1. Max Brod was a Bohemian-born Israeli author, composer, and journalist.
22 Facts About Max Brod
1. 2.
Max Brod was born in Prague, then part of the Kingdom of Bohemia in Austria-Hungary, now the capital of the Czech Republic.
3.
At the age of four, Max Brod was diagnosed with a severe spinal curvature and spent a year in corrective harness; despite this he would be a hunchback his entire life.
4.
Max Brod settled in Tel Aviv, where he continued to write and worked as a dramaturg for Habimah, later the Israeli national theatre, for 30 years.
5.
Max Brod became very close to a couple named Otto and Esther Hoffe, regularly taking vacations with the couple and employed Esther as a secretary for many years; it is often presumed that their relationship had a romantic dimension.
6.
Max Brod increasingly devoted himself to music, traveling to Europe to give lectures and to encourage young artists.
7.
Max Brod was close to Israeli author Aharon Megged, with whom he had many philosophical discussions as they walked along the beachfront in Tel Aviv.
8.
Max Brod died on 20 December 1968 in Tel Aviv; his final resting place is the Trumpeldor Cemetery in Tel Aviv.
9.
Unlike Kafka, Max Brod rapidly became a prolific author who eventually published 83 titles.
10.
Max Brod would write at various times both for and against Karl Kraus, a convert from Judaism to Roman Catholicism.
11.
Max Brod first met Kafka on 23 October 1902, when they were students at Charles University.
12.
Max Brod had given a lecture on Arthur Schopenhauer at the German students' hall.
13.
Max Brod pushed Kafka to publish his work, and it is probably owing to Max Brod that he began to keep a diary.
14.
Max Brod prodded his friend to complete the project several years later, but the effort was in vain.
15.
On Kafka's death in 1924, Max Brod was the administrator of the estate.
16.
When Max Brod fled Prague in 1939, he took with him a suitcase of Kafka's papers, many of them unpublished notes, diaries, and sketches.
17.
On one side was the National Library of Israel, which argued that Max Brod passed his literary estate to Esther as an executor of his actual intent to have the papers donated to the institution.
18.
Max Brod translated some of Bedrich Smetana's and Leos Janacek's operas into German, and wrote the first book on Janacek.
19.
Max Brod authored a study of Gustav Mahler, Beispiel einer deutsch-judischen Symbiose, in 1961.
20.
Max Brod's book Die Musik Israels, first published in 1951, which introduced the term "Musica Yam-tikhonit" to define a prominent style in Israeli concert music of the era, shortly before Boskovich published essays which provided an extended definition of this style.
21.
In 1948, Max Brod was awarded the Bialik Prize for literature.
22.
In 1965, Max Brod was awarded the Honor Gift of the Heinrich Heine Society in Dusseldorf, Germany.