‘Lovers of Frank K.' Review: Book of Betrayal
Mr. Sönmez, the current president of PEN International and a former human-rights lawyer in Istanbul, situates his fiction amid the political convulsions of West Berlin in the fevered summer of 1968. In this invented scenario, an aged and frail Max Brod, Kafka's literary executor and former confidant, arrives in Berlin from Tel Aviv to give a talk on Kafka, only to be shot by an assailant and wounded. The intended assassination of Brod inadvertently claims the life of an innocent young student, Ernest Fischer.
Initially, the authorities suspect an ideological motive. 'It seems that an antisemitic group has begun a campaign of aggression against prominent writers and intellectuals,' the prosecutor surmises, 'and they picked Max Brod as their first target. It would be a good start for them. Mr. Brod is someone who fled the Nazis during the war and settled in present-day Israel. Besides his writing, he is recognized for his dedication to the Zionist ideal.'
The novella swiftly leads the reader away from this hypothesis when it emerges that the assailant, Ferdy Kaplan—a German-Turkish radical orphaned by World War II and raised in Istanbul—attacked Brod not because of his heritage but for a literary transgression. Kaplan condemns Brod with fanatic fervor, branding him—through the prosecutor's recounting—as a traitor 'more treacherous than the traitors during the war' for forcing Kafka into immortality by editing, altering and ultimately publishing his friend's unfinished manuscripts. The assailant portrays Brod neither as selfless savior nor faithful steward of his friend's unfinished works but as a posthumous ventriloquist who made Kafka's voice marketable. Kaplan's sentiments echo a letter he read in a literary magazine: 'Kafka can no longer be erased, but Max Brod . . . may pay the price.'
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