Benjamin Balint

When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfill Kafka's last instruction: to burn his manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted his life to championing Kafka's writing, rescuing his legacy from obscurity and physical destruction. Nearly a century later, an international legal battle erupted to determine which country could claim ownership of his work: Israel, where Kafka dreamed of living, or Germany, where Kafka's three sisters perished in the Holocaust? Benjamin Balint offers a gripping account of the controversial trial in Israeli courts--brimming with dilemmas legal, ethical, and political--that determined the fate of the oeuvre. Kafka's Last Trial is a brilliant biographical portrait of a literary genius, as well as the story of two countries whose national obsessions with overcoming the traumas of the past came to a head in a hotly contested trial for the right to claim the literary legacy of one of our modern masters.

The Case of a Literary Legacy

Kafka's Last Trial

A fresh portrait of the Polish-Jewish writer and artist, and a gripping account of the secret operation to rescue his last artworks.

Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History

"Balint's well-written book is far more than a history, it is ... the most important work of its kind published for years."---Walter Laqueur, historian --

The Contentious Magazine that Transformed the Jewish Left Into the Neoconservative Right

Running Commentary

Winner of the 73rd National Jewish Book Award for Biography A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A fresh portrait of the Polish-Jewish writer and artist, and a gripping account of the secret operation to rescue his last artworks. The twentieth-century artist Bruno Schulz was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole, and died a Jew. First a citizen of the Habsburg monarchy, he would, without moving, become the subject of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Second Polish Republic, the USSR, and, finally, the Third Reich. Yet to use his own metaphor, Schulz remained throughout a citizen of the Republic of Dreams. He was a master of twentieth-century imaginative fiction who mapped the anxious perplexities of his time; Isaac Bashevis Singer called him “one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived.” Schulz was also a talented illustrator and graphic artist whose masochistic drawings would catch the eye of a sadistic Nazi officer. Schulz’s art became the currency in which he bought life. Drawing on extensive new reporting and archival research, Benjamin Balint chases the inventive murals Schulz painted on the walls of an SS villa—the last traces of his vanished world—into multiple dimensions of the artist’s life and afterlife. Sixty years after Schulz was murdered, those murals were miraculously rediscovered, only to be secretly smuggled by Israeli agents to Jerusalem. The ensuing international furor summoned broader perplexities, not just about who has the right to curate orphaned artworks and to construe their meanings, but about who can claim to stand guard over the legacy of Jews killed in the Nazi slaughter. By re-creating the artist’s milieu at a crossroads not just of Jewish and Polish culture but of art, sex, and violence, Bruno Schulz itself stands as an act of belated restitution, offering a kaleidoscopic portrait of a life with all its paradoxes and curtailed possibilities.

An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History

Bruno Schulz

¿A quién pertenece Kafka? La historia del verdadero proceso sobre su obra. El último proceso de Kafka arranca con las últimas instrucciones que le dio Frank Kafka a su amigo más cercano, Max Brod: que a su muerte este destruyera todos los papeles que le quedaban. Sin embargo, cuando llegó el momento en 1924, Brod no tuvo el ánimo de quemar las obras inéditas del hombre al que consideraba un genio literario. La historia de la vida póstuma de Kafka es kafkiana en sí misma. Tras la muerte de Brod se estableció una batalla legal internacional para determinar qué país podía reclamar la propiedad de la obra de Kafka: ¿Israel, donde el autor soñaba con vivir, pero adonde nunca llegó a ir, o Alemania, donde perecieron las tres hermanas de Kafka en el Holocausto? Un relato apasionante acerca del controvertido proceso en los tribunales israelíes que resolvió cuál sería el destino de los manuscritos del escritor. Muy bien documentado, con retratos certeros y una extraordinaria capacidad para evocar la época y el lugar, El último proceso de Kafka es al mismo tiempo un brillante retrato biográfico de un genio literario y la historia de dos países cuyas obsesiones nacionales por superar los traumas del pasado alcanzaron un punto crítico con un juicio acaloradamente disputado por el derecho a reclamar el legado literario de uno de nuestros maestros modernos.

El juicio de un legado literario

El último proceso de Kafka

Merav Mack

A captivating journey through the hidden libraries of Jerusalem, where some of the world's most enduring ideas were put into words In this enthralling book, Merav Mack and Benjamin Balint explore Jerusalem's libraries to tell the story of this city as a place where some of the world's most enduring ideas were put into words. The writers of Jerusalem, although renowned the world over, are not usually thought of as a distinct school; their stories as Jerusalemites have never before been woven into a single narrative. Nor have the stories of the custodians, past and present, who safeguard Jerusalem's literary legacies. By showing how Jerusalem has been imagined by its writers and shelved by its librarians, Mack and Balint tell the untold history of how the peoples of the book have populated the city with texts. In their hands, Jerusalem itself--perched between East and West, antiquity and modernity, violence and piety--comes alive as a kind of labyrinthine library.

Jerusalem

A captivating journey through the hidden libraries of Jerusalem, where some of the world’s most enduring ideas were put into words In this enthralling book, Merav Mack and Benjamin Balint explore Jerusalem’s libraries to tell the story of this city as a place where some of the world’s most enduring ideas were put into words. The writers of Jerusalem, although renowned the world over, are not usually thought of as a distinct school; their stories as Jerusalemites have never before been woven into a single narrative. Nor have the stories of the custodians, past and present, who safeguard Jerusalem’s literary legacies. By showing how Jerusalem has been imagined by its writers and shelved by its librarians, Mack and Balint tell the untold history of how the peoples of the book have populated the city with texts. In their hands, Jerusalem itself—perched between East and West, antiquity and modernity, violence and piety—comes alive as a kind of labyrinthine library.

Benjamin Balint

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