Burnt Books by Rodger Kamenetz

Author:Rodger Kamenetz [Kamenetz, Rodger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37933-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

In Dov Ber, feelings arrive as messengers; in Kafka the messenger never quite arrives. Instead there’s struggle and exhaustion and no end of anticipation. One scholar of the parable reads Kafka as expressing the “futility of understanding, the hopelessness of our interpretative efforts.”3 The mashal supports the reading. But a nimshal in the last line troubles it:

But you sit at your window and dream of that message when evening comes.

Kafka, the “miserable specimen” in the bath hut with his father, can be identified with “the pathetic subject” in the parable. But he also “dreams of the message” at the end. Kafka occupies two positions at once. He awaits the message and yet dreams the whole parable: emperor, subject, messenger, and message. Is there a frail element of hope in that imagination?

Of course Kafka’s parable doesn’t quite lead us anywhere. It, too, just sits and waits. It certainly does not provide the spiritual intensity Buber spoke of that would lead to a religious renewal. No one will be reciting “An Imperial Message”4 in a shul, though for many Jews it might be a very honest place to begin. Because of its sense of disconnection. Because of its longing.

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