SOURCE: Wasserman, Martin. “Kafka's ‘The Animal in the Synagogue’: His Marten as a Special Biblical Memory.” Studies in Short Fiction 34, no. 2 (spring 1997): 241-45.

In the following essay, Wasserman posits that the marten-like character in “The Animal in the Synagogue” symbolizes the female prophet Huldah.

Exploring the identity of Kafka's marten-like creature in his story, “The Animal in the Synagogue,” Marthe Robert speculated that it should be viewed as the memory of something sacred (113-14). Elaborating on Robert's conjecture, I would argue that the marten specifically symbolized the female prophet, Huldah.¹

Kafka probably wrote “The Animal in the Synagogue” in 1923,² when he had become quite competent in his understanding of Hebrew. One of his teachers, Jiri Langer—who had been a member of the Hasidic sect and thus would have been highly proficient in Hebrew—said of his student: “Yes, Kafka spoke Hebrew. We always spoke Hebrew in the...