Hunger Artist & Other Stories / Poems & Songs of Love

Kafka’s writings are characterised by an extreme sensitivity manifested in absurdity, alienation, and gallows humour, and these two particular collections of short pieces, A Country Doctor (1919) and A Hunger Artist (1924), represent later works in the corpus. Poems & Songs of Love is a translation of the collection Piyyutim ve-Shirei Yedidot by Georg Mordechai Langer, which contains an elegy to Langer’s friend and mentor Franz Kafka. Langer and Kafka hailed from the same middle-class, assimilated, Jewish Prague background and shared a mutual interest in Hasidic culture, literature, and Hebrew. This collaborative translation by Elana and Menachem Wolff brings the fascinating work of Langer – poems as well as an essay on Kafka – to the English-reading public for the first time, and sheds light on a hitherto unexplored relationship.