Cynthia Ozick's sharp-eyed view of the book
must be shared ~
“Though Benjamin Balint’s masterful hunt for Kafka’s rightful ownership begins as a local dispute in an Israeli family court, it soon thickens into modernity’s most bitterly contentious cultural conundrum. Who should inherit Franz Kafka? The woman into whose hands his manuscripts fortuitously fell? Germany, the nation that murdered his sisters but claims his spirit? Israel, asserting a sovereign yet intimate ancestral right? Searing questions of language, of personal bequest, of friendship, of biographical evidence, of national pride, of justice, of deceit and betrayal, even of metaphysical allegiance, burn through Balint’s scrupulous trackings of Kafka’s final standing before the law.” — Cynthia Ozick, author of Foreign Bodies
Norton
2018
"The rise of Nazism put an end to the rich German-Jewish literary
symbiosis that had so decisively shaped both cultures, and to the long and lively Jewish love affair with the German language."
— Benjamin Balint
the opening sentence to chapter 9
"Kafka's Creator"
