Book interview: Fascinating story of Israel’s claim on Jewish artist Bruno Schulz

Schulz might have offered the world more literature, but he was shot dead, aged 50, by a Nazi in 1942 while walking back home in German-occupied Poland.

A man looks at wall paintings made by Jewish author and artist Bruno Schulz at the Yad Vashem Museum of Holocaust Art in Jerusalem in 2009. The display includes three wall paintings, from the last known work by Schulz before his murder on November 19, 1942. Picture: Getty

In Kafka’s Last Trial (2018) Israeli author, Benjamin Balint, examined a decades-long legal battle that asked a controversial question: who is the rightful cultural guardian of Franz Kafka’s original manuscripts, since Max Brod’s death in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1968?

Brod, a German-speaking Jew and committed Zionist from Prague, fled the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, emigrating to Mandatory Palestine. Kafka was born in 1883 into a German-speaking Jewish family in what was then the Bohemian capital of Prague and died from tuberculosis in 1924 at the age of 40. As Kafka’s sole literary executor, Brod edited and prepared posthumous editions of Kafka’s unpublished novels: The Trial (1925); The Castle (1927); and Amerika (1927).