ABSTRACT
To my knowledge, I was neither a lesbian nor a feminist when I began my Kafka research in 1966, but that doesn't explain my continuing interest in his life and works long after I began to use a feminist lens and even after I came out as a lesbian in the mid-1970s. It only explains why gender issues are not part of the discussion in my 1971 book, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater: Its Impact on His Works. This essay is an attempt to chart my journey with Kafka and to explore the meanings of my absorption in his work which continued long after I had lost interest in working with texts by virtually all other male writers of fiction, including those I had been teaching in my “Yiddish Literature in Translation” courses.
