Kafka in Brontëland and Other Stories

by Tamar Yellin

Thirteen stories by the author of the critically acclaimed The Genizah at the House of Shepher address universal themes of yearning and displacement, love, loss and the struggle to belong. A latter-day Jewish Odysseus spends his life planning an intricate journey to the Promised Land, while an English father stranded in London mourns for his faraway Italian son. A man without a past searches the world for potential relatives, while in the title story, a Jew and a Muslim cast adrift in a Yorkshire landscape find momentary sisterhood over a copy of the Koran. Blending irony with pathos, the mythical with the mundane, Kafka in Brontëland gives voice to a rich mix of characters living outside traditional patterns of identity in a world of complex migrations and tumultuous change.

Genres: Short Stories

153 pages, Paperback

First published February 16, 2006

About the author

Tamar Yellin is an author and teacher who lives in Yorkshire. Her first novel, The Genizah at the House of Shepher, won the 2007 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

Tamar Yellin was raised in Leeds. Her father was a third-generation native of Jerusalem;[2] his father was Yitzhak Yaakov Yellin (1885–1964), one of the pioneers of the Hebrew language press in pre-state Israel. Her mother was the daughter of a Polish immigrant to England.

Yellin attended the Leeds Girls' High School. She studied biblical and modern Hebrew language and Arabic language at the University of Oxford

She spent 13 years writing her first novel, The Genizah at the House of Shepher (2005) and took two years to find a publisher. This was followed by a collection of 13 short stories, Kafka in Brontëland (2006) and another novel, Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes (2008). She also writes fiction for magazines, including The London Magazine and the Jewish Quarterly, and has published stories in two anthologies, The Slow Mirror and Other Stories: New Fiction by Jewish Writers (1996) and Mordecai's First Brush with Love: New Stories by Jewish Women in Britain (2004).

Yellin is a teacher for the Interfaith Education Center, in which capacity she speaks to non-Jewish schoolchildren about Jewish religious practices.

Reviews

[Des Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a remarkable book but – possibly because of that very remarkability – it seems to have been imprisoned in a forgotten library just as the letter-writer is imprisoned in the last story. I hope this review at least helps toward the book’s full release. From the penal colony of self toward a trial by readers, then, by some form of metamorphosis, gaining its due of dizzy heights…

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.

[Gregory Ashe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful collection of short stories. Each was tinged with a melancholic depressive quality that I thoroughly enjoyed.

[Vel Veeter]

Talk about not judging a book by its cover; this cover is terrible, but this book is pretty good.

This is a collection of short stories written by a second generation Eastern-European Jewish writer born and living in Northern England. Her collection often discusses the hybrid nature of her life and her heritage and because of the novelty of this mixing of cultures, I was found very interested and moved throughout, and thought through a lot of interesting things I’ve had a little but not a lot of experience with in reading.

I was also not sure what this book was going to be because of the bad cover, which you can see, but also that this is a small press book from 2006 and oddly has a quote form Jeff Vandermeer on the front, mostly known for Annihilation, so I really did think it was going to be science fiction.

The title story is by far the best, but there are other very good stories in this collection. A little too many of them feel like they’re covering and recovering familiar ground by the end, however.

What is interesting to me, a point brought up in the title story, is how many United Kingdom authors casually discusses Judaism, Jews, and Antisemitism in their writing, and have for centuries. So the reference to Bronteland goes over some of the particular ways in which this happens. But the famous examples are more than enough: Shakespeare’s Shylock, obviously, but also Fagin in Oliver Twist is repeatedly referred to simply as The Jew. Even modern writers have a probably unhealthy fascination–Iris Murdoch loves to have a Jewish character in her novels with mixed results.

[Blythe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best short story collection I've read in a long time. Written by anyone else, the subjects of these stories would be prosaic; Yellin reveals characters and situations most of us would never think warranted their own story. Yet when you're done reading one, you feel intimately privileged to have shared in the story. Mr. Applewick, the piano tuner, haunts me the most of all the characters. Read that story if nothing else.

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you love short stories (and I do!), then make an effort to find this book. Not all libraries have it, but many libraries will get books for you from other libraries if they don't have it. The stories are wonderful, beautifully written, and the description of a certain kind of family quarrel is one of the funniest and truest descriptions of family dynamics that I've read.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of stories. For once I agree with the blurb and don't find it overstated: "Yellin is a consummate stylist. Her sentences are to die for." --Jeff VanderMeer. All thirteen stories are excellent.