The question of whether Brod acted ethically in disregarding Kafka’s dying wishes is one of the great debates of literary history, and it lies at the core of Balint’s book. As he notes, “Brod was neither the first nor the last to confront such a dilemma.” Virgil wanted the Aeneid to be burned after his death, a wish that was also denied. Preserving an author’s work against his or her will implies that art belongs more to its audience than to its creator. And in strictly utilitarian terms, Brod undoubtedly made the right choice. Publishing Kafka’s work has brought pleasure and enlightenment to countless readers (and employment to hundreds of Kafka experts); destroying it would have benefited only a dead man.

But did Kafka, the man made of literature, really want his writing to disappear? The truth is that, if you read Kafka’s will closely, it is just as ambiguous, just as susceptible to multiple interpretations, as everything else he wrote. Not least, the will distinguished between his unpublished work and some of his published stories, which he described as “valid.” “I don’t mean that I want them reprinted,” he added, but “I’m not preventing anyone from keeping them if he wants to.” Kafka seemed to have a lingering hope that his work would find readers. And in choosing Brod as his executor, he picked the one person who was certain not to carry out his instructions. It was as if Kafka wanted to transmit his writing to posterity, but didn’t want the responsibility for doing so. “Even in self-renunciation Kafka was beset by indecision,” Balint writes.

Brod, for his part, had no doubts about the importance of his friend’s writing. He succeeded in finding publishers for The Trial and The Castle in the 1920s, but only in the ’30s did Kafka’s work slowly begin to find a real audience. The rise of Nazism convinced readers that they were indeed living in Kafka’s world of counterfeit laws and meaningless violence—even as Nazi anti-Semitism made it impossible to publish his books in Germany.

Brod fled Czechoslovakia on the very night the Nazis annexed the country, in March 1939, carrying Kafka’s manuscripts with him. He had been a committed Zionist for many years, and he made his way to Tel Aviv, where he lived until his death, in 1968. Balint shows that, like many immigrants from Germany, Brod had a difficult time remaking his life in Palestine. To his distress, he was slighted by the local literary world, which was interested only in Hebrew writing. Indeed, Balint points out that Kafka’s work has never been as popular in Israel as it is in Europe and the United States.

During the trial, German scholars argued that Kafka’s manuscripts should go to Germany, where they would be studied intensively, rather than be neglected in Jerusalem. One obvious counterargument was that it would be obscene for Kafka’s relics to end up in the country that had annihilated his family. Balint quotes an Israeli scholar who cuttingly observed, “The Germans don’t have a very good history of taking care of Kafka’s things. They didn’t take good care of his sisters.” But the case for keeping Kafka in Israel went deeper, and involved a literary as well as a legal judgment. Balint writes that in awarding Kafka’s papers to the National Library of Israel, the judges “affirmed that Kafka was an essentially Jewish writer.” And this is the real question at the center of Kafka’s Last Trial: Is he a Jewish writer? What do we gain, or lose, by reading his work through a Jewish lens?