Loyal readers! As promised last time, here is a write-up of the talk I gave at a Kafka conference in Prague—about the Kafka-Brod collaboration in work and in life. I’ve included the original slides, plus a few new images and links.
Thanks for your support!
Good evening! I come to you today as a lover, not an expert. (I am not a Kafka expert.) Some years ago, when I was working as a journalist, I had an encounter with Kafka and Brod that has stayed with me. It’s something I’ve been returning to in my writing, now that I am mostly a novelist. So what a joy and honor to get to work through these ideas here with you today, at the Jewish Museum in Prague (thanks to organizers, hosts, translators).
In 2010, I got a call from the New York Times magazine, asking me to go to Israel to report on the legal case surrounding Max Brod’s papers. I won’t go into the details of the case, which are familiar to many of you, but here is an infographic with a chronology.
Just to quickly sum up: in 1921, Kafka writes a letter naming Brod as his literary executor, instructing him to burn everything. When Kafka tells him about the letter, Brod replies that he won’t comply with the instructions. Kafka doesn’t name a new executor.
In 1924, Kafka dies. Brod starts editing and publishing the works, starting with The Trial in 1925.
In 1939, Brod flees the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. He ends up in Tel Aviv, where he meets Esther Hoffe, his soon-to-be secretary. After Brod’s wife dies, Brod becomes very close with Esther and her husband, Otto. He goes on vacations with them in Switzerland. Esther has an office in Brod’s apartment.
Brod dies in 1958, leaving the papers to Esther Hoffe. Esther eventually auctions off the manuscript of The Trial for nearly $2 million. It ends up in Germany, at the Marbach archive.
When Esther dies in 2007, she leaves the rest of Brod’s papers to her daughters, Eva and Ruth. The National Library of Israel challenges the legality of the bequest. In 2010, the Supreme Court of Israel rules that an inventory must be taken of all the papers, some of which are still at Eva Hoffe’s home, on Spinoza Street in Tel Aviv.
Eva Hoffe at this point has a lot of cats. This is where I get involved. Basically what I’m told by by the Times in 2010 is: “So the daughter lives in an apartment with 100 cats, and she doesn’t talk to anyone. But we’re hoping she’ll talk to you.”
I was just getting started as a writer, so I took the assignment, even though I don’t speak Hebrew or German (so even if Eva Hoffe wanted to talk to me, how was it supposed to happen?). The travel budget was tiny—I don’t remember exactly, something like $2000, almost all of it went to the plane ticket from San Francisco. I didn’t have enough for a hotel. I stayed at a friend’s friend’s aunt’s (?) apartment. [I was lucky to have such a brilliant and helpful friend.]
I spent several days running around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, feeling continually guilty about my lack of qualifications. I was talking to scholars, archivists, and especially lawyers. An incredible number of lawyers. Eva Hoffe had a lawyer, the National Library had a lawyer, the Kafka estate had a lawyer, even the Marbach archive had a lawyer.
In the downtime from talking to lawyers, I lurked around Spinoza Street, hoping to somehow communicate with Eva Hoffe. I brought toys for the cats. Some of the cats came out, they were ready to go on the record, but Eva never answered the door.
Then I went back to SF and spent the whole summer writing the story. Meanwhile, the Times sent an Israel-based photographer (Natan Dvir) to Spinoza Street, and he had a really different experience from me: Eva invited him inside for tea and he was able to take a beautiful photo of her, and she even shared some old personal photographs. The story, “Kafka’s Last Trial,” made it to the cover:
[NB I didn’t mention this in the talk, but actually one of the photos Eva shared was of herself as a young woman—I think from the time when she worked as an attendant for El Al—and it’s reproduced in the chronology infographic from the second slide.]
That was in September, 2010. The trial, as you know, lasted for many more years. In 2016, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in favor of the National Library of Israel. Then there was another trial in Switzerland, but we’ll just fast-forward past that one. Since 2019, everything is at the NLI. And that’s it for the court case! Now we can talk about the actual human relationships!
Everyone who loves Kafka, has to be grateful to Brod. Literally everything we know of Kafka, all of his writing, comes to us via Brod.
But is gratitude always a pleasant feeling?
In 2010, when I was doing all the interviews, I kept encountering ambient waves of animosity towards Brod. Some of the animosity was relatively overt and pragmatic, and was related to how this whole legal mess had been caused by Brod—why hadn’t he put the papers in an archive, instead of leaving them to his secretary?
But there was also a less clearly stated, more emotional, and more diffuse annoyance at Brod—for getting in the way of “our” relationship with Kafka. And that’s one of the questions I want to ask today: What does it mean to try to get past Brod—to get to the authentic, unmediated Kafka?
In some cases, there is a clear literal answer. We heard yesterday from Ross Benjamin, the heroic translator who, at great personal cost, did Anglophone Kafka fans the huge service of translating the diary Kafka actually wrote, instead of the version redacted by Brod. In situations like this, it’s not just possible, but also very meaningful, to get past Brod. But I think such cases are more limited than we think.
I want to point out that Western literary culture has a model of authorship that’s very individual-oriented.
We still have the German Romantic idea of the artist as a lone individual. And it’s not that this idea is wrong, exactly: a big part of writing really is you alone in a room with your awful self. But it’s not the whole picture.
I want to read you what I think is a very insightful observation from Brod. “Two opposite tendencies fought for supremacy in Kafka: the longing for loneliness, and the will to be sociable.”
This is a central tension, not just in Kafka, but in the act of writing. We find it stated very clearly in Proust. (One thing I love about Brod’s Kafka biography is the weight he gives to biographical and psychological similarities to Proust.)
At the end of In Search of Lost Time, we learn that literary “work” is a product of solitude and darkness—AND that the work is co-authored by others, by people outside of ourselves. Every novel is a collaboration with real people—with real life.
This is the main question of my talk: what happens when we look at the Kafka-Brod relationship as a collaboration? Just to clarify, I mean this in a very moderate sense—I’m not saying it’s an equal collaboration. Or only a collaboration. But what do we learn when we look at the relationship as, among other things, a collaboration?
[The remaining two-thirds of the talk is after the paywall. Thanks for reading!]
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