Kafka’s Complete Diary Sheds Light on His Jewish Commitments

While it has long been known that the Prague-born German-language author Franz Kafka at times evinced deep interest in his Jewish heritage—attempting to learn Hebrew and becoming enthralled by the Yiddish theater—much more about his attitudes can be learned from his diaries, which for the first time have been published in English in unexpurgated form. The original expurgation, ironically, was largely the work of Kafka’s close friend and literary executor Max Brod, an ardent Zionist who settled in Tel Aviv in 1939 and later won Israel’s prestigious Bialik literary prize. Andrew Lapin writes: