When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his best friend, the writer and Zionist publicist Max Brod, found a note on his desk asking that his manuscripts be burned. Brod instead ensured that Kafka’s stories were published, thus preserving his friend’s literary legacy. When Brod left Prague for Palestine in 1939—escaping the Nazis by the skin of his teeth—he brought with him a suitcase stuffed with Kafka’s papers. The papers, following Brod’s own death, eventually became the property of Eva Hoffe, who wanted to sell them to the German Literature Archive in Marbach. It was then that the Israeli government stepped in to keep them in the country, leading to a lawsuit that lasted nearly a decade. Reviewing Kafka’s Last Trial, a book by Benjamin Balint on the case, Adam Kirsch writes:
During the trial, German scholars argued that Kafka’s manuscripts should go to Germany, where they would be studied intensively, rather than be neglected in Jerusalem. One obvious counterargument was that it would be obscene for Kafka’s relics to end up in the country that had annihilated his family. Balint quotes an Israeli scholar who cuttingly observed, “The Germans don’t have a very good history of taking care of Kafka’s things. They didn’t take good care of his sisters.” But the case for keeping Kafka in Israel went deeper, and involved a literary as well as a legal judgment. Balint writes that in awarding Kafka’s papers to the National Library of Israel, the judges “affirmed that Kafka was an essentially Jewish writer.” And this is the real question at the center of Kafka’s Last Trial: is he a Jewish writer? What do we gain, or lose, by reading his work through a Jewish lens?
Biographically, Kafka’s Jewishness is obvious. He was born to a Jewish family and lived in a Jewish community beset by serious, sometimes violent anti-Semitism. Though he was raised with little knowledge of Judaism, Kafka developed a profound interest in Jewish culture. Yiddish theater and ḥasidic folktales were important influences on his work, and in the last years of his life he dreamed of moving to Palestine, even studying Hebrew to prepare. (Kafka’s Hebrew workbook was among the items Eva Hoffe inherited.)
But if you didn’t know Kafka was Jewish, you could read his books without ever discovering that fact. The word Jew never appears in his fiction, and his characters have the universality of figures in a parable: Joseph K., [the protagonist of The Trial] could be anyone living in a modern urban society. And yet many Jewish readers—including critics from Walter Benjamin to Harold Bloom—have always understood Kafka’s work as growing out of, and commenting on, the Central European Jewish experience. Kafka belonged to a Jewish generation that was cut off from the traditional Yiddish-speaking life of Eastern Europe, but that was also unable to assimilate fully into German culture, which treated Jews with disdain or hostility. In a letter to Brod, Kafka memorably wrote that the German Jewish writer was “stuck by his little hind legs in his forefathers’ faith, and with his front legs groping for, but never finding, new ground.”
Once you start looking for such figures in Kafka’s fiction, they are everywhere. . . . Above all, Kafka’s obsession with the idea of law, and his bafflement before legal systems whose workings seem incomprehensible, is practically theological, a product of his sense that Jewish law had been irretrievably lost. . . . Yet Kafka’s genius was to see that these Jewish experiences—what Balint calls his “stubborn homelessness and non-belonging”—were also archetypally modern experiences.
Read more on Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/franz-kafka-archives/565763/