Arnold Beer is a young man who wishes to organise a flying display in Prague, based on the model of the show in Brescia that Brod had visited with his friend Kafka. He raises money and sets to work building wooden shacks. His secretary Lina, an unprepossessing Bohemian-German Christian girl, falls in love with him. He refuses her advances, but cannot do without her help. Finally the inevitable happens and she seduces him – a nice variation on the many stories of seduction found in Brod’s romantic novels. At the end of the novel, Arnold goes on a trip to the country to visit his grandmother - a strange and wonderful woman who never stops talking in her Bohemian German with the occasional soupcon of Jewish, hardly letting her grandson get a word in. The world of the Jewish community in Prague, which many look for in the writings of Kafka, can be found here in Max Brod’s work.
The volume also contains the short novel »Ein tschechisches Dienstmädchen« (A Czech Maid, 1909) and the novella »Weiberwirtschaft« (Woman’s Work, 1913).
The world of the German Jewish community in Prague before the First World War – brought to life again in the novels of Max Brod.
The Author
Before and after the First World War, Max Brod (1884 –1968) was one of the most well-known representatives of German-speaking literature in Prague; today he is famous primarily as the editor of the works written by his friend Franz Kafka.
The Series
With the publication of »Max Brod – Selected Works«, a literary oeuvre that is no longer on sale in bookshops and rarely found in libraries is made available to the reading public again. The edition will appear in ten volumes
