Essay: Zionism, Judaism and Palestine in Fiction- The Case of Franz Kafka
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Salman Kureishy analyses the context and interpretations of the story through the lens of Zionism, Colonialism, and Palestine in Kafka’s short story Jackals and Arabs.
“If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skulls, then why do we read it? ….. What we must have are those books that come on us like a misfortune, like the death of one we love better than ourselves….A book must be like an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us.
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) occupies a unique place in modern literature. He is widely regarded as one of the first writers of European modernism and existential crises, a stylist in the German language and literature, as well as a master storyteller. His stories and novels have become markers of a mood of alienation, anxiety, and dread known as “Kafkaesque”– as relevant in Western as in Eastern social, political, and cultural life. One of his remarkable stories, tucked among some 55 ‘shorter stories’ in The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka’, is “Jackals and Arabs”.
