SOURCE: “Max Brod: A Study in Unity and Duality,” in Judaism, Vol. 14, No. 1, Winter, 1965, pp. 48-59.

In the following essay, Weltsch examines paradoxes and contrasts in Brod's fiction.

Shortly after he completed the following appreciation of his closest friend Max Brod, on the occasion of the latter's 80th birthday, Felix Weltsch died in Jerusalem on November 8, 1964, only a few weeks after having himself reached the age of 80. Of the trio of Kafka, Brod and Weltsch, whose unique friendship is reflected in Kafka's published Diaries and Letters, only Brod is now left.

Because of his modest manner, and also perhaps because of difficulties of language, Felix Weltsch, a remarkable philosophic writer of original ideas, has not been widely known outside of his own countries, pre-Hitler Czechoslovakia and post-Hitler Israel. In both countries he served as a librarian of high standing, at the National University Library in Prague and subsequently...