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''A highly entertaining story of literary friendship, epic legal battles and cultural politics centred on one of the most enigmatic writers of the 20th century'' Financial Times When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his friend Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfil the writer''s last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod took them with him to Palestine in 1939, and devoted the rest of his life to editing and canonizing Kafka''s work. By betraying his last wish, Brod twice rescued his legacy - first from physical destruction, and then from obscurity. In Kafka''s Last Trial , Benjamin Balint offers a gripping account of the contest for ownership that followed, ending in Israeli courts with a controversial trial - brimming with legal, ethical, and political dilemmas - that would determine the fate of Kafka''s manuscripts. This is at once a biographical portrait of a literary genius, and the story of two countries whose national obsessions with overcoming the traumas of the past came to a head in a hotly contested trial for the right to claim the literary legacy of one of our modern masters.
List of contents
Chapter - 1: The Last Appeal Chapter - 2: ¿Fanatical Veneration¿: The First to Fall under Kafkäs Spell Chapter - 3: The First Trial Chapter - 4: Flirting with the Promised Land Chapter - 5: First and Second Judgments Chapter - 6: Last Son of the Diaspora: Kafkäs Jewish Afterlife Chapter - 7: The Last Ingathering: Kafka in Israel Chapter - 8: Kafkäs Last Wish, Brod¿s First Betrayal Chapter - 9: Kafkäs Creator Chapter - 10: The Last Train: From Prague to Palestine Chapter - 11: The Last Tightrope Dancer: Kafka in Germany Chapter - 12: Laurel & Hardy Chapter - 13: Brod¿s Last Love Chapter - 14: The Last Heiress: Selling Kafka Chapter - 15: The Last Heiress: Selling Kafka
About the author
Benjamin Balint taught literature, including Kafka, at the Bard College humanities programme at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem. His first book,
Running Commentary, was published by PublicAffairs in 2010. His second book,
Jerusalem: City of the Book, is co-authored with Merav Mack. His reviews and essays regularly appear in the
Wall Street Journal,
Die Zeit,
Haaretz, the
Weekly Standard, and the
Claremont Review of Books. His translations of Hebrew poetry have appeared in the
New Yorker and in
Poetry International.
Report
A literary battle that became Kafkaesque . . . remarkable . . . I warmly recommend this deeply absorbing book. Daily Telegraph
