On the Threshold of a New Kabbalah: Kafka’s Later Tales by Walter A. Strauss

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This is a study of the last phase in Kafka’s short career, concentrating on his intensive preoccupation with the problem of writing (and of self-regeneration): the attempt to link himself to the Jewish tradition as well as to the literature of the past, and at the same time to renovate it radically because it no longer adequately served the «truth» that writers search for. This paradoxical quest, whose nucleus is the parable and the short fable, is the «New Kabbalah» to which the title refers and which was suggested by an entry into Kafka’s diary in 1922.