Arnon Grunberg

Dolls

Brod

Gabriel Josipovici in TLS on Kafka, Brod and heritages:

'Where Kafka was parsimonious with his writing and ruthless in what he allowed into print, Brod was one of those writers who seems to have no censoring superego at all. In the course of his long life he poured out novels, plays, poems, memoirs, autobiographies and philosophical and religious tracts as well as numerous books on Kafka. According to those who have read them, these are uniformly execrable, though at the time of Kafka’s death Brod was far better known than Kafka. Yet even if he was misguided, he was nevertheless a faithful friend. His admiration and love for Kafka are unquestionable. Having failed to make it to America as things grew dark for Jews in Eastern Europe in the late 1930s, Brod finally managed to get to Israel, along with his wife and a suitcase full of the material Kafka had given him in the course of his life as well as what he had rescued against Kafka’s expressed wishes at his death.

Brod was also as promiscuous as Kafka was chaste – and, while married, serially unfaithful. However, he was devastated by the triple blow of having to abandon his beloved Prague in 1939, followed by the deaths of both his mistress and his wife in quick succession. Besides, any thoughts of being greeted by the Tel Aviv intelligentsia as a major European writer were quickly dashed. Here he was, in a foreign country whose ways he failed to understand, unable to master the language and bereft of friends, in the middle of a world war which an avowed enemy of the Jews seemed at the time quite likely to win. It was at this low point that he met Otto and Esther Hoffe. Like him they were émigrés from Prague; and Brod had even known Esther’s mother, Hedwig Reich, in the old country. Soon a close friendship developed between the three, so much so that friends remarked that Brod had “at last found his familial nest”.'

(...)

'No, the issues are fundamentally cultural and critical. The Germans argued that Israel had shown no interest in Kafka in the early years of the state, had in fact seen him as a representative of that desperate and unhappy world of European Jewry from which the State of Israel wished to dissociate itself totally. Was the sudden change of direction not driven solely by the fact that ownership of the Kafka archive was a way of boosting Israel’s cultural credibility as the world turned against it, owing to its seemingly permanent annexation of the West Bank? The Israelis, for their part, wondered why a people that had killed Kafka’s family and banned his books should be given access to his literary remains. Nor were the Hoffes above playing the Holocaust card themselves, though this time it was the State of Israel that was accused of “Gestapo tactics”. And Balint, an admirer of Kafka might feel, should have sensed that any attempt to use Kafka’s own complex meditations on the vagaries of the law to underpin his examination of the role the law played in the physical afterlife of Kafka’s writings was a dangerous gambit. The story he tells is interesting enough in itself not to need sentences like: “As Eva Hoffe awoke in Tel Aviv one morning in August 2016 from uneasy dreams, she found herself transformed into a disinherited woman”.

In the end the passages of Kafka that Balint quotes stand in vigorous reproof to all the legal arguments that surround the case and of the banal justifications for their actions provided by both individuals and institutions. Here is one, from the Letter to his Father, that is typical of Kafka in its inextricable mingling of humour and pathos. Kafka is trying to convey to his father what he experienced during the latter’s rare visits to the local synagogue accompanied by his son:

And so I yawned and dozed through the many hours (I don’t think I was ever again so bored, except later at dancing lessons) and did my best to enjoy the few little bits of variety there were, as for instance when the Ark of the Covenant was opened, which always reminded me of the shooting galleries where a cupboard door would open in the same way whenever one hit a bull’s eye; except that there something interesting always came out and here it was always just the same old dolls without heads.

Here his radical alienation from all traditions, which Kafka himself recognized in himself, can be seen as both utterly debilitating – for whether we know it or not, we all function by means of inherited traditions of one sort or another – and marvellously liberating.'

Read the article here.

Poor Max Brod, no more or less famous writer has been more discredited than Max Brod.

As to the question whether Kafka was Jewish, German, Czech, European, a Zionist et cetera.

Everybody wants his or her own Kafka. I'm not even sure that we can say that Kafka was radically alienated from all traditions, was he? Does he stand outside the tradition, even the tradition of literature?

The realization that religious services are dull and rather pathetic fits into an old and long tradition.

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