FORGIVING THE ANGEL

A BRILLIANT AND BEAUTIFUL GROUP OF STORIES based on a circle of real people held together by their love of Kafka, both while he was still alive and after he died, by one of our most thought-provoking and admired writers. The sequence opens with Max Brod, Kafka's friend and literary executor, who has emigrated to Israel, telling us about Kafka and his lover Dora Diamant, living together in Berlin. They are so much in love they are able to believe that the dreadful prognosis for his tuberculosisis will change, but when it doesn't, Kafka talks of forgiving the angel of death. In a sort of La Ronde, other stories tell of Dora's marriage and daughter, her embrace of communism, move to Russia, and escape to England, leaving her husband behind in the gulag where he finds Milena Jesenska, another of Kafka's lovers, and they are eventually traded to the Germans and are sent to a concentration camp. By the end, these moving stories tell the whole calamitous story of European Jews in the Second World War, and we, too, need to find a way to forgive the angel. JAY CANTOR is the author of three novels, The Death of Che Guevara, Krazy Kat, and Great Neck, and two books of essays, The Space Between and On Giving Birth to One's Own Mother. Great Neck was listed as a New York Times Notable Book. US: Knopf (January 2014)