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“... Like many others of his time, Kafka called Yiddish ‘jargon’. This was one of various names for the language, and Kafka, who knew several, could have used another had he so wished. But ‘jargon’ was an exact name for the unsettled and unsettling thing he took the language of the Eastern European Jews to be. ‘Jargon,’ he wrote, ‘is the youngest European language – barely four hundred years old and actually even younger ...”

“... and household servants, had left their mark on him. In Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language, Daniel Heller-Roazen recounts a parallel story. Elias Canetti grew up in Bulgaria speaking Ladino, the ‘largely medieval Spanish of the Sephardim’. Bulgarian was the language used by the family servants. However, while Canetti, his family and friends ...”

“... that he thinks, but his actual ‘self’ is bound up with his rapidly diminishing sensorium. As Daniel Heller-Roazen argues in his rich and elegant book, a more enigmatic formulation of the sense of self than we are used to was still at work in the 16th century: its place had not yet been usurped by the bullying cogito which ...”

“... time and place, that people have gone missing, been stripped of status, or become somehow undead, Daniel Heller-Roazen offers a typology of the ‘nonperson’, about whom it can be said neither that ‘he is a person’ nor that ‘he isn’t a person.’ A nonperson is thus a nonentity in the colloquial sense of the word, existent yet ...”

“... piracy by a judge and jury and sentenced according to law. Although he knows of the Gordon case, Daniel Heller-Roazen appears not to understand all this. Since his chair at Princeton is in comparative literature, this would be unsurprising if his book were what for much of its length it appears to be: an elegantly composed and widely researched survey ...”