A Yiddish Night at the Café Savoy

Wherein our insurance clerk trades actuarial tables for Yiddish theatre, much to his father's chagrin, and discovers a world of gesticulating actors, identity crises, and a dash of forbidden romance.

Now visualise our insurance clerk—bowler hat and all—Herr Kafka, his days consumed by factory safety reports, suddenly transfixed by a ragtag bunch of Eastern European Jewish actors performing on the modest stage of Prague’s Café Savoy. It’s autumn 1911, and Kafka is about to embark on a love affair with an art form he had previously ignored: Yiddish theatre. This wasn’t just a fleeting fancy. He spent months absorbing these performances as if they were holy scriptures, befriending actors and filling his diaries with observations so precise they bordered on obsession.

But why? What drew this son of German-speaking, assimilated Jews to a culture his father dismissed as beneath them?

Enter Yitzhak Löwy and his troupe of wandering actors from Lemberg, Galicia—today’s Lviv in Ukraine. They transformed Kafka. Here was a form of Jewish expression unabashedly proud, vibrant, and deeply rooted in an ancient heritage that one could rank alongside other traditions of the theatre, such as the Ital…