inheritance; astride two cultures and two languages, like the spool called Odradek, to which the very absurdity of its existence confers a kind of eternity — Kafka’s hero is always in some fashion a double creature, an error of nature, a chimera in the biological sense…”⁴

As is known, German, which is his language of culture, Kafka says he does not love, that it is not his language, that he feels cramped in it. In his Discourse on the Yiddish Language, Kafka takes up these various elements. We know that he prepared this talk in a state of extreme agitation. There was indeed good reason. How was he going to speak of Yiddish, in order to introduce the performance of Löwy, his recital of poems, to a public of Western Jews like himself, proud of their mastery of German (even if they claimed to detest it) and still living largely on the tenacious prejudices sown a century earlier by the Haskalah — a public doubtless ready to love these poor Jews of the East, but above all not ready to take them seriously, neither them nor the language in which they expressed themselves? On the program: poems by Rosenberg (1838–1928), by Frishmann (1859–1922), by Frug (1860–1916); in a certain way, the authors of the evening are poorly chosen. None of the three can represent, in 1912, the great Yiddish poetry. S. Frug comes from Russian. He is first of all a great lyric poet of the Russian language. After the pogroms of 1881, he passes over to Yiddish and to a national poetry. What Löwy is to recite that evening is Sands and Stars, a poem that all the Jews of a certain generation know by heart. D. Frishmann is above all a great prose writer and poet of the Hebrew language. He also writes lyric poems in German, and on occasion in Yiddish. A. H. Rosenberg, finally, writes in Yiddish poems on the difficulty of emigration to the United States. Kafka takes up point by point the discourse of the Haskalah, but he inverts it, turns it symmetrically around. Far from following the evolution of Yiddish that took place over some fifty years toward a normed, institutionalized language, a literary language and a national language, he remains fantasmatically fixed on the judgment of the Haskalah, but what was pejorated for the Haskalah becomes for him meliorated. Yiddish was not a language? So be it. It is not a matter of a language: “Who, then, could understand that confused language that Yiddish is, who, then, could want to?” Yiddish is a language without grammar, a spoken language, mobile, popular. “The people does not abandon it to the grammarians.” The language, “concise and rapid,” has on the other hand “elaborated no form endowed with the clarity we need.” A language of little clarity, an impure language composed only of “foreign vocables.” These vocables work the language in “heedlessness.” It is a language one cannot use outside of communication. This is also why no reasonable mind dreams of making Yiddish an international language, however tempting that might be. Only argot makes borrowings from it, and this because it has less need of syntactic relations than of isolated words.

This is written precisely after the Czernowitz conference of 1908, at the moment when Yiddish was recognized by the Jewish community as one of the national languages of the Jewish people, at the moment when I. L. Peretz, D. Bergelson, the Yunge in America had begun to bring Yiddish into literary modernity.

Far from despising this “non-language,” Kafka loves it, dreams it, incorporates it. It is the other of German, a language at once near and far, a language of the uncanny. “One cannot, in effect, translate Yiddish into German. The relations between Yiddish and German are far too delicate, far too charged with meaning, not to break as soon as one wishes to bring Yiddish back to German: what has been translated is no longer Yiddish, but a thing devoid of reality. By translation into French, for example, Yiddish can be transmitted to the French; by translation into German, it is annihilated. For ‘Toït’ is not ‘Tot’ and ‘Blüt’ is in no way ‘Blut.’” Kafka touches here on a fundamental problem, on the imaginary functioning of so-called near languages, on the lure, on what is played out on the identity plane in the passage from one to the other, on the trouble, on the uncanniness that this infinite proximity and at the same time this total difference entails. As J. M. Rey recalls: “Under the rubric of the Übersehen, reread, for example in its entirety, the Discourse on the Yiddish Language of F. Kafka. More than elsewhere doubtless, the question of proximity, of resemblance, of concordance, of difference within the semblance of similitude, of the remainder one works on there with an astonishing pertinence, with a staggering force — the screen of a language.”⁵

Yiddish is frightening because it recalls the origins of the ghetto, a forgotten, shameful origin, but it can bring back to the surface unsuspected forces. It can do so through the emotive euphony of its speech, “for Yiddish is everything, the word, the Hasidic melody and the profound reality of this Jewish actor…” This imaginary, dreamed, fantasized Yiddish is the Yiddish that Kafka needs in order to create for himself a semblance of Jewish identity, in order to go beyond the “phantom of Judaism” that his father bequeathed to him. Yiddish cannot be a national language, or even international, Kafka said so that evening. Of national languages, he already has too many. German first, as a German-speaking Jew of Prague; Czech next; and even Hebrew, which he learns with relentlessness, frequenting the Zionist milieus and dreaming later of settling in Palestine, where he would be a café waiter. A literary language? But there is German, with which he struggles, which is nonetheless the language in which he thinks and writes. “Bad Heine,” Pines wrote of Peretz. Kafka is quick to copy out this judgment, for Heine, though a Jew, is a great poet of the German language. It is by this measure that one can judge the literary realizations of Yiddish, and for Kafka, they could not rival German. Neither a national language nor a literary language. Precisely what Yiddish has become when he delivers his famous discourse — so what place remains for this so-beloved Yiddish? The place of the lost paradise, of the maternal, the place of the archaic, of innocence, of the childlike. A non-language reduced to its orality, the language of legends, of ballads, of Hasidic tales, of good stories. The language of those Jews of the East with whom Kafka imaginarily identifies. Above all Yiddish must not become anything other than this archaic block that returns us to the country of innocence and of childhood. A language learned at school, it would no longer be the language made of added pieces and of dialects, the language of the mother. On the contrary, it would become the language of the father, the language of the norm and of the institution. A literary language (just imagine a Yiddish Goethe, a Yiddish Schiller), so near and so far from German, it would be a language too many. Just as would be a national Yiddish dreaming of territorialization. Yiddish, without letters of nobility, without territory, without grammar (in Kafka’s eyes), is indeed that lost language of which he dreams and which he never knew. A wandering language, a true gypsy language. German he has borrowed, he is the guest of it, but one cannot be the guest of Yiddish, one carries it within oneself.

One would have no trouble showing that today, after the murder of the speakers of the language, the nostalgia for Yiddish has amplified dramatically. From pure folklorization to the fantasy of a new fundamental language, from the temptation to constitute Yiddish into a new sacred language while remaining ignorant of it, we have not finished defining ourselves in relation to Yiddish.

Notes