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Articles

Pamuk’s Dis-orient: Reassembling Kafka’s Castle in Snow (2002)

This article analyses the circuitous relationships between Franz Kafka’s last novel The Castle and Orhan Pamuk’s 2002 Snow. Though Pamuk’s “political novel” does not mention Kafka’s hero by name, K.’s pursuit of the domain of Count Westwest in The Castle lays the rhetorical groundwork for Pamuk’s narrative about Turkish modernity and political Islam. Snow is designed around a pyramid-like series of imbrications—ranging from Kafka’s “K.” to Pamuk’s hero “Ka” to the novel’s Turkish title “Kar” to the Eastern Turkish city of “Kars”—a poetic Verschachtelung that upends the traditional binary terms “East” and “West.”

Jews, Ethnicity and Identity in Early Modern Hamburg

During the seventeenth century a vibrant and complex Jewish community developed in Hamburg and its surrounding areas. This community was comprised of several sub-communities that varied because of social and economic factors, ethnic differences and external political pressures. Utilizing the protocol books of the Portuguese Jewish community in Hamburg, Bell examines the nature and scope of this community by considering the relations between Sephardic (Portuguese) and Ashkenazic (Tudesco) Jews. He concludes that ethnicity could be an important factor, but that ethnicity was only one in a range of factors that helped to shape early modern Jewish communal identity.

'Schriftstellerin zu sein und in seinem Leben anwesend zu sein, ist für mich eins': Ein Gespräch mit Terézia Mora

A conversation with the author Terézia Mora. The following interview was conducted in Berlin on September 11, 2007.