[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 the drives at work in the artist and the mentality imposed by his employment in a semigovernmental insurance institute (where he did his work carefully and well) combined with other crucial conflicts to impress themselves on Kafka as painful and taxing realities.

Little wonder that in this maelstrom of opposed currents Kafka becomes the great modern portrayer of man struggling against the inconclusiveness of (mortal) life, or even that this ordinarily light-hearted and rather playful young man found himself at least once tempted to suicide.

The crises in Kafka's life were experienced with such appalling thoroughness and in such ultimate terms that in all of them the religious issue is never far from the surface. Brod, like Kafka himself, is well aware of this fact and discusses it at some length. The religious issue, in fact, assumes a very significant shape. Kafka was to some extent betrayed by the calculatingly impersonal laboratory manner of expression stipulated by many as a condition of their approach to God—the manner of expression which, opposed to the highly personalistic approach to God essential to both the Old and New Testament, benignly outlaws thinking, or at least speaking, in terms of my God and makes of God only a sort of theorem.

The implication slyly enough conveyed by this often pretentious and always bogus “objectivity”—which, by no means exclusively modern, can be seen as a radical and lamentable deficiency in even an Aristotle's cast of mind—is that there can never be any question of our turning to God as beings needing some special and direct action of His on our individual lives. Yet, if all finite reality is inconclusive, intellectually and otherwise, as Kafka was not afraid to intimate, and if God's Being is transcendent, as Kafka was acutely aware that It is, there is no use pretending we do not stand in need of such action or that we can do anything really relevant to help ourselves. Our whole being is simply a being which manifests a need for God's intervening, for His special help in the here and now. And without a personal God, all question of real intervention, of personal initiative on God's part, is meaningless.

Everything in Kafka's life proved evidence for the hopelessness of man's case without God's special and direct succor. The fact that there remained engrafted in him inhibitions against grappling with his problems explicitly in terms of God's personal and fatherly interest in His creature undoubtedly constituted for Kafka the greatest tension of all.