Brod’s biography of Kafka was not well received. According to Walter Benjamin, it testifies to a “lack of any deep understanding of Kafka’s life,” one great riddle of which is, indeed, Kafka’s choice of such a philistine for a best friend. “I will never get to the bottom of the Brod mystery,” Milan Kundera writes, marveling that Brod was astute enough to preserve Kafka’s novels for posterity, yet capable of doing so in such sentimental, vulgar and politically tendentious books. The received image of Brod in Kafka studies is a well-meaning hack who displayed extraordinary prescience, energy and selflessness in the promotion of his more talented friend, about whom, however, he understood nothing and whose dying wishes he was thus able to ignore.

The truth is more complicated. Although the loss, within a few years, of both Kafka and Europe could easily have driven Brod to despair, he instead resolved to transform it into the foundation for a new future, adopting a lifelong determination to fuse his two favorite causes — Kafka and Zionism — into a single, future-bearing entity. Kafka’s life and work became a uniform and inherently meaningful body, in which every last detail had the same supreme importance: in the “22 years of our unclouded friendship,” Brod recalled, “I never once threw away the smallest scrap of paper that came from him, no, not even a postcard.” Whatever Brod thought that Kafka was going to do for mankind, it was definitely something huge. “If humanity would only better understand what has been presented to it in the person and work of Kafka,” Brod writes, “it would undoubtedly be in a quite different position.”

Pinning his hopes of a new world order onto Kafka’s oeuvre — onto, that is, a collection of abstruse literary fiction, mostly dealing with the lives of Prague white-collar workers and animals — Brod was following a dream logic common to Kafka’s own characters. In “Amerika,” Karl believes that he can “have a direct effect upon his American environment” by playing the piano in a certain way; Josephine the Mouse Singer believes that when the Mouse Folk “are in a bad way politically or economically, her singing” will save them. In 1941, Brod published an extraordinary column in the Hebrew paper Davar, recounting his arrival in Palestine with “only one plan” rising from a “mist of many obscure thoughts”: “to act for the memory of my friend Franz Kafka in this country that he missed.” (According to Brod, only Kafka’s “sickness and sudden death prevented his immigration.”) Having transported Kafka’s manuscripts by train and ship to the soil of Zion, Brod had already found a few fellow thinkers “for whom Kafka is more than any other modern writer — he is the 20th-century Job.” Once they had fulfilled their true purpose — namely, the establishment of a Kafka archive and a Kafka club in Palestine — “the Hitler era, the era of destruction” would be followed by an age of “the infinite creation in the spirit of Kafka,” “a good era for humanity, and for Judaism, which has again professed salvation to the peoples by one of its finest sons.”

Kafka’s actual relationship to Zionism and Jewish culture was, like his relationship to most things, highly ambivalent. (In 1922, Kafka compiled a list of things he had failed at, including piano, languages, gardening, Zionism and anti-Zionism.) Although Brod’s attempts to convert Kafka to Zionism were a source of tension in the early years of their friendship, Kafka grew increasingly sympathetic to the cause. As early as 1912, he discussed a journey to Palestine with Felice Bauer, a dictating-machine representative with whom he was to pursue a long, anguished, mainly epistolary romance. (The two were twice engaged to be married before separating in 1917.) In 1918, Kafka drew up his vision of an early kibbutz. The only nourishment would be bread, dates and water; notably, in light of recent developments, there would be no legal courts: “Palestine needs earth,” Kafka wrote, “but it does not need lawyers.”

Kafka’s plans to move to Palestine grew more concrete only as their fulfillment grew less likely. He began studying Hebrew in 1921. According to his teacher, Puah Ben-Tovim, “he already knew he was dying” and seemed to regard their lessons “as a kind of miracle cure,” preparing “long lists of words he wanted to know”; rendered speechless by coughing, he would implore his teacher “with those huge dark eyes of his to stay for one more word, and another, and yet another.” In 1923, Ben-Tovim visited Kafka and Dora Diamant in Berlin. She found them living in bohemian squalor, reading to each other in Hebrew and fantasizing about opening a restaurant in Tel Aviv, where Diamant would work in the kitchen and Kafka would wait on tables. “Dora didn’t know how to cook, and he would have been hopeless as a waiter,” Ben-Tovim observed. Then again, “in those days most restaurants in Tel Aviv were run by couples just like them.” Ben-Tovim left one of Kafka’s Hebrew notebooks in the National Library, where I saw it this spring: a long list of those words from which Kafka expected such miracles: “tuberculosis,” “to languish,” “sorrow,” “affliction,” “genius,” “pestilence,” “belt.”