Review by New York Times Review
MAX BROD'S ORIGINAL SIN - the linchpin that launched Kafka's posthumous career and a thousand scholarly ones besides - has always possessed something of the uncanniness and mythic aura of Kafka's fiction itself. In 1924, dying of tuberculosis and facing what surely seemed to him the ignominious end of his literary life, Kafka bequeathed to Brod - his closest ally and fellow Prague scribbler - a pair of notes instructing him to burn "unread and to the last page" everything he was leaving behind: manuscripts, diaries and letters. Brod defied the injunction and instead spent the rest of his own life tirelessly editing, compiling and promoting Kafka's work, building him up into the sainted laureate of alienated modernity he remains for many readers today. Brod, in fact, twice saved Kafka's writing from destruction, first from the self-immolating flames of his dying testament, and, later, from the bonfires of Nazi barbarism (which claimed Kafka's three sisters), when, in 1939, he escaped by train from Prague to Palestine, clutching a briefcase full of Kafka's papers. Brod, who died in 1968, left his collection to his secretary, Esther Hoffe, with the apparent intention that she ultimately deposit it in a public library or archive. Instead, Hoffe kept the papers vaulted away, sold what she could - most controversially, the manuscript of "The Trial" - and gave the rest to her two daughters. When she died, Franz Kafka in 2007, the National Library of Israel contested the rights to Brod's and Kafka's archives, precipitating a succession of courtroom showdowns that pitted the institution against Esther's daughter Eva and the German Literature Archive in Marbach, which had long hoped to acquire the papers. In 2016, the Israeli Supreme Court finally decided in favor of the National Library. That Brod, the great custodian of Kafka's legacy, managed to leave it in the hands of a gaggle of litigious would-be inheritors is no small irony, though a fitting one, given the nature of Kafka's court-riddled work. This irony forms the basis of Benjamin Balint's new book, "Kafka's Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy." ft is an unusual hybrid: part courtroom procedural, part double portrait of Kafka and Brod, part account of the postwar construction of Israeli and German national identity. As with his previous book, an admirably levelheaded history of Commentary magazine, Balint writes most naturally in the interrogative mode, preferring the probing of difficult questions to easy resolutions. A gifted cultural historian with a scholarly sensibility, he is perhaps less suited to the role of investigative reporter. The first third of his book cuts back and forth between the origins of Kafka's career and friendship with Brod, and the unfolding Israeli custody battle. The latter material, dense with the names of lawyers and the convolutions of the proceedings, feels plodding at times. Balint never quite manages to illuminate the motivations behind Eva Hoffe's increasingly desperate appeals to retain her inheritance, whether rooted in her desire to convert Kafka's cultural capital into a financial asset or some deeper identification with her mother's and Brod's hidden aims. Whatever the case, one comes to tire of the courtroom rigmarole, longing to return to the roomier vistas of Kafka's mind. Balint is more sure-footed when mining the legal drama for what he calls its "symbolic" resonances. Underlying Israel's and Germany's propriety claims - their rival attempts to recruit Kafka as a tutelary heir and, in the case of past-haunted Germany, as a propitiating presence - is a question about the fundamental status of his genius: Was Kafka a quintessentially Jewish writer, who "belongs in the Jewish state"? Or was he a master of the German language, who should "be read universally"? Ultimately, Bahnt reveals a Kafka impervious to such dichotomies, a paragon, instead, of multicultural ambition, whose artistic universality was born of the particularity of his Jewish German, Prague-based experience. Kafka's paradoxical and self-divided nature is further detailed through a series of chapters describing his relation to Zionism, women, the German language and his own Jewishness. Kafka had a reflexive instinct for what Philip Larkin termed the "importance of elsewhere": Remoteness and otherness were for him conditions of desirability. Repelled, for example, by the secularized, desiccated Judaism of his upbringing - the "nullity of his father's religion-by-rote," as Balint nicely puts it - Kafka kindled to the performances of a Yiddish theater troupe in Prague and what he perceived as the invigorating authenticity of Eastern European Jewish culture, ft is characteristic that such affinities rarely cohered into sustained commitments. (A list that Kafka compiled of his broken allegiances included Hebrew, Zionism, anti-Zionism and marriage attempts.) If Kafka's irresoluteness was a cause for personal reproach, it can also be taken to suggest his honest means of grappling with the disinheritances of modernity: the sundering of the old verities and stabilities of meaning. Kafka's contradictory striving for and disavowal of collective belonging, what he called his "we-weakness," makes for instructive reading in our own era of renewed tribal polarization - in which group identity is frequently defined in axiomatic and exclusionary terms, the better to be used as a bludgeon against others. And it is here that we arrive, perhaps, at a final irony: If Kafka's fictions have often been read as parables of belatedness, non-arrival and perpetual deferment, there are other ways - most notably, the genuine, if fraught, multiculturalism of his literary imagination and conception of selfhood - in which he still remains ahead of us, pointing a direction forward. We are always, it seems, catching up to Kafka. LEV MENDES has written for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, among other publications.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 14, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
When Max Brod, Kafka's friend and tireless advocate, decided not to honor the writer's request that he burn his papers upon his death in 1924, instead overseeing the publication of Kafka's revolutionary work, he inadvertently catalyzed decades of legal skirmishes. Balint tracks them all with pinpoint detail and narrative drive, first bringing Kafka and Brod into focus as literary, German-speaking Jews in anti-Semitic Prague. Brod and his wife escaped with Kafka's manuscripts on the last train out ahead of the Nazis. In Tel Aviv, Esther Hoffe became Brod's trusted assistant, inheriting his literary estate, including Kafka's papers, some of which she kept in the messy, cat-festooned apartment she shared with her daughter, Eva. Anxious to secure those treasures, the state of Israel filed its first lawsuit in 1973; Germany was also on the hunt, precipitating arguments steeped in the anguish of the Holocaust about whether Kafka was a Jewish or German author. Present during Eva's final court appearance in 2016, Balint presents a uniquely incisive exegesis of the literary, historical, and deeply personal forces behind the work of a world-defining genius.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Balint (Running Commentary), a research fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, delivers a lively and balanced account of the international battle-fought in Israeli courts-for Franz Kafka's manuscripts, letters, and diaries. Heard in 2016, the case involved three parties: the National Library of Israel, the German Literature Archive in Marbach, and Eva Hoffe, who inherited the documents from her mother. But the story begins much earlier, in 1924, when Kafka died of tuberculosis and his close friend, Max Brod, could not bring himself to follow Kafka's last instructions to burn his remaining papers. Instead, Brod devoted most of his life to promoting Kafka's legacy. When Brod, who fled to Palestine during WWII, died in Tel Aviv in 1968, Kafka's papers passed to Brod's secretary and confidante, Esther Hoffe, Eva's mother. In addition to relating this background, Balint thoughtfully examines the arguments brought up at the trial: what Judaism meant to Kafka, who wrote in German, "steeped himself in German literature," and wondered, in his diary, what he had in common with other Jews, yet discovered a love of Yiddish theater and Hebrew; Israel's ambivalence to Kafka and diaspora culture; and the ways both Israel and Germany claimed Kafka's legacy. Well-researched and insightful, this suspenseful work illuminates the complex relationship between literature, religion, culture, and nationality. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Review by Library Journal Review
In this scholarly and deeply moving literary history, Balint (Van Leer Inst., Jerusalem; Running Commentary) details the controversial trials that sought to establish which person (Eva Hoffe) or entities in Germany and Israel had claim to the writings of Franz Kafka (1883-1924). Chapters alternate between recent court battles and the narrative history involving the relationship between Kafka and his closest friend Max Brod, who ignored the novelist's wish that his papers be burned after his death, instead having many of them published. Brod's own career as a writer, as well as his friendships (both literary and personal) are also closely examined. Eventually, an Israeli court ruled against the Hoffe family (matriarch Esther was Brod's longtime secretary) and determined that Kafka's archive be turned over to the National Library of Israel. Balint describes the reactions of everyone involved in the legal processes, further highlighting the impact of the court's decision on contemporary Kafka studies. VERDICT Highly recommended for anyone interested in literary controversies, legal maneuvering, and, of course, admirers of one of the 20th century's greatest writers.-Morris Hounion, New York City Coll. of Technology, Brooklyn © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The Kafkaesque story of who owns Franz Kafka's manuscripts.Journalist and translator Balint (Research Fellow/Van Leer Institute; Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine that Transformed the Jewish Left into the Neoconservative Right, 2010) seeks to explain to literature lovers the convoluted story of what happened to Kafka's manuscripts and papers after his death in 1924. The first chapter of this legal/literary history takes place in an Israeli court, where three parties, including 82-year-old Eva Hoffe, are fighting over some Kafka manuscripts. In order to better understand the complexities of the case, Balint provides the compelling backstory. It's famous knowledge that Max Brod, who had a "fanatical veneration" for his beloved friend, was ordered by Kafka to destroy all of his writings after he died: "Everything I leave behindis to be burned unread and to the last page." Brod, however, "preferred to act as a self-appointed literary executor rather than as literary executioner." By doing so, he twice rescued Kafka's legacy, once from fire and once from "obscurity." As World War II was breaking out, Brod, a passionate Zionist, escaped from Prague to Palestine with a "bulky, cracked-leather suitcase stuffed with loose bundles and leaves of Kafka's manuscripts." Esther Hoffe served as Brod's secretary and close friend in Israel for more than two decades. When Brod died in 1968, he had already written a will in which he "gifted [her] all the Kafka manuscripts and letters in my possession." Assuming the materials were hers, she sold some over the years, including the original manuscript of The Trial, at public auction. When she died in 2007, she willed the manuscripts to her two daughters, Eva and Ruth. During a few trials after that, an Israeli court finally awardedfair or notthe manuscripts to Jerusalem's National Library.A fascinating tale of literary friendship, loyalty, political power, and feckless law. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
