Tied to German, Unable to Find a Foothold in Yiddish: Examining Kafka Editing Choices of Yitzhak Lowy's 'Vom judischen Theater'

When Franz Kafka first saw Yitzhak Lowy's Yiddish theater troupe perform in Prague in 1911, he was enthralled with this unabashed expression of Jewishness from the actors, which lead to an almost yearlong study of Yiddish language and theater. This study culminates in Kafka's speech on Yiddish, in which he claims that Yiddish had no fixed grammar, was made up entirely of loanwords, but that his audience would be able to understand more than they realize through their knowledge of German. In the speech, Kafka promotes speaking a faux Yiddish, imitating the sounds and structures of Yiddish speech, in German. In several letters to friends, Kafka includes quotes from Lowy. This article discusses a particularly long quote which has not been widely examined. in which Lowy's writing style features a blend of Yiddish and archaic, poetic German. Though Kafka expresses appreciation for Lowy's playfulness with German grammar, he also smugly states that it was difficult to understand. Kafka's own fixation with 'proper' German grammar did not allow him to replicate this way of speaking in his own works, which are famously free of regionalisms and which make only oblique references to Jewish culture and worldview. As editor of an article that Lowy wanted to publish in the magazine Der Jude, Kafka strikes a balance between maintaining 'proper' German grammar, while imitating features of Yiddish, such as the interspersion of Hebrew words within the German and, in one case, imitating Yiddish speech patterns. In this article, Kafka, as editor, is able to overcome his long-internalized anti-Semitic sentiments, which compel him to avoid regionalisms and direct references to Jewish culture, and his interest in Yiddish, which for him allows for an unabashed expression of that culture. Keywords: Kafka, Lowy, Yiddish, Editing, Untranslatability