This book argues that both Franz Kafka’s personality and his literary activity were perceived by himself as exemplifying the modern Jewish predicament of aspiring to modernity while being tied to a past-civilization, thus finding oneself struggling in a vacuum.
In an exposition of writer S.Y. Abramovitsh, this work shows the symbolic importance of his central character, Mendele the Bookseller, and explores the history of Yiddish fiction in Russia during the 19th century.