SOURCE: A review of Franz Kafka: A Biography, in Thought, Vol. 23, No. 89, June, 1948, pp. 316-17.

In the following review, Ong praises the first English translation of Brod's Kafka biography.

Max Brod's life of Kafka [Franz Kafka] is here presented in excellent English translation for the first time following its appearance in German in 1937. Kafka's life does not admit of offhand discussion, for in it many of the ferments acting on men's lives today work at a depth and with a vigor which produced in Kafka's narratives some of the most significant art of our time. Kafka died in Prague in 1924 at the age of forty-one. His world had been simultaneously Jewish, Czech, and German, but Kafka seems to have been above the political tensions which the tragedies of the past few years of war have revealed in his milieu. Yet there were other tensions aplenty. The conflict between...