When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfill Kafka’s last instruction: to burn his manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted his life to championing Kafka’s writing, rescuing his legacy from obscurity and physical destruction. Nearly a century later, an international legal battle erupted to determine which country could claim ownership of his work: Israel, where Kafka dreamed of living, or Germany, where Kafka’s three sisters perished in the Holocaust? Benjamin Balint offers a gripping account of the controversial trial in Israeli courts—brimming with dilemmas legal, ethical, and political—that determined the fate of the oeuvre. Kafka’s Last Trial is a brilliant biographical portrait of a literary genius, as well as the story of two countries whose national obsessions with overcoming the traumas of the past came to a head in a hotly contested trial for the right to claim the literary legacy of one of our modern masters.

Benjamin Balint is a library fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, and Die Zeit, and his translations from the Hebrew have appeared in The New Yorker.