It's hard to imagine two more disparate characters: the Hasidic rabbi rooted in the life of the 18th-century shtetl and the secular novelist of early 20th-century Prague. And yet in linking the biographies of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka in this profound study, poet and scholar Rodger Kamenetz weaves a web of connection so intricate it seems plausible that one of his subjects might have stared into a mirror and seen the other's face.
The most obvious correspondence, and the incident that lends the book its title, is the direction each gave a close friend near the end of his life to burn his books. In Rabbi Nachman's case, a disciple acceded to that request, and, as is more widely known of Kafka, his acolyte Max Brod defied that directive. But this strange request only superficially unites the two men, and it is in its painstaking yet lively literary exegesis of their at times eerily similar works that Burnt Books excels.
Kamenetz's thesis is that the Hasid and the novelist "both adopted the same literary form, the Hasidic parable, and made it entirely new." Indeed, he suggests, the parallels between some of their stories are so strong he imagines "somehow Franz Kafka was a reincarnation, a gilgul, of Rabbi Nachman."
In brief but penetrating chapters, Kamenetz compares the themes of Kafka's classic stories to the more obscure but equally masterful tales of the rabbi. "In The Trial and 'The Humble King,' " for example, "both men write a midrash (commentary) on Job, using the metaphor of a cosmically unjust legal system." Most of all, this is a book about the power of stories because, Kamentz concludes, "our souls are made of the stories that we've taken in most deeply, that have become part of us. The literature we love mingles with our deepest substance."
Although it's not as exotic as the Tibetan trip Kamenetz chronicled in The Jew in the Lotus, there's also a journey at the heart of Burnt Books. After a visit to the Ukraine town of Kamenetz-Podolsk, he joins some 20,000 followers of Rabbi Nachman on an ecstatic Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage to Uman, where the rabbi died in 1810. He carries with him a coffee mug bearing a likeness of Kafka, as if to symbolically unite his two subjects. "These two dead Jews must meet," he asserts, "for their spirits still haunt the world."
As might be expected in a volume that treats the lives of two such complex figures in a short space, some of its concepts will be challenging to the casual reader. Still, one comes away from this enchanting, often deeply moving book inspired and wanting to learn even more about these two astonishing men.--Harvey Freedenberg
Shelf Talker: Rodger Kamenetz's dual biography of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka is an intellectually stimulating exploration of the lives of two classic Jewish storytellers.