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 Italian Commedia dell’Arte—which has wielded considerable sway over Western comedic traditions, from the works of Shakespeare and Molière to the likes of Dario Fo. In Kafka’s upbringing, all this had been cast aside as vulgar entertainment or mere shtetl jest. However, his diary entry dated 6 October 1911, beautifully encapsulates his raw, visceral response to these exuberant extravaganzas:
Some songs, the pronunciation ‘jüdische Kinderloch’, some glimpses of this woman, who on the stage, because she’s a Jew draws us listeners to her because we’re Jews, without longing for or curiosity about Christians, sent a tremor over my cheeks.1
Oh, and then there was ‘that woman’. Mania Tschissik. No point in pretending Kafka wasn’t smitten. His diaries from that time are practically dripping with it, chronicling every gesture, every glance, every... everything about Mania. Take this lyrical entry from 8 October:
As if in childlike complaint her mouth opens, running above and below into delicately shaped indentations, one thinks that this beautiful word formation, which spreads the light of the vowels in the words and with the tip of the tongue preserves the pure contour of the words, can succeed only once and marvels at its everlastingness.
On 19 December, he adds, “the beautifully rounded moderately strong large body didn’t belong to her face yesterday, and she reminded me vaguely of hybrid creatures like mermaids, sirens, centaurs”—already, this motif of cross-breed creatures that Kafka would explore time and again.
Was Kafka’s affair with Yiddish theatre just an excuse to brood over Mania? Well, not quite, though she certainly added a particular... spice to his passion. Kafka being... Kafka, he couldn’t exactly let her know. Besides, Frau Tschissik was already spoken for. So, what else could he do? Confess his feelings to himself, maybe? To his diary, mainly... But most of all, he poured his desires into an enthusiasm for everything Yiddish.
Kafka’s journal entries from this period are incredibly abundant, and a real treasure trove. They reveal a man obsessed with detail, dissecting every gesture, every inflexion, every nuance of the actors, rendered with the precision of an entomologist scrutinising a rare insect. Take, for instance, his description of the actress Flora Klug:
In a caftan short black pants, white stockings, a white shirt of thin wool that rises out of a black vest, is held in front at the neck by a thread button and then folds over into a broad, loose, flaring collar. On her head, enclosing her woman’s hair but necessary anyhow and worn by her husband too, a small dark brimless cap, over it a large soft black hat with an upturned brim.
This isn’t just a costume description. Kafka’s eye misses nothing, from the thread button at the neck to the layered headwear. It’s as if he’s trying to decode a secret language, a meticulous catalogue of cultural signifiers.
But Kafka’s fascination wasn’t limited to what happened on stage. He buddy-buddied with Löwy. Spent hours chattering about theatre, literature, and the peculiarities of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Löwy, a charismatic, passionate champion of Yiddish culture, became a sort of mentor to Kafka, introducing him to a realm of folklore and superstition, whose bizarreness was entirely new to him. Like dipping your fingers in water after waking up to scare off demons. Or the belief that sipping from an imperfect glass lets evil spirits invade your body. Perhaps they also talked about the dybbuk, an evil spirit that could possess the living; or the golem, a creature fashioned from clay and animated by mystical incantations to protect the Jewish community from anti-Semitic attacks; or maybe a hybrid abomination that combined traits of both entities… What else? Perhaps Jewish humour with its abundance of cheekyass jokes about Moses who extended his penis to part the sea and whatnot… But that’s an entirely different story.
At any rate, for Kafka, raised in a household that prized assimilation over tradition, these stories were a window into a world both familiar and utterly foreign... a jigsaw puzzle to reassemble his forgotten identity.
Kafka’s engagement with Yiddish culture quickly developed into an intensive study. He began to immerse himself in Jewish history and literature. In his diary, he notes with a touch of humour: “Today greedily and happily began to read Geschichte des Judentums (History of the Jews, 1888) by Grätz. Because my longing for it had far overtaken the reading, it was at first stranger to me than I thought and I had to stop now and then to let my Judaism collect itself in peace.”
This fixation on Yiddish dragged on, culminating in February 1912 when Kafka held a speech on the Yiddish language (which he referred to as the ‘Jargon’) at a fundraising event he’d organised for Löwy’s troupe. In this speech, Kafka celebrated the ‘liveliness’ of Yiddish, linking it to the language’s peculiar grammar and vocabulary, which borrows from German, Hebrew, and Slavic languages. He told his audience:
You draw already very close to the Jargon when you consider that besides knowledge there are other forces and connections to forces at work in you that enable you to understand Jargon by feeling it. Only at this point can the explainer be of help by reassuring you, so that you will no longer feel excluded and recognise also that you must no longer complain about not understanding Jargon. This is crucial because with every complaint, understanding evaporates. But if you remain calm, you will suddenly be in the midst of Jargon. As soon as Jargon has taken hold of you—and Jargon is everything, word, Hasidic melody, and the character of the Eastern European actor—you will no longer recognise your former tranquility. It is then that you get to experience the true unity of the Jargon, and so forcefully that you will become afraid though not of the Jargon but of yourself.2
This speech unveils his evolving relationship with the language, marking a profound shift in Kafka’s attitude towards his Jewish heritage. Once alienated, he now embraced and celebrated an expressive, and deeply rooted culture. But Kafka, as always, despite his growing passion for the language, maintained a certain critical distance. He was quick to point out, with an air of superiority, the ‘incorrect’ grammar sprinkled throughout Löwy’s Yiddish-compromised German. While editing Löwy’s article ‘On the Jewish Theatre,’ Kafka struggled to balance what he saw as the ‘liveliness’ of Yiddish expression with his own meticulous adherence to proper German grammar. This tension between his newfound excitement for Yiddish culture and his identity as a German-language writer would haunt him for the rest of his life. Yet the influence of this new passion on his work was profound and permanent.
It’s worth noting that not everyone was thrilled about this new passion. His father, for instance, would roll his eyes at the mention of the subject. ‘He who lies down with dogs gets up with bugs,’ he’d sneer, referring to Löwy. Of course, this dismissiveness only fueled Kafka’s fascination further. It gave him a reason to defy his overbearing father. And guess what? Kafka didn’t forget that little jab when he penned ‘The Metamorphosis’ a few months later.
Tensions with his father were indeed escalating, worsened by Kafka’s lack of enthusiasm for the family business. Hermann and his son-in-law, Karl Hermann (Elli’s husband), had recently started a new asbestos factory, Hermann & Co., and wanted Franz on board as a partner, thinking it might ‘cure’ him of his ‘pointless scribbling’. Kafka caved but found the factory only deepened his sense of suffocation and hopelessness. His days were now consumed between the AUVA, the family store, and now the asbestos factory. No time for literary pursuits, and when there was, he was exhausted. In his diary, he complains:
The torment that the factory causes me. Why did I let it pass when they obligated me to work there in the afternoon [that is, after his work at the AUVA in the morning]? Now no one compels me by force, but my father does so with reproaches, Karl with silence and my sense of guilt.
Ultimately, caught between the demands of his family and the pull of his artistic ambitions, Kafka retreated further into his writing. His diaries from that time are a jumble of thoughts—frantic scribbles, feverish ideas. He’s all too conscious of his frailties, moaning about insomnia, exhaustion, and a body “too long for its weakness”. Yet, despite these worries, a deeper sense of creative drive was sparking within him...
Before his theatre epiphany, Kafka’s literary output had been scant. He’d churned out bits and bobs like ‘Description of a Struggle’, ‘Wedding Preparations in the Country’, ‘The Urban World’, and more recently, a ‘novel’ co-written with Brod, Richard and Samuel based on their Italy and Paris travel notebooks (they never went beyond chapter 1)3. All these projects ended up languishing in his drawer, mostly unread. But in the months following his encounter with the Yiddish theatre troupe, Kafka experienced a burst of creative energy. During this time, he wrote some of his most famous works, as we will soon see. While these works are not explicitly about Jewish themes, they are infused with a new sense of urgency, probing identity, belonging, and alienation—directly linked to his engagement with Yiddish culture.
For instance, think of the schlemiel. As Isaac Bashevis Singer, a prominent Yiddish author, points out in his Paris Review interview:
the Yiddish writer was really not brought up with the idea of heroes. I mean there were very few heroes in the Jewish ghettos—very few knights and counts and people who fought duels and so on. In my own case, I don’t think I write in the tradition of the Yiddish writers’ “little man,” because their little man is actually a victim—a man who is a victim of anti-Semitism, the economic situation, and so on. My characters, though they are not big men in the sense that they play a big part in the world, still they are not little, because in their own fashion they are men of character, men of thinking, men of great suffering.4
That perennial Yiddish figure, the little man, the schlemiel, whether victim or not—like the bumbling, blundering Zanni and Arlecchino of the Commedia dell’Arte—infests Kafka’s work everywhere, even in his own persona. Think of Karl Roßmann or Josef K. And it permeates Russian and American literature too, from Akaky Akakievich in ‘The Overcoat’ to Chaplin’s Little Tramp (Charlot) and beyond, all the way to the Coen Brothers’ films, like Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo or Larry Gopnik in A Serious Man... But I digress.
Moreover, Kafka’s meticulous observations of the Yiddish actors’ mannerisms and physicality seeped into his own prose. He began, even in his diaries, to zero in on the minutiae of movement and expression, crafting the eerie, dreamlike ambience that would become his hallmark. The story’s focus on Gregor’s struggle to control his new body possibly echoes Kafka’s fascination with physical expressiveness—a blend of German Expressionism and Yiddish theatre.
Kafka’s engagement with Yiddish culture also influenced his approach to language itself. Yiddish was no dead language; it was alive, kicking, thrashing, twisting, a bizarre hotchpotch germinating in the mouths of its speakers, shaped by their needs, their dreams, their joys, their sorrows. This possibly contrasted with Kafka’s view of German as a more rigid, formal language, set above the ordinary business of life—pure, airtight, abstract. This tension is reflected in Kafka’s distinctive prose style, which merges precise, almost legalistic language with surreal, dreamlike visuals that would influence other authors down the line, particularly the Magical Realist movement in Spanish American Literature.
In the following years, Kafka kept wrestling with questions of Jewish identity and culture. He studied Hebrew and even toyed with the idea of moving to Palestine. Yet, as with many other projects, he failed to follow through. His later works, like The Castle or A Report to an Academy, persist in exploring themes of alienation, identity, and the struggle to belong that were central to his engagement with Jewish culture. Ultimately, Kafka’s brush with Yiddish theatre didn’t quite disentangle his alienation or his Jewish identity crisis. But it handed him a fresh lexicon, both literal and figurative, to delve into these matters in his writing.
As someone of French and Spanish descent living in the UK, I sometimes grapple with these questions. What hidden parts of my hybrid identity am I trying to hide? What parts am I yearning to explore? What unforeseen encounters might shape my own voice and outlook? Because who knows? Who knows what might be lingering just beyond the corners of our existence? If a night at the theatre could turn an insurance clerk into one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, who knows what might be waiting for any of us just around the corner by delving into long-neglected traditions with a singularly obsessive fervour?
Franz Kafka, The Diaries, translated by Ross Benjamin, New York, Schocken, 2022.
Franz Kafka, An Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language, 1912.
In The Metamorphosis and other Stories, Schocken, pp. 279-296.
Paris Review: Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Art of Fiction No. 42.
I never knew of this side of Kafka! Thanks so much...