Alienation from oneself, the conflicted assimilation of migrants, losing one place without gaining another… This feels like Kafka in the genuine clothes of an existential prophet, Kafka in his twenty-first-century aspect (if we are to assume, as with Shakespeare, that every new century will bring a Kafka close to our own concerns). For there is a sense in which Kafka’s Jewish question (‘What have I in common with Jews?’) has become everybody’s question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts.15 What is Muslimness? What is femaleness? What is Polishness? What is Englishness? These
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