5: Homeland

PRIMARY:

• Nicole Krauss, Forest Dark (2017)
• Joshua Cohen, Moving Kings (2017)

SECONDARY:

• Judith Butler, “Who Owns Kafka?”, London Review of Books (2011) *
• Philip Roth, “I Always Admired Your Fasting’; or, Looking for Kafka” (1972) *
• Naomi Sokoloff, “Israel in the Jewish-American Imagination”, in Wirth-Nesher (ed.), The Cambridge History of Jewish-American Literature (2015)
• James Wood, “A Novel Brings Israel’s Conflicts to New York”, New Yorker (2017)

Pre-Class Notes

— In the midst of Butler’s comments on the arrival/non-arrival of language in Kafka (“Who Owns Kafka”, London Review of Books, 2 March 2011) and Nicole Krauss’ reflections on her relationship to space, place and home in Forest Dark, I am struck by the reappearance of many of the themes/debates that are occuring (curatedly) in my World Literature A Course. I’m thinking specifically of translation theory and its concurrent debates about the functionality or the non-functionality of language to properly express an idea or make feasible the transition between word and meaning. In this vein, Krauss makes several early allusions to what might be termed philological philosophy in Dark Forests, as on page 71, where she muses about the multiple meanings of the German Heim and the Hebrew olam. I was reminded immediately of Barbara Cassin (et al)’s 2004 tome, The Dictionary of Untranslatables (actually, this is the English title, which was published in 2014). In this, olam is also given the English synonyms ‘world’, ‘humanity’, ‘life’ and ‘present’ and gets the definition:

“The Hebrew word for “world” is currently ‘ ōlām [ ‫עֹולָם‬ ]. It is present in the Bible, but probably not in this sense [of emphasizing being in the world], even in a late text like Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) 3:11. There is another, temporal sense, that of indefinite duration, usually in fixed expressions such as ‘ ōlām [ ‫עֹולָם‬ ], “to have an indeterminate future,” whence “for all time,” or me- ‘ ōlām [ ‫עֹולָם‬ ‫מ‬ ֵ ], “for a time whose beginning is unknown,” “since a moment which is not known,” whence “forever.”” (Cassin et al, Dictionary of Untranslatables, 733).

As Hebrew Literature scholar Adriana Jacobs told us in our A Course, this is a definition deliberately designed to play up the ‘untranslatable’ element, relying on strange and awkward constructions like ‘since a moment which is not known’. So we take Cassin’s definition with a grain of salt. At the same time, Cassin’s jumbled definition takes further some of the work that Krauss is asking the word, olam, to do in her novel as she has the narrator place it side by side with heimlich and unheimlich, asking them all to mean both ‘concealed’ and ‘illuminated’, home and Other. Belonging to the word and articulating a place in it, as this narrator is so anxious to do, seems bound to the language in which that attempt is articulated and endlessly denied by the inevitable imprecision of that language anyway.

In parallel, I think its productive to observe my inclination to read Butler’s “Who Owns Kafka” and the emphasis it places on the many misfired letters that circulate both within it and around the Kafka archive as entangled with Zizek’s sort of opposite explanation of the letter that ‘always arrives at its destination’ in Enjoy Your Symptom (1991) (Here’s a link to a photocopy of the operational half of the chapter that I found on Google, and here’s another attempt at explanation by Zizek in The Symptom, likely an impenetrable experience). Butler is talking about a person permanently displaced, while Zizek, basically, posits a letter that continuously makes its reader into its addressee; I know they seem like opposite motions, but I think they are both revolving around the same core of language and whatever dissonance exists between meaning and the written word. Butler’s Kafka is writing himself in and out of belonging, setting off periodically, linguistically on a journey away-from, never truly planning to arrive at all. Meanwhile, of the remnants of that writing is being forged the ‘letter’ of which all bidders believe they are the addressee, its destination.

Moving out of the psychoanalytic strata, I see some of the anxiety about / fear of / effects of readership taking ownership in Krauss’ novel as well. I am thinking of the three related anecdotes on pages 76 – 78 in which Krauss describes her interactions with readers who have taken her words uncomfortably to heart, mimicking the process of appropriation Butler describes in the production of a ‘cultural asset’ and making of her a symbol, or the source of symbolic language. Binding her. And, ironically, silencing her as she ‘desperately tried to write something on the first page [of the Yad Vashem notebook] to strip of its power’ (Forest Dark, 77) but managed only to write an aborted to do list.

I wonder, then, if the image she conjures through Epstein in the succeeding chapter, that of the spider which apparently moves from his imagination to ‘the wall in front of him, exactly as he had seen it in his mind’ (Forest Dark, 103) can be read as her ideal mode of authorship. That is, authorship not moderated by language, the fluent transposition of idea to material. There is no mistaking a spider for a cultural history. Or is there? After all, Epstein’s next wish is for ‘the assistant to take this down on her pad, too’ (Forest Dark, 103). And, of course, Krauss has written this all down for us to consume as written words. [MS]

—

I’m so sorry this comes so late–I’ve contracted a nasty cold and haven’t been up to much work this week. here are some thoughts!

I was struck by the intent focus on Kafka and his language in Jewish narratives. If Butler is right, neither German, nor Hebrew, nor Czech was Kafka’s true mother tongue; he had written, “What do I have in common with the Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself”, though he strove to learn Hebrew in his later years. One wonders if this reckoning/wrestling with Jewishness comes from a place of disentangling/attempt to clarify one’s identity. Kafka’s archives, which Brod had salvaged rather than destroyed as Kafka had asked, have become a point of contention between the National Library of Israel and the German library, though many of them are also stored in the Bodleian. Ownership and identity are inextricable questions for Kafka, as well as for Krauss. In the novel, Nicole faces the same question as a Jewish writer: perhaps her writing belongs not to her, the individual engaged in the creative act, but the Jewish people, a collective consciousness/culture to which she belongs, and perhaps to whom she owes part of her understanding of the world, or even to the reception of the readers. It is not merely with whom she identifies or dedicates herself/work to, but who claims ownership.

Krauss’s novel thus demonstrates an evident awareness of authorship along with the question of belonging. Writing in the first-person for her self-referential, metatextual protagonist Nicole, she argues that “frustration was more than a subject for Kafka, it was a whole dimension of existence”. Throughout both Forest Dark and Moving Kings, there is a degree to which the characters seem to be navigating through, but inexplicably stuck in, this liminal frustration. Kafka had never made it to (had even perhaps never intended to) Palestine; had always struggled to reconcile with his Jewish identity; and indeed, with the assertion of self. This is what Nicole largely latches onto in Forest Dark; that Kafka is a writer whose ownership is constantly taken up by/contended upon, but also that he is a writer existing on the threshold, aware, yet unable to cross. 

On the same thread of identity enters the question of home and the nostalgia ever-present in postmodern literature. Nicole, the female protagonist in Forest Dark, writes that “When I woke again, it was into a homesickness that felt physical. . . Though never so acute, the longing for something I felt divided from, which was neither a time nor a place but something formless and unnamed.” Krauss delineates a nostalgia for a “home” that transcends spatio-temporal conditions; as Butler discusses as the problem of non-arrival in Who Owns Kafka, the longing for a destination that is “away from here,” [weg-von-hier] a destination, a home, to which one can never truly reach unless they escape the logic of the “here”; of a home that exists in a time or place that cannot be accessed. Epstein shares a similar comment about his family. He says he “had come from here” discussing Israel; but his parents had “come from nowhere”, as “where they had come from had ceased to exist and so could not be returned to.” There are different ways of looking at home; as a place, an identity, a sense of belonging, a family, a country, where you come from; and the paradoxical idea that home is that which you recognize with detachment. I find that with Jewish and Irish narratives in particular, the search for, or the Odyssey-like return to home, becomes a question closely linked to nationhood. A chapter belonging to Epstein muses, “to have family in country is to have country in the family.” Once displaced from it, the country becomes more than a physical place, but the object of longing and attachment, a homeland. National identity becomes a characterizing feature, even, or particularly, away from the physical nation. 

Constant displacement and an enduring faith in return appear as common crucial themes to the Jewish people; yet the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the ongoing eviction of tenants by David King’s company in Moving Kings go hand in hand to show them actively engaging in the displacement of other peoples. Here, the modern controversy over who owns Kafka’s archives is then perhaps comparable to the conflict over Jerusalem/ the Israeli occupation. 

It is unsurprising that the book further brings in Freud’s discussion of the unknown and the unheimlich in relation to home[heim]. What both Krauss and her twin protagonist claim to be a “novel about a Hilton in Tel Aviv” then strives to reckon with fear, frustration, and the loss and/or search for homeland. Unheimlich, as discussed at length by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror, is not merely a feeling captured by the English word “uncanny”; it is also the physical fear of that which is not “Heimlich,” that is, homelike, or familiar. The physical [unheimlich] felt by the Jewish characters attempting to return home—wherever it is, whichever form it takes—is perhaps the realization that what used to be has become unrecognizable, that the familiar has turned into the ‘unheimlich.’ 

Krauss proceeds to explain the homesickness she feels as a “division of being both here and not her, but there.” If the Jewish people do not have a history, but rather a memory, and home (or belonging) exists more in the collective memory than in a concrete place (ie. Hilton in Tel Aviv), destination becomes lost in its own teleology; Israel may be, after all, the ideal, the abstraction of home that has ceased to exist in the “here.”  [JK]

— (So, so sorry this is so late!)

As soon as I’d read the phrase ‘Out in the Blue’ on the Contents page of Forest DarkI couldn’t seem to forget it. I was – and am – incredibly grateful for the fact that Krauss’s chapter titles find their way into the main text, rather that only reflecting an essence of it. 

He’d received a phone call the day before, he told me. “Out in the blue,” he added. He took a special joy in English idioms but rarely got them right. (Forest Dark,p. 60)

What does it mean for an idiom to be “right”? Idioms in everyday speech ultimately equate to a repeated phrase in a repeated context. The longevity of an idiom gives it credence in the sense that every time an idiom becomes applicable it in some way gains strength. And yet, like any other sign, an idiom is made up, referring in actuality to no greater truth. The only thing that makes an idiom “right” in any capacity is its recurrence, and its exact repeated quoting makes it familiar, tethering this instance of the idiom to every instance prior.

If the idiom itself refers to no greater truth, then to misquote an idiom equally cannot make it inherently wrong, it only appears as such because it becomes unfamiliar – it’s the “wrong” phrase in the “right” context. In becoming unfamiliar the idiom draws attention to itself, and this heightened attention distorts familiarity further: what we previously hear in conversation and recognise but do not necessarily notice now soundswrong, feelswrong. A misquoted idiom – a “wrong” idiom – is uncanny. I should also note that, in the section above, only the idiom is quoted in direct speech, again drawing attention specifically to the misquoting. We recognise the context, here reflected in reported speech, easily workable into the narrative voice. The misquoting, however, is isolated, unfamiliar. 

But what about thisidiom in particular? (Moreover, what about this idiom in this book?) What’s the effect of changing ‘of’ to ‘in’? To say that something – a phone call, or whatever else – manifests ‘out of the blue’ is to say that it comes from nowhere, ‘randomly’ into the here and now. (I quote randomly because I’m certain it appears in the text but can’t remember where!) The ‘out of’ is really in some way past and serves to imply the fact of now ‘coming in’. It – whatever it may be – was once out, and is now in. ‘Out in the blue’, then, has an othering effect. In the misquoted idiom the ‘out’ is no longer past, but present, and ‘the blue’ is some unknown place. The it is still somewhere else.

As this novel is so concerned with place, the uncanny, and narrativisation – the latter being reflected in the longevity in the recurrence of the idiom which implies some connection between repeated contexts in the past and the present –  I cannot help but see this “wrong” idiom as in some way summative of the preoccupations of Forest Dark. 

(Side note: I don’t for a second imagine any of the above hasn’t been said of idioms before, it’s just something I’d never really thought about in any depth until reading this!) [RF]

——————————————-

“Switching off the bedside lamp, Jules Epstein’s soul stirred under the stiff sheets and he returned again to the intractable dark that he stared into on countless nights when he couldn’t sleep” (160).

I don’t know if this is necessarily going to be “illuminating,” partly because I’m not a huge fan of Descartes either, and so this might simply be my own Kaddish for Kafka—-

It is partly frustration–some lingering beauty—-but also a level of respect to which I ascribe Krauss’s style—-leaving me out in the blue as it were. Here, or maybe nowhere, I’m looking at this brutalist photo of the Hilton (the close up, specifically) and where I might have thought I could recognize something before—-the presence of form and control, the architectural symmetry—-I instead cannot help but be clouded by the strange formlessness the “novel” gives it.  But that darkness, the deep forest of unfamiliar words, places made unfamiliar (leaving “the shore of reason, with its familiar hills and landmarks”)—becomes slightly warm. There’s a kind of joy that arises when one walks the tightrope over unreason. The analogy of the uncouthed Forest experience like the Ardens of Shakespeare’s As You Like It or the forests Hester Prynne and Pearl find themselves in The Scarlet Letter lend a certain freedom, perhaps chaotically. City (structure) was never the place you’d want to go in a Kafka story…

On a side note, there is a really good book called Forests by a Stanford professor named Robert Pogue Harrison, which does a really good Job at taking us through the stories of Gilgamesh, the Greeks, the Romantics, and to the present in order to analyze this anxiety but also powerful identity regarding forests and their place on the periphery of the Polis—-

“I could no longer write a novel, just as I could no longer bring myself to make plans, because the trouble in my work and my life came down to the same thing: I had become distrustful of all the possible shapes that I might give things. Or I’d lost faith in my instinct to give shape at all.” (165)

Perhaps there is an irony in trying to complete a Kafka play, no? Or perhaps the “reason” they were left “undone.” It becomes meta-paradoxical to read a book that has a novelist that decries shape and form, but maybe that’s why Forest Dark’s texture doesn’t feel fully novelistic. It’s hard not to compare the text to the ramblings of Ishmael: the ability to be discussing some very concrete moment in the story and then jump to extremely deep philosophical comments, sometimes within the course of a single sentence. (examples on pg. 155-56).

Yet, all the remnants are left behind; we see the shadows of a novel. “Narrative may be unable to sustain formlessness, but life also has little chance” (138).  More than anything else in the plot, we see the fixation on Jewish thought, place, and “memory.” Where identity lies in those sentiments I think is the thematic tract of the text. I was as curious as Epstein in trying to weave through and carve out a sense of something in the ancestral experience–Though there was an anxiety to it right? About using heritage as the grounding form? Our Novel’s novelist couldn’t easily write a book about the structure of the Hilton…Krauss’ Novel couldn’t just be about following the physical forms of words in the act of meaning making in literature. I couldn’t merely follow Epstein on this path and expect a linear plot on his journey of self-realization. I slowly lost my sense of being a detective once I got through the first part of the novel. The novel, as it were, became Unheimlich for me. I don’t know if I could comfortably lay here while sick in bed as our novelist—-even if she retained a desire to move even if that one spot–the Aleph–allowed her the possibility to see all other spots. Hopefully there isn’t a sickness to reading…

—-Anyways—-there must be a door to this text :)?

“Kafka is never sinister or nihilistic, it’s because to even read the threshold requires a susceptibility to hope and vivid yearning. There is a door. There’s a way up or over. It’s just that one almost certainly won’t manage to reach it, or recognize it, or pass through it in this life” (136).

(BJS)

Post-Class Notes

–– In a New York Times reviewof Nicole Krauss’ Forest Dark, Peter Oren writers:

‘There’s an unnerving moment in Nicole Krauss’s new novel, “Forest Dark,” when a man in a suit struts to the edge of a wet roof and pulls on a pair of rubber gloves. A novelist watches from the window of her office in the house next door. For a few mesmerizing seconds the novelist waits for him to leap — or fall. Instead, he merely kneels and begins to clear leaves from the gutter. Turns out he’s a neighbor who’s decided to do a little housework without changing out of his office clothes. But this is the sort of fraught, disorienting moment that characterizes the novel. Ordinary actions assume a scary fragility. One false move and things might go to hell. And one of the beauties of this lucid and exhilarating book is that Krauss is unafraid, at times, to let it go where it will.‘ (New York Times, emphasis mine)

I, too, was struck by this moment of dramatic suspension. Throughout the novel, Nicole’s story is propelled forward by her obsession with the man who supposedly jumped from the balcony of the Tel Aviv Hilton Hotel, an incident we become less and less convinced has actually happened, as no one can remember him. 

It is only towards the end of the novel that this narrative suspension is resolved – oddly, through suicide. Drawn to ‘a concentrated sense of intent and drama that animated his body’, Nicole looks on as a man jumps actually jumps from a terrace on the ‘fifteenth or sixteenth floor’ of the Hilton:

‘It happened very quickly. He shifted his weight forward onto his hands, and vaulted one leg over the metal rail. A woman getting out of the pool shouted, and in a matter of seconds the man had swung the other leg over, and was perched on the railing, legs dangling over the two-hundred-foot drop. He seemed, suddenly, to be filled with enormous potential, as if the whole rest of his life had slammed forward into him. And then he leaped with arms open, like a bird.’ (Nicole Krauss, Forest Dark, p. 289-290)

Immediately afterward, almost glossing over this much-anticipated event that collapses the beginning and end of the novel, we hear that Nicole is returning to her home in New York, thirty-six hours after the incident. As she comes up to her house, she has one of her eerie premonitions:

‘They didn’t see me. And for a while I didn’t see myself either, sitting in a chair in the corner, already there.’ (Krauss, p. 290)

Thus, Krauss comes full circle, looping back to Nicole’s initial ‘idea of being in two places at once’ (Krauss, p. 40) – echoing the scene in which she ‘came through the door of the house I shared with my husband and our two children, and sensed that I was already there.’ (Krauss, p. 40). Not only does this collapse the idea of time, or even of reality – it collapses the idea of character, not just the one on the page, but the identity of Krauss herself.

In her presentation on Forest Dark, Rhona pointed out how the text is littered with metatextual elements, drawing on Freud and the concept of the Doppelganger, ideas of faith, literature, the (fictional) life of Kafka, and even the scientific concept of the multiverse. To Rhona, the novel is about the failure of bringing these things together – or, in other words, the problem of ‘non-arrival’ that Judith Butler articulates in her essay, ‘Who Owns Kafka’.

We spoke at length about the role of Kafka in Krauss’ novel, but also his role as a ‘Jewish’ writer – insofar that he is one. As Butler remarks in her essay, ‘“What have I in common with Jews?” [Kafka] wrote in a diary entry in 1914. “I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.”’ (Judith Butler, ‘Who Owns Kafka?’, London Review of Books).

Just as Kafka is ‘claimed’ as a Jewish writer, Nicole is ‘claimed’ as a successful Jewish author in Tel Aviv. As Friedman remarks to her: “You really think your writing belongs to you?”, he is echoing the questions of authorship and belonging that Butler puts forward in ‘Who Owns Kafka?’. Here, ‘belonging’ does not simply refer to the act of ‘belonging’ to a country or culture (or ‘feeling at home’), but of ownership – perhaps this is why the barriers holding stable identities start to fail in Krauss’ novel.

In Philip Roth’s essay, ‘Looking at Kafka,’ he charts an imagined future for Kafka, a ‘what if’. But in doing so he domesticates him – he has Kafka move to New York, gets him a teaching position, and sets him up with his aunt. Similarly, Nicole and Epstein are forced to inherit and live out Jewish narratives in the novel. Nicole becomes a new Kafka, locked away in his house in the desert (if indeed it is his house), and forced to live out the end of his life, thus fully ‘claimed’ as a Jewish writer, but also becoming ‘a Jew wandering in the desert’ – a cliché, a pastiche. Epstein, on the other hand, starts to inhabit the role of King David: Klausner insists that he is the descendent of King David, and at the end, Epstein ends up playing David in film, going through a Kafka-like metamorphosis into his supposed forefather.

I also think Kafka’s Metamorphosis creates an interesting framework to discuss the failure of language I touched upon earlier. Gregor Samsa’s inability to communicate as a beetle is certainly mirrored in Krauss: the novel is full of misunderstandings, missed connections, and miscommunications. Someone is always speaking the wrong language (Hebrew, Yiddish, English). Meaning is lost or distrusted – Nicole doesn’t trust narrative, and often questions her own writing (‘Is that what I wrote?). Krauss imagines that Kafka learnt to write in Hebrew, and so Nicole is given a Hebrew typewriter to complete his work. In real life, Butler explains how Kafka was claimed as a German author because of his perfect ‘pure’ German (see Butler essay) – thus, by ‘claiming’ Kafka as a Jewish writer at the level of language, and ‘claiming’ Nicole by forcing her to continue writing the story in Hewbrew, the novel enacts this battleground on language.

In Joshua Cohen’s Moving Kings, failure of communication is everywhere. Uri attempts to speak to his lawyer, who doesn’t understand Yiddish, but his lawyer thinks that he’s speaking Hebrew. When Uri speaks to the to the Rabbi, he says that his beard is the interpretation of Uri’s dream (Cohen, p. 116). The therapist mixes up the Hebrew word for ‘cool’ with ‘dad’. David’s daughter Tammy majors in communication studies, but she’s failing every class except Spanish. And then, of course, there are Dina’s emails, titled ‘Re: Bad New’. At every turn, communication falls apart.

In his presentation, Mo pointed out that Cohen’s previous novel, Book Of Numberswas described as ‘one of the five best Jewish novels ever written’. However, Mo wasn’t so sure this one lived up to the same standard. He argued that when you read it, it’s not as striking – the prose is interesting, but it doesn’t blow you away.

Mo brought up some convincing arguments. Firstly, there is the David Mamet-esque dialogue, filled with hard New York tough-guy characters and overplayed masculinity. Then there are the dense sentences, which can be, at times, overwritten or overwrought. As Michael Kalisch pointed out, the language is clogged, overly smart, frenetic, reminding him of David Foster-Wallace. Over-description clogs the reading experience at every turn – especially when we run into phrases such as ‘swimfit in a slimcut suit’ (p. 28), or ‘rubbleshouldered Route 1 rose into eyesquint and earpop’ (p. 40). 

I was really interested in the way that David’s language, and the dialogue of the early scenes, creates a frame of banality and insincerity around the novel. The overwraught sentences come as slabs of banality in the text, drawing us out of sincere moments. And the letters from evicted people jar with the overall tone established (precariously) at first. Rather than following the trend of ‘new sincerity’ that we’ve seen in other novels on this course, Cohen’s novel felt like a departure into ‘faux sincerity’. The prose is affectless, cynical. Because of this, the notes from the evicted tenants feel suddenly soppy. 

However, James Wood, in his review of the book for the New Yorker, doesn’t read these stories with the same cynicism – in fact, he seems more interested in these stories than in the novel itself. Somehow, I got the sense that if you read these like sentimental and heart-wrenching, it’s easier for them to pass. But, as they are framed by the insincerity and overwrought language, it becomes hard to read them un-cynically. The letters, then, become a parody, just like the novel as a whole becomes a parody of narrative coherence.

One thing I would have loved to discuss further is how Cohen’s book relates to the topic of gentrification, and how it differs from our discussion of Markovits and Mengestu. In his novel, Cohen draws out some interesting and disturbing similarities between gentrification and settlement. For example, Tammy is described as a gentrifier, living in an unnamed neighbourhood in New York; at times, Cohen also uses the word ‘settler’. Uri and Yoav, as part of the Israeli army, are also a form of ‘settlers’ – but their role is complicated by the idea of the Israeli-nation state.

Lastly, I’m interested in the idea of the body politic in Cohen’s novel, and how it is enacted differently in the Israeli nation-state and in the United States. In Israel, it seems that the politics exerted on the body are more straightforward, singular, physical. Young men like Uri and Yoav are drafted into the army and must serve for two years, falling under the command of a nation-state in which ‘Nothing ever happened out of whim or caprice. Everything was logical, logistical, systematic, each mission backed by a sacrosanct wisdom to which the average grunting soldier would never be privy.’ (Cohen, p. 104). In the States, however, the pressures of the body politic are more multiplicitous, as we saw in Markovits’ novel. What seems to be oppressing the American characters is money; Tammy’s life is defined by the pocket-money from her father; David is controlled by the ‘Pro-Growth’ body politic (Cohen, p. 15); and they are all active participants in gentrification. All this led me back to thinking of Butler’s essay, the politic of the Jewish nation-state, the politics of ‘non-arrival’, and the body politic. [Caroline Koktvedgaard, CRK]

—

Thanks for an excellent post-class note, Caroline. I want to briefly pursue the parallels between Krauss’s novel and Roth’s story, and to think more about the place of Kafka in the Jewish-American imaginary. In both texts, we could say that an alternative history brings Kafka ‘home’. In Roth’s story, that means Americanising Kafka, and imagining him in Newark, New Jersey; for Krauss, it means imagining Kafka making aliyah, living on a kibbutz, then working as a gardener in Tel Aviv. In both, Kafka’s ‘return’ prompts us to ask quite what we mean by ‘belonging’, a literary question but also a legal one, as Butler explores in relation to the ownership of Kafka’s manuscripts, and which she connects more broadly to the ‘right of return’ that is such an intractable problem in Israeli-Palestinian politics (sometimes called the Law of Return, recalling the Before the Law parable in The Trial, which Krauss makes much of). Kafka emblematises a diasporic sensibility that both writers want to claim or make their own, even as they explore the tension inherent to this. More ambitiously, both texts are also preoccupied with the relationship between survival and literary posterity: if Kafka had survived, he would not be remembered, at least, not in the same way. And behind this equation, there seems to be a darker anxiety about the place of the Holocaust in Jewish identity , the idea that memorialising always involves a kind of Max Brod-esque  myth-making – this is something Roth explores much further and more daringly in The Ghost Writer, in which Anne Frank is alive and well in America…

Thinking about the place of Israel and the Holocaust in the novel, its interesting to note – and not just as literary gossip – the parallels between Krauss’s work and that of her ex-husband, Jonathan Safran Foer. At the start of class, I described Forest Dark, a little flippantly, as Krauss’s ‘divorce novel’; Foer’s equivalent was Here I Am, published in the same year, and also involving the breakdown of a marriage, and a plot based in Israel. It’s not the first time this has happened: Krauss’s The History of Love (2005) and Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) also overlapped in ways that can be read not simply biographically, but as reflecting something broader about third-generation Jewish-American fiction, its relationship to traumatic Jewish history, and its changing perspective on Israel.

With references to Kafka, Spinoza, and Bruno Schulz, Krauss situates her work in relation to a much-mythologised Eastern European Jewish intellectual culture, and her novels seem to owe a lot to the sentimental shtick (which I love, by the way) of Isaac Bashevis Singer. I think what we took in class to be the acidic tone of Moving Kings – what we called its cynicism – has to do with a kind of hyper-vigilance against this shtick. In class, we talked about Cohen’s prose as frenetic and jarring, and discussed its inability to stick with one scene, with one character, with one narrative style, and how this related to the novel’s theme of displacement, of being ‘unsettled’; but I think it also guards against the dreaminess and easy reverie of Krauss’s prose. Cohen isn’t interested in a mythic Jewish, intellectual past; he’s pursuing a much riskier parallel between (near) contemporary American and Israeli politics, between the displacement and disenfranchisement of both late capitalism and military occupation. I’m not sure it always comes off – I think the narrative, unlike his other works, is a bit too summarily compressed – but its worth paying attention to how much we were troubled by the prose style. [MK]