You're listening to a London Review of Books podcast.

Thank you very much. I'm very pleased to be here. I'd like to thank the London Review of Books for this wonderful invitation, and I thank

all of you for turning out this evening. As many of you doubtless know, there is an ongoing

trial to determine who will have stewardship of several boxes of Kafka's unpublished writings,

including primary drafts of his published works

currently stored in Zurich and Tel Aviv. As you also perhaps know, Kafka left his published

and unpublished work to Max Brod and then wrote Brod explicitly, instructing him to destroy all the work

upon Kafka's death.

Indeed, Kafka had apparently burned much of that work before he even made this request.

Brod refused to honor the request, although he did not publish everything that was bequeathed to him.

He published the best-known novels, The Trial, the Castle, and America, between

1925 and 1927, and he put most of the rest away in suitcases, thus honoring Kafka's wish not

to have it published, but refusing the wish to have it destroyed. Brod's compromise with himself

turned out to be consequential, and in some

ways we are living out the consequences of that non-resolution of the bequest. Broad, a committed

Zionist, emigrated to Palestine in 1939, and though many of the manuscripts in his custody ended up

at the Bodleian Library in Oxford,

Broad held on to a substantial number of them until his death nearly 30 years later.

In 1968, Brod bequeathed the manuscripts to his secretary, Esther Hoffa,

with whom he had had an apparently amorous relationship,

and she kept most of them until her death last year at the age of 101.

For the most part, Esther did like Max.

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