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Lecture

Rooted: Kafka and the Jewish Diaspora in Central Europe

Date
Monday 5 February 2024
Time
Location
Utrecht University
Room
TBA

Did the Prague Jewish writer Franz Kafka live in a “diaspora”? Contemporaries of Kafka and some of our contemporaries today continue to use the word “diaspora” to talk about Jews who lived (and some who continue to live) in central and eastern Europe before, during and after Kafka’s lifetime.  Yet because many Jews like Kafka could trace their lineage in this region back many centuries, we need to examine the word diaspora. Were not German-speaking Prague Jews, in fact, “rooted” in Bohemia? Drawing on sociologist Małgorzata Melchior’s theory of “rootedness” and my book Uprooting the Diaspora, this talk explores how Kafka’s Jewish rootedness took multiple forms: local, regional, and national; family and communal; political, linguistic, and cultural; logistical and emotional. Being rooted, Simone Weil wrote in the 1940s, “is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”  This “need” for rootedness remained throughout Kafka’s life, despite calls for “Zionist” returns, incidents of antisemitism and literary manifestations of persistent, alienated otherness.

R.S.V.P and more information: B.G.Mariacher@uu.nl 

 

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