Book Description

"Eighteen months after it was published, it was banned by the Nazis, who had occupied the region and labeled the book a monstrosity of art, copies being confiscated as a result of house-to-house searches. Yet, this exceptional example of spiritual autobiography continues to live, having since been translated into several languages, including Italian and German. Part of the special quality of Nine Gates to the Chasidic Mysteries is that despite its being deeply rooted in the world of mystical Judaism, the sketches of chasidic life and the folktales that Langer learned during his life among the chasidim are written for the reader who is not familiar with the esoteric theology of Kabbalah. As the author's brother remarks in his insightful and revealing foreword to the book, "Their purpose was to tell . . . something different about the Jews from that which Nazi anti-Semitism was endeavoring to smuggle across the Czechoslovak frontier."" "Jiri Langer was indeed a remarkable individual. A friend of Franz Kafka (he taught Kafka Hebrew) and Max Brod (who writes in his own autobiography that some of his work would never have been written without Langer's help), he was also one of Sigmund Freud's earliest admirers, and he wrote a number of studies of Jewish ritual and literature, applying Freud's ideas along the way.".