Kafka’s Last Trial

To fully capture the battle over Franz Kafka’s unpublished papers, Benjamin Balint “must tell three stories at once,” said Rebecca Schuman in Slate .com. Balint’s “riveting” account uses a lengthy recent trial to revisit how a friend of Kafka’s spirited the cache out of 1939 Czechoslovakia and bequeathed it to a woman in Israel whose daughter grew old guarding it. In this telling, physical and legal struggles “morph into questions of identity, self, and existential belonging.” Kafka would have approved.