#david suchoff

[...] To be in exile, in Rosenfeld’s “Goles,” means to have one’s tradition or language misunderstood in his ironic sense: the “Torah” is considered a symbol of “plunder,” when it is in fact the nations of the world who have helped themselves to Hebrew’s resources, as biblical translation created a literary tradition of one’s “own.” Exile for Rosenfeld means to have one’s tradition misunderstood; to depart from that slavery means recognizing the “curse” of the Jews as an excuse for textual robbery, rediscovering the potential for textual and human exchange that “unser Thore” actually represents.

This “blessing” to be found in the “enemy’s curse” centers on “unser Nomen,” or “our name.” Here transforming the “curse” placed on the foreign means a recognition of Hebrew and its potential for change. In the biblical text it is Jacob who will have his name changed to “Israel” after struggling with the angel; he will be granted the name of the nation only after recognizing the angels as translator figures—as a series of messengers, traveling on a “stairway” between different realms, who cannot be mastered by a single “Jakob,” no matter how strong (Gen. 28:12, 32:29). In Kafka’s New York, the Uncle Jakob who undergoes a similar name change conveys this same Hebrew sense of difference as the essential principle that is required for human growth. Changing “Jakob” from his first name to his last, Karl’s uncle becomes more “original” in the biblical sense, identifying with the “Israel” whose identity was founded in a vision of continuous exchange. In Kafka’s New York novel, getting one’s “nomen” changed means reversing the curse, as Rosenfeld suggests, and discovering the origin of tradition in forms of exchange. Uncle Jakob has therefore given up what the text calls his “Taufname,” or baptismal first name, and with it the notion that his sinful, “other” identity must be shed.

Uncle Jakob's “intermediary trade” (Zwischenhandel) reflects this same kind of interpretive transaction, where respect for the law and love for interpretive freedom go side by side. The accurate transcription of messages in Jakob's office echoes this principle, evoking a modern form of the traditional copying of the Torah famously depicted in S. Y. Agnon's modern Hebrew tale “The Torah Scribe.” Thus in Jakob's New York office Karl is astonished to see how “Meldungen,” or “messages,” are “taken down by two other employees and then compared [verglichen], so that errors [Irrtümer] could be ruled out as much as possible.” In the Talmudic tradition, the same Rabbi Meir whom Kafka mentions in his pardes version was famous for strictly following the letter of the law, and with the same paradoxical effect. The more that literal correctness is valued, the more each word comes to be invested with a mystical, even world-changing significance, as attention to the letter eventually reveals potential “others” that open up the meaning of the text. As Rabbi Meir declares in the Talmud, here quoted in a version of Eruvin 13a that Gershom Scholem provides: “When I was studying with Rabbi Akiba, I used to put vitriol in the ink and he said nothing. But when I went to Rabbi Ishmael, he asked me: My son, what is your occupation? I answered: I am a scribe [of the Torah]. And he said to me: My son, be careful in your work, for it is the work of God; if you omit a single letter, or write a letter too many, you will destroy the whole world.” Fidelity to the letter and its “messages,” as Uncle Jakob practices this notion, leads to a flourishing “business” in New York in a more comic form. Scrupulous attention to the letter thus acquaints the reader with the infinite potential of its inferences, multiple meanings, and even secret combinations of the letters of the law. As a Jewish scholar who used Kafka's pardes passage for his commentary on Exodus once declared, “whoever believes only in the plain sense of the Bible, peshat, is indeed a fool,” playfully demonstrating his reading by rearranging the consonants of peshat to show that they also spell the Hebrew word tipesh, that is, “foolish,” meaning someone who misses the hidden meanings of the traditional text.