kafka & schulz
Mr.Stein''s article is interesting but overlooks a fundamental point that the Israeli''s ignore too. As my Muse & Messiah: The Life, Imagination & Legacy of Bruno Schulz (Inkermen Press 2006) points out, Kafka & Schulz were OUTSIDE their ancestral religion because they did not participate in them, they were secularised. Kafka could not spell the Hebrew for circumciser, and did not attend a synagogue in adulthood until his last year. They did not eat kosher, and Schulz seems not have had a bar mitvah while he also publicly stated in the local newspaper that he no longer considered himself of the faith. So what does being Jewish apply to? A designate that was by no means a ''community'' before the war anyway but subject to bitter dispute. Both writers spoke AUSTRIAN German (as under the Habsburg Empire) not German, that is the point of Kafka''s discussions with his lovers. Yad Vashem Museum displays Schulz as a ''Jewish artist'' with no mention of Poland, that is the absurdity. And why, Sir, is Prague an invalid home for the archive? Even allowing for its ignoring of him until a tourist attraction, Kafka lived there most of his life. It has more validity than for say Rilke, who disliked it. The Czechs and Slovaks recognised a country called Bohemia. The problem is that Institutes (and now states join the greedy Klondike trail) think they have a monopoly on artistic heritage; they do not. Cultural spaces during biography hold and retain that right, it overrides sordid bickering at least.best wishes Brian R. Banks