A fascinating tale of literary friendship, loyalty, political power, and feckless law.
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 behind…is 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 awarded—fair or not—the manuscripts to Jerusalem’s National Library.
A fascinating tale of literary friendship, loyalty, political power, and feckless law.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-324-00131-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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