Kafka's Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy - Couverture rigide

Balint, Benjamin

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1509836713 ISBN 13 : 9781509836710

Editeur : Picador, 2019

Synopsis

When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend and champion Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfil Kafka's last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted the rest of his life to canonizing Kafka as the most prescient chronicler of the twentieth century. By betraying Kafka's last wish, Brod twice rescued his legacy - first from physical destruction, and then from obscurity. But that betrayal was also eventually to lead to an international legal battle over Kafka's legacy: as a writer in German, should his papers come to rest with those of the other great German writers, in the country where his three sisters died as victims of the Holocaust? Or, as Kafka was also a great Jewish writer, should they be considered part of the cultural inheritance of Israel, a state that did not exist at the time he died in 1924? Alongside an acutely observed portrait of Kafka and Brod and the influential group of writers and intellectuals known as the Prague Circle, Kafka's Last Trial also provides a gripping account of the recent series of Israeli court cases - cases that addressed dilemmas legal, ethical, and political - that determined the final fate of the manuscripts Brod had rescued when he fled from Prague to Palestine in 1939. It tells of a wrenching escape from Nazi invaders as the gates of Europe closed to Jews; of a love affair between exiles stranded in Tel Aviv; and of two countries whose national obsessions with overcoming the traumas of the past came to a head in the Israeli courts. Ultimately, Benjamin Balint invites us to question not only whether Kafka's legacy belongs by right to the country of his language, that of his birth, or that of his cultural and religious affinities - but also whether any nation state can lay claim to writers who belong more naturally to the international republic of letters.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Benjamin Balint taught literature, including Kafka, at the Bard College humanities program at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem for the last three years. His first book, Running Commentary, was published by PublicAffairs in 2010. His second book, Jerusalem: City of the Book (co-authored with Merav Mack), was released in 2017. 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. His study of Kafka's tangled literary legacy, Kafka's Last Trial, draws on his extensive knowledge of this elusive author, and which country can lay claim to him.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Picador
• Date d'édition: 2019
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1509836713
• ISBN 13: 9781509836710
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 304
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible