Yet had it not been for her—and most of all had it not been for Hugo Bergmann—the end would have come exactly as Kafka had imagined it. As Kafka imagined it, Friedman added, and as Brod later publicized it: the emaciated corpse lowered into the ground, the well-rehearsed death scene finally and irrevocably performed, the writer who wrote one of the most haunting and unforgettable stories of metamorphosis gone from this world without ever having, himself, transformed. That it didn’t is only thanks to the small cabal spearheaded by Bergmann. Along with Puah and Max Brod, it included Salman Schocken, without whom both the transport to Palestine and the subsequent decades of Kafka’s life here in Israel would have been financially impossible. I’m sure you know Schocken’s name from the publishing house that subsequently published all of Kafka’s work in Germany, and later in America. When Bergmann approached him in the summer of 1923, he was still just the wealthy owner of a chain of German department stores. But along with Buber, Schocken also founded the Cultural Zionist monthly Der Jude, which had published two of Kafka’s stories. He was already also known as a patron of Jewish literature—he’d been the sole supporter of Agnon for more than a decade by then. So Bergmann wrote to him, Friedman told me, and in the fall of 1922, Brod traveled to Berlin to meet Schocken in person to discuss Kafka’s situation.
Later it was Brod who got all the credit for being Kafka’s savior. If anyone remembers Hugo Bergmann, it’s as the first rector of the Hebrew University, and a professor of philosophy who wrote about transcendence. Unlike Brod, Bergmann never sought any acknowledgment of his part in saving Kafka. On the contrary, said Friedman, he was willing to go down as the fall guy, the selfish villain to Brod’s magnanimous hero. According to the story written by Brod, it was with Bergmann’s strong encouragement that Kafka made definitive plans to emigrate to Palestine in October of 1923, to travel there with Bergmann’s wife and to stay with their family in Jerusalem until he was well again and found his feet. But as the time drew near, Bergmann supposedly had a change of heart. Fearing that Kafka would infect his children with tuberculosis, and that it would be too much to have such a sick person on his wife’s hands, he rescinded the invitation. That no one has ever questioned the likelihood of such a sudden and callous turn in someone who for over twenty years had been one of Kafka’s closest friends, Friedman suggested, can perhaps be attributed to the fact that by then the Holocaust had inured the world to stories of the countless many who refused safe harbor to even those closest to them for fear of putting themselves at risk. But the truth is that without Hugo Bergmann, Kafka would never have made it to Palestine, would have accepted his life sentence and never escaped the tyranny of his father, never have gotten out of Europe, where, had he survived his tuberculosis, he would later have been murdered along with his three sisters by the Nazis. In 1974 Bergmann was awarded the Israel Prize for “special contribution to society and the State of Israel,” Friedman told me. But only a small group of people ever knew the full extent of that special contribution.
By 1924 Max Brod was the only one still left in Prague. And so he was the only one who could feasibly inherit Kafka’s manuscripts after his death, and assume the role of controlling their fate beginning, supposedly, with disobeying Kafka’s last request to burn everything. And because Brod was a writer, and because it was necessary to distance everyone else from the story, he also became the guardian of Kafka’s legend. And because the legend didn’t yet exist, and because Kafka was still almost entirely unknown, Brod became its sole author. Later, Brod would describe how in the immediate aftermath of his friend’s death, he was too devastated to begin work on a biography. On top of that, he was overwhelmed by the laborious practical work of sorting through all of Kafka’s papers, creating a bibliography, and preparing the manuscripts for publication. And so instead, Brod wrote what he called eine lebendige Dichtung—“a living literary creation”—a roman à clef in which he offered the original portrait of the suffering, sickly saint on which every Kafka portrait since has been based.
Zauberreich der Liebe, Friedman said, if you can’t guess by the title—The Magic Kingdom of Love—is a piece of garbage that would have been carted to the literary dust heap the day after its publication had it not been for the character of Richard Garta. When the novel begins, the writer Garta has already died in Prague. So we can never meet him ourselves, can only ever know him through the memories of the novel’s protagonist, Christoph Nowy, Garta’s close friend and now the executor of his literary estate. Nowy recalls Garta constantly, almost obsessively, consulting with him internally and even going so far as to provide his dead friend’s answers. In that sense, the novel provides not only the original portrait of Kafka but also Brod’s argument for constructing an image of Kafka through his own distilled memories. Just as the readers of Zauberreich der Liebe can never know the saintly Garta except through the mediation of Nowy, so the world, even now, has never known Kafka except through the prism of Brod’s Garta.
Friedman began to rifle through the leather portfolio he’d brought from the car until he came up with a wrinkled photocopy. “Garta,” he began to read, who “of all sages and prophets that walked the earth was the quietest,” who, “had he only not lacked self-confidence, would have become a guide to humanity.” Friedman paused and looked at me with raised eyebrows. “It’s complete schlock, no?” he said, his mouth curling into a smile. And yet, purely on the level of strategy, he continued, there’s genius in it; as much genius as in the story of refusing a dying Kafka’s last will to take everything he’d left behind and burn it all unread. When the world slowly woke to Brod’s Kafka, he proved irresistible. And though the legend may have been Brod’s own handiwork, in the decades that followed, it was expanded and embroidered upon by the hordes of Kafkologists who took up where Brod left off, gleefully churning out more Kafka mythology without ever once questioning its source. Nearly everything—everything—known about Kafka can be traced back to Brod! Including anything gleaned from his letters and diaries, since of course Brod collated and edited those. He introduced Kafka to the world, and thereafter managed each minute detail of his image and reputation until he himself died in 1968, leaving Kafka’s estate in the hands of his lover, Esther Hoffe, and in just enough confusion and disorder to ensure that to this day his authority would never be passed on or shared out, and the Kafka golem he molded with his own hands would continue to roam the earth.
But he left us one enormous clue. “He couldn’t help himself, I think,” Friedman said. The temptation to divulge everything and reveal the brilliance of his own handiwork was too great, and so he hid the truth in plain sight. In Zauberreich der Liebe, Nowy sets off to Palestine to meet up with Garta’s younger brother, who has made aliyah and lives on a kibbutz. From him, Nowy discovers that Garta was a Zionist—not just that he was sympathetic to the movement, but that his Zionist beliefs and activities were absolutely central to his life and his sense of himself. This is a complete revelation to Nowy, who hadn’t had the slightest inkling of his closest friend’s hidden passion. Furthermore, Garta’s brother tells Nowy that Garta secretly wrote in Hebrew, and it was the “spectacular content” of these Hebrew notebooks that had convinced him to make aliyah and become a pioneer. “Ah?” Friedman said, raising his heavy eyebrows again. “Hebrew notebooks? If you were reading Zauberreich der Liebe for news of Kafka, might you stop to ask yourself: What Hebrew notebooks?”
When Brod finally got around to writing a real biography of Kafka, he described Kafka’s “lonely secretiveness.” How, for example, they’d been friends for some years before Kafka even revealed to him that he wrote. And yet, in a sense, Brod’s overblown novel, and the whole subsequent mythology for which it serves as foundation, itself conceals a more subtle game, both revealing and obscuring the true Kafka. Not a single critic has ever picked up on the reference to those Hebrew notebooks, Friedman said, or the suggestion that Kafka may have written in Hebrew. The only known “Hebrew” notebooks of Kafka’s are four small octavos used
in his lessons with Puah, including the one with crumbling blue cover that sits in the archives of the National Library, where Brod deposited it. There one can find lists of German words translated into Hebrew in Kafka’s familiar script, words that couldn’t fit the legend more perfectly. Friedman dug around in the folder, removed another dog-eared photocopy, and pointed to each word as he translated:
Innocent
Suffering
Painful
Disgust
Terrifying
Fragile
Genius
If one didn’t know better, one might take it for a parody of Brod’s suffering Kafka, the one who apparently died in a sanatorium at the age of forty! “But there’s another story to be told,” Friedman said. “Do you understand?” he asked again, but as I did not yet fully understand, as I was drifting so oddly off course from understanding, I could only go on regarding him with what I hoped was a look of comprehension. A story of Kafka’s afterlife in Hebrew, Friedman said. A story in which he escaped into that ancient and new language, just as he bodily escaped into an ancient and new land. In which he “crossed over” into Hebrew, which is the literal translation of Ivrit, derived from Abraham, the first Hebrew, or Ivri, who crossed over the river Jordan into Israel. In Hebrew, the translation of The Metamorphosis is Ha Gilgul. You know what gilgul means, don’t you? The Yiddish title—Der Gilgul—is nearly the same. Which is to say, Friedman said, that for the Jews, The Metamorphosis has always been a story not about the change from one form to another, but about the continuity of the soul through different material realities.
Friedman fell silent at last, and turned to look out at the view. I followed his gaze to the church towers and Jaffa Gate and tried to absorb everything I’d just been told. But it wasn’t just Friedman’s authority and methodical presentation of the evidence that made it difficult to write him off as some excitable academic gone off the rails. If I found myself in Friedman’s thrall, prepared to believe what had at first seemed beyond belief, it was because I could feel in my own body Kafka’s claustrophobia and his longing for another world, and how, for him, the only possible escape was one that would be final and irreversible. And because, between the two stories of Kafka’s life and death, the one Friedman had drawn struck me as having the more beautiful shape—more complex, but also more subtle, and so closer to truth. In light of it, the familiar story now seemed clumsy, overblown, and steeped in cliché.
If something didn’t seem to fit, it was only Kafka’s passivity about the fate of his work. Brod’s editing had been notoriously intrusive. He had cut, edited, reordered, and punctuated as he saw fit. He had published books that Kafka considered unfinished. It’s one thing to be turned into a saint, but how could one be expected to believe that Kafka would have stood by in silence while Brod performed his butchery?
“What makes you so sure the edits weren’t Kafka’s?” Friedman asked. “Or that there weren’t extra-literary reasons for Brod’s editorial decisions? Did you ever wonder why the novel Amerika wasn’t published with Kafka’s own title, Der Verschollene? Do you know what Der Verschollene means? The Man Who Disappeared. Or even The One Who Went Missing. Barely three years after Kafka’s death in Prague, such a title was completely out of the question.
“As for publishing so-called unfinished work,” Friedman continued, “can’t you see the brilliance of it? Think about it: Wouldn’t every writer want his stories and books and plays to be published with the claim that they remained unfinished? That he’d died, or been otherwise waylaid, before he could bring them to the state of perfection he’d envisioned for them, which lived within him, and which he would have brought to bear on the work had he only been given more time?”
The waiter came by the table to clear our plates, but though more than an hour had passed, neither of us had touched our food, and so he refilled our water glasses and returned to the kitchen.
I asked where Kafka had lived here, and Friedman told me that when he’d first arrived, he’d been put up in a house close to the Bergmanns. His health steadily improved over the summer. Secrecy was paramount, and outside of the small cabal immediately involved, the only person who knew was Kafka’s sister Ottla. The moment he got off the boat in Haifa, he was no longer the writer Kafka. He was simply a thin, ailing Jew from Prague, convalescing in the warm climate of his new country. That fall, Agnon returned to Palestine after twelve years in Germany—a fire had broken out in his house there, destroying all of his manuscripts and books—but there is nothing to suggest that the two writers ever met. Schocken set Agnon up in a house in Talpiot, and a few months later moved Kafka to a house in the brand-new German Jewish garden suburb of Rehavia, where his rooms overlooked the land behind the house. In the afternoons, following the Schlafstunde, during which quiet had to reign in all the streets and stairwells of Rehavia, he would often go outside to sit under a tree in the plot that had been left to grow wild for centuries. He began to putter around—to weed here, and clip and prune there—and very soon he discovered that where he had been merely an average, or even less than average, gardener in Europe, in Palestine everything he touched seemed to thrive. Else Bergmann made him the gift of some seed catalogs, and he began to send away for crocuses and Algerian iris bulbs. A visitor who peeked into the garden in the afternoons might discover the thin man with the cough bent over some roses whose roots he was soaking in Epsom salts, or removing stones from the soil. In no time at all, the plot behind the house in Rehavia began to bloom.
Not long ago, Friedman told me, he’d come across the following lines in Kafka’s Diaries: “You have the chance, if ever there was one, to begin again. Don’t waste it.” And a few pages later: “O beautiful hour, masterful state, garden gone wild. You turn from the house and see, rushing toward you on the garden path, the goddess of happiness.” The entries were dated to his first days in Zürau, and yet I can’t help but believe, Friedman said, that they were written after he moved to the rooms in Rehavia instead.
When I expressed confusion, he reached into the leather portfolio for the last time, and produced a final photocopy, which he pushed across the table. The passage in question was underlined with shaky pen. “Why did I want to quit this world?” it read.
Because “he” would not let me live in it, in his world. Though indeed I should not judge the matter so precisely, for I am now a citizen of this other world, whose relationship to the ordinary one is the relationship of wilderness to cultivated land (I have been forty years wandering from Canaan); I look back at it like a foreigner, though in this other world as well—it is the paternal heritage I carry with me—I am the most insignificant and timid of creatures and am able to keep alive thanks only to the special nature of its arrangements.
I read the extraordinary passage three times. In the upper right corner of the page was the title of the book it was taken from, Letters to Felice. When I looked up again, Friedman was watching me. “Do I need to remind you,” he whispered, “that Schocken didn’t publish these letters until 1963?” Trying to keep pace with him, I asked if he was suggesting that there were things Kafka wrote after 1924 that Brod had slipped in among the pages he published from his diaries and letters. The corner of Friedman’s mouth lifted into a smile. “Tell me, my dear,” he said, “did you really believe that Kafka wrote eight hundred letters to one woman?”
A sense of what Friedman might be asking of me began slowly to sink in: not to write the end of a real play by Kafka, but to write the real end of his life. Max Brod and his fog and schlock were long gone. Soon Eva Hoffe would be, too. In the meanwhile, the case would finally be decided by the Supreme Court, and if Eva Hoffe lost, which was almost certain, Kafka’s hidden archives would be handed over, and his false death and secret transport to Palestine exposed to the world. Did Friedman want to get in front of the story to control how it would be written? To shape, through fiction, the story of Kafka’s afterlife in Israel, as Brod had shaped the canonical story of his life and death in Europe?
As if he sensed my awareness, Friedman now moved swiftly toward the end of the story. The newly built neighborhood of Rehavia, he told me, soon became filled with intellectuals from Berlin and Vienna who played at the Tennisplatz, met at the coffeehouses they opened, and built art deco houses similar to the ones they’d left behind in the Rhineland. Kafka had moved there in 1925, the same year Brod published Der Process in Europe. If the risk of running into someone in Rehavia who’d known him from home already hung over him, by the following year, when Das Schloss was published in Europe, the situation had become untenable. At his own request, Kafka was transferred to a kibbutz in the north, close to the Sea of Galilee. There he was given a simple house on the edge of the lemon groves and took up work, also at his request, under the head gardener. The life of the kibbutz suited him. Though at first his reticence and penchant for solitude was frowned upon, in time he gained a reputation as a skilled gardener who put in long hours among the plants, and after he found a way to treat the diseased ancient sycamore tree, in whose deep shade the kibbutz members often congregated, his value was secured and he was left in peace to do as he pleased. He was beloved among the children for the little dolls and balsa-wood airplanes he used to make for them, and for his mischievous sense of humor. Because Kafka loved to swim, at least once a week he bathed in the Galilee, where he would swim so far out that to those on the shore he became nothing more than a tiny black dot.