Visions of Continuity and Rupture: Franz Kafka, S. An-ski, Isaac Babel, and Joseph Roth

Tuition: $325 | YIVO members: $250**

This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.

Instructor: Jonathan Brent

Between World War I and the onset of World War II, Jewish writers and thinkers in Eastern and Central Europe became acutely aware, perhaps more so than their Western European or American cousins, of the gathering forces of future catastrophe. They understood that cultural, social, as well as purely physical survival was at stake. From the visions of Franz Kafka to the more muted transformations in the work of Joseph Roth, these writers registered the profound threats to Jewish culture and historical memory.

In this class, we will examine works by four of the greatest of these writers: S. An-ski (1863-1920); Franz Kafka (1883-1924); Isaac Babel (1894-1939); and Joseph Roth (1894-1939). An-ski was born in what is now Belarus; Kafka in Prague; Babel and Roth, exact contemporaries, were born in Ukraine. We will examine the diaries of An-ski and Babel and Roth’s late novel Job to ask what these threats were and what recourses they imagined to preserve Jewish culture. How do we today evaluate the accuracy and value of their accounts? Are their visions still relevant to understanding Jewish history?

Course Materials:
Students should purchase the following books before the first date of class:

• “The Destruction of Galicia,” from An-ski’s Diary (1915) (The Dybbuk and Other Writings of S. Ansky, Yale Press) (Purchase)
• “A Report to An Academy,” Franz Kafka (1917) (The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Dover Thrift Editions) (Purchase)
• 1920 Diary, Isaac Babel (Yale Press) (Purchase)
• Job, Josef Roth (1930) (Archipelago Books) (Purchase)

Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. From 1991 to 2009 he was Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Brent is the co-author of Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Harper-Collins, 2003) and Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas Books, 2008). He is now working on a biography of the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Brent teaches history and literature at Bard College.

**Become a member today, starting at $54 for one year, and pay the member price for classes! You’ll save on tuition for this course and more on future classes and public programs tickets.