The Brooklyn Rail

Franz Kafka completed his final story “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” just weeks before his death in spring 1924. Published alongside “A Hunger Artist,” another late text, famous for its musings on rejection and obscurity, “Josephine” remains unique among the author’s fables for its aestheticism and the unexpected beauty of its hero, a woman seeking “unambiguous, permanent recognition of her art.” Most striking is Kafka’s ambivalence toward the incorrigible singer and the community that indulges and later betrays her.

Kafka’s story has long fascinated the artist Zoe Beloff, who in past projects looked at Bertolt Brecht and Sergei Eisenstein in Hollywood, and Sigmund Freud’s 1909 visit to Coney Island. In a new film, she sets “Josephine the Singer” on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where she has lived and worked for decades. Beloff's version is not a full-scale adaptation. (For that, see Sergey Masloboyshchikov’s extraordinary Ukrainian film of 1994.) Nor is it a simple recitation, though the dozen or so actors Beloff cast as mouse folk—a few, like Kate Valk, affiliated with the experimental Wooster Group—speak Kafka’s blocks of exacting sentences verbatim.

Together, they narrate the unhappy story of the mouse folk (usually viewed as stand-ins for European Jewry), who gather around Josephine in times of crisis. Her singing, they say, “is not so much a performance of songs, as an assembly of the people.” Theirs is, further, an “unmusical” race. They only know ordinary “piping,” which Josephine can barely exceed, though something in her voice, or maybe her appearance—“delicacy itself”—enchants them. “In the brief intervals between struggles,” one mouse says, “our people dream.”

Josephine herself is described as “half-dying in sheer wonderment at the sounds she is producing,” yet all the same, “she has learned not to expect real understanding.” For most of the mouse folk, by contrast, art is a source of constant anxiety, threatening to delude, to intoxicate, to rob them of care, attention, and time. After Josephine demands exemption from physical labor, her public flatly denies her: “The people are capable of presenting a stony, impenetrable front to one of their own.” And when, in outrage, she departs their little world, her absence barely registers.

The strength of Beloff’s approach lies in retaining Kafka’s language yet lending it a theatricality. While the entirety of the original text is told in continuous monologue, Beloff’s ensemble voices a chorus of exasperated gossip. Now it is the whole community that scrutinizes the diva, calling her “vulgar,” “sarcastic,” “arrogant,” “blinded by self-conceit,” “unladylike,” all the while going about their daily lives, sweeping the walk, making tea. One of them is a cobbler and speaks from inside his booth on Grand Street, surrounded by tools and scraps of leather. Children are among the actors too.

In Beloff’s hands, Kafka feels very near to us. Who could say they’ve never met a Josephine? Or seen a woman scapegoated? Beloff poses these questions to anyone who’s walked through East River Park on a cold morning or sat beneath the elms in Marble Cemetery on East 2nd Street. But Kafka’s story is also, principally, an allegory. The critic Clement Greenberg, who translated the text for the Partisan Review in 1942, described it as a “tissue of figures, likenesses, parables.” Theorists have identified Josephine with the State, and separately with the Biblical Joseph, sold into slavery by his brothers. According to Kafka’s biographer Reiner Stach, the story represents the writer’s chief preoccupations: “an absolute claim to truth, which only the art of the autonomous individual could fulfill” and, at the same time, “a yearning for a concrete social and physical connection to one’s own group.” These desires can never quite be reconciled—so Kafka believed, though Beloff leaves room for doubt.

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Screened in tandem with Josephine, Beloff’s other new film, Life Forgotten, responds to Kafka’s pessimism with a portrait of a poor, Jewish community politicized by exposure to early cinema, again on the Lower East Side. The film recounts the true story of a nickelodeon at 58 Willett Street, just below the Williamsburg Bridge, owned by a Galician impresario called Frank Seiden (played by Ariel Shafir). For five cents, anyone, including “ladies without escorts,” could watch a film like G. W. Bitzer’s The Broker’s Athletic Typewriter (1905), about a Wall Street stenographer resisting a lecherous executive, or D. W. Griffith’s social drama The Song of the Shirt (1908), starring Florence Lawrence as a woman struggling to find work while her sister slowly dies of consumption.

Standing in the wings, Seiden and his sons improvise dialogue for the films, while a crowd of Yiddish-speaking immigrants and working women—one of them based on the real-life labor organizer Clara Lemlich (Maria Perez)—hiss and cheer and cry “exploiter!,” at one point rising to sing a solidarity anthem. The history of the devastating Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the uprising of furious garment workers is woven into these scenes, along with startling footage of workhouses in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and of Rivington Street swarmed with jobless men in old clothes.

Though the second film stars many of the actors from Josephine, the mise en scène is entirely different—stagey, black-and-white, with surreal elements (Valk reading a broadside in the sky above the theater) and brief theatrical tableaux. Using marionettes, Lemlich recounts her early life in the Pale of Settlement. Later, two young women act out Karl Marx’s theory of value—one plays a bolt of linen, the other a wool coat. All of it is shot in elegant 16 mm by Beloff’s partner, the cinematographer Eric Muzzy. Beloff herself designed the costumes and sets, as well as the placards, movie adverts, and sewing templates (many of them fashioned during a residency at the Museum of Industry in Ghent). The film’s final scenes employ more archival material—footage of a donkey thrashing on a vaudeville stage, then a baboon in starched collar, bowing a violin. The clips are paired with a haunting reflection from Walter Benjamin: “Kafka never tired of hearing about the forgotten from animals.” The greater question: what must we try to remember?

Life Forgotten, with its Brechtian mix of song, puppetry, newsreels, and visions of a bustling, dysfunctional metropolis, may, at a glance, seem an odd fit with the spare misery and deferral of Kafka’s fiction. But Kafka spent countless hours absorbed in theoretical fantasy—his diaries of 1911 show him attending the Yiddish theater every week. He is remembered by Benjamin for his belief that life is a kind of proscenium: “Kafka’s world is a world theater,” Benjamin wrote, in a passage quoted in Beloff’s film. “Man is on stage from the very beginning.” The movies were another source of attraction. According to documentarian Hanns Zischler, it was during a screening of Ya’acov Ben-Dov’s Shivat Zion (1921) at Prague’s Lido-bio cinema that Kafka discovered the idea of Palestine—though he eventually declined to resettle there, describing his own strain of Judaism as “non-Zionist and non-practicing.”

Here, Beloff once more aligns with Kafka. “Those of us who are Jewish, socialist, atheist, anti-Zionists, we too have a history,” she writes in a note accompanying Life Forgotten, evoking a crucial moment, a century ago, when intellectuals (like Max Brod, Kafka’s best friend and literary executor) were endorsing a Jewish State as the best solution to European anti-semitism. Yet at the very same period in history, Beloff shows us a politically radical, diasporic Jewish culture struggling and surviving in the great theater of public life that was the Lower East Side.

Zoe Beloff’s Josephine the Singer (based on Willa and Edwin Muir’s translation of Kafka’s story) and Life Forgotten screened together in January at the Velaslavasay Panorama in Los Angeles and Shapeshifters Cinema in Oakland. A book based on Life Forgotten will be published this month, and an exhibition, recreating Seiden’s nickelodeon, and featuring a looped edition of Life Forgotten, will open at City Lore (56 East 1st Street) in July. Beloff will also screen Josephine in collaboration with the Film-Makers’ Cooperative.