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?