Even when truth is not stranger than fiction, it frequently provides us with a more satisfying tale. That’s one conclusion to be drawn from Benjamin Balint’s new book, Kafka’s Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy. An up-and-coming Israeli nonfiction writer and professor of literature, Balint has taken as his subject the same one that was chosen by the acclaimed novelist Nicole Krauss for her 2016 book Forest Dark: the recent set of legal rulings emanating from Jerusalem over who owns the greater portion of Franz Kafka’s manuscripts and letters.

The route by which these documents arrived in the Jewish State was a circuitous one, and it has been the subject of more than four decades’ worth of litigation. Before Kafka died in 1924, he asked his best friend and principal booster, Max Brod, to burn all of his remaining papers. Recognizing their excellence when the rest of the world had not yet proved so keen, Brod ignored these entreaties and brought the papers with him to Palestine in 1939. Fifteen years later, Brod deeded the papers to Esther Hoffe, his married lover and a fellow refugee from the Nazis. Brod requested that the documents be turned over upon her death to a proper library or archival research center so that scholars could access them. But when Hoffe died in 2007, this record of Kafka’s surviving work was instead bequeathed to her daughter, Eva. Possession of the manuscripts became the focus of a court