Friday, 26 November 2021

Kafka, the Middle East Version

 


What if Kafka had been lived in the Middle East? Would his writing be even more painful and heartaching? How absurd life can be, especially when humans meet the institutions made by men?

Although acknowleding her disillusioning, Lizzie Doron is far from being an apologetic for one cause or another. At least not in Who the Fuck is Kafka, a personal account of an encounter with a Palestinian writer, Nadim, at a Peace Conference in Rome. I had access to this book in audiobook format in an exceptional arrangement played, among others by Corinne Kirchhoff, translated from Hebrew into German by the late Mirjam Pressler

Doron´s first person account can be compared from the point of view of the information with the stories of Sayed Kashua. It starts though as a two-way effort to understand the situation of Palestinians, through coming back and forth from fears to compassion and human understanding. The voice of the author, as an Israeli living in the proximity of the terrorist attacks of the Second Intifada, a mother, daughter of a Holocaust survivor. 

It is important to try to understand the other side, it is the first step towards trust, but it is not enough though. Personally, I want to see solutions, I want to see a future without conflict, but how exactly this future may look like should be the task of people living there. Although now I am more informed about the conflict as I was 5 or even 4 years ago, I am still convinced that peace has two different meanings for each of the two sides. Will it be possible, any time soon, to go out of the kafkian paradigm?


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