SOURCE: Beck, Evelyn Torton. “Gender, Judaism, and Power: A Jewish Feminist Approach to Kafka.” In Approaches to Teaching Kafka's Short Fiction, edited by Richard T. Gray, pp. 35-42. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1995.

In the following essay, Beck, using a Jewish feminist approach, looks at the influence of Yiddish theater on Kafka's short ficiton.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Long before I became aware of the significance of gender, my approach to the study of literature was both contextual and integrative. I took it as given that art is not separable from life and that establishing the cultural and biographical contexts of an artist's work is as essential to an understanding of a text as is the analysis of symbol, imagery, and language...