Speaking in a hushed tone so as not to be overheard by Kafka’s progeny drying glasses by the espresso machine, Friedman told me that some thirty years ago, one of Kafka’s biographers had turned up Puah Ben-Tovim in Jerusalem, and published an interview with her in the New York Times. She was Dr. Puah Menczel by then, and nearly eighty years old, and to read between the lines of the article was to see the “Kafka fog machine,” as Friedman called it, at work, a machine powered by Brod but which would have been impossible without Bergmann and Puah, both of whom had been instrumental in the plan to bring Kafka to Palestine in secret. Puah had been employed in Bergmann’s library when she was eighteen, and the story goes that when he saw how overqualified she was for the work, he sent her to study mathematics in Prague, and even went so far as to arrange for her to live with his own parents. It’s that last bit that makes one raise an eyebrow, said Friedman. Or would if one were to look askance at the official biography, which tells us that Bergmann sent Puah to Prague not as an emissary, not to begin work on a clandestine plan already taking shape, but simply out of the kindness of his heart, and only as an afterthought decided to send her to meet Kafka, to whom she began to give private Hebrew lessons twice a week.
By the time Puah arrived in 1921, Kafka was already very ill. In the interview she gave to the clueless biographer who tracked her down sixty years later, she described the painful coughing fits that interrupted their lessons, and Kafka’s huge dark eyes imploring her to continue for one more word, and one more after that. By the end, Kafka had progressed enough that they were able to read part of a novel by Brenner together. But in the Times article, Kafka’s biographer also notes that after Puah Ben-Tovim dropped her math studies and moved to Germany, and Kafka followed her there, installing himself next door to the Jewish children’s camp where she worked, she abruptly fell out of the picture and never saw him again. Among the mountains of recollections later offered in the wake of Kafka’s posthumous fame, most inaccurate or of dubious authority, there is not a single word from Puah Ben-Tovim, the biographer notes. And when he finally tracks her down in Jerusalem, and she graciously invites him into her book-lined apartment, she explains her disengagement simply: Kafka was thrashing about like a drowning man, ready to cling to whoever came close enough for him to grab hold of. She had her own life to live, and she didn’t have the will or the strength to be a nursemaid to a very sick man twenty years older than her, not even if she’d known then what she now knew about him. In other words, her poise was flawless, said Friedman. She managed to extricate herself, putting the biographer’s curiosity permanently to rest. And now she is dead, and we can no longer ask Puah Ben-Tovim anything.
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.