Kafka & Poland: Love, Friendship, & Burning Manuscripts

rzezba_franza_kafki_w_pradze_gettyimages-1243129730.jpg, default, Sculpture of Franz Kafka in Prague, Czech Republic, 4 September 2022, photo: Hasan Ay / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

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Although Tadeusz Różewicz warned that one shouldn’t scrutinise the author of ‘The Trial’ too closely, Agnieszka Holland decided to direct a biographical drama about Franz Kafka anyway. What should we know about the protagonist and his ties to Poland before watching it? There’s his love for Warsaw’s Jewish theatre, his beloved from Pabianice, and the story of a certain translation...

Bruno S.

Comparisons are something that Kafka and a certain Polish writer will likely never escape. Literary historians point out their parallel biographies: their Jewish origins, struggles with family myths and complexes, failed engagements, battles with inner demons, and the autobiographical elements in their works. Critics notice a similar mood in their writings and a unique narrative style where it’s images and sounds rather than characters that drive the action. They are close, even when placed in opposite corners of the literary boxing ring, as Zofia Ziemann does in her article ‘Polish Kafka? O Pewnym Stereotypie Anglojęzycznej Recepcji Schulza’ (The Polish Kafka? On Certain Stereotypes in the Anglophone Reception of Schulz):

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Kafka’s clear, cool style does not resemble Schulz’s sensual, feverish sentences. [...] Kafka uses nouns, Schulz uses adjectives (and participles). Kafka is a master of narrative storytelling, Schulz – of poetic imagery. Kafka’s humour is rather cruel, Schulz’s is mild.

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Bruno Schulz, ‘Self-Portrait’, 1919, pencil, paper, Jewish Historical Institute, photo: Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature in Warsaw

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Bruno Schulz, born 12^th July 1892 in Drohobych, knew Franz Kafka Prague, born 3^rd July 1883 in Prague, from at least 1927. Nine years later, they were connected by The Trial. Schulz, the author of The Cinnamon Shops, signed the Polish translation with his name – but he did not translate the novel. The initiative was his though. He read Kafka in the original and translated one story from German. However, the translation of The Trial was entrusted to his fiancée Józefina Szelińska. Schulz only corrected it, wrote the afterword, and illustrated the book (another similarity: Kafka also drew). When Jerzy Ficowski made this public in 1967, he received a letter from Szelińska herself:

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You say the motivation for the translation of ‘The Trial’ being signed by Schulz was as an action of debt to his fiancée. I’m not very convinced. It was mostly about something very simple – to have the book published by Kister and to receive something in return. We received 1000 zł, I got 600, Bruno 400, a fair division, for without his inspiration, the translation wouldn’t have come into existence, and Bruno badly needed the money.

Other ties between the Prague writer and Poland must be sought among events during his lifetime.

Amalie T.

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Drawing by Bruno Schulz for Franz Kafka’s ‘The Trial’, translation: Bruno Schulz, photo: MG publishing house

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Muscular lips utter some telling words. ‘My will is iron, my heart I make a fortress’. They stand out on the smooth face of a thirty-year-old woman from Częstochowa. On the Prague stage, where she is playing a young woman despairing after her lover’s betrayal, she sensually sways her hips. Her rather strong body is cinched by a corset. When she lifts her arms, her gait takes on a festive character. This is how the enchanted Kafka sees her. ‘Mrs Tschissik (I enjoy writing the name so much),’ he notes in his Diaries.

Kafka’s platonic love for Amalie Tschissik – or Mrs T., as he calls her – unfolded like a typical drama. When Kafka was 27, a troupe of Jewish actors from Warsaw arrived in Prague. In his notes, dated 14^th October 1911, we find a description of an evening Kafka spent at Café Savoy watching Shulamis, a play by Abraham Goldfaden. Madame Czyżyk stars in it. Over several months, Kafka attends a total of 20 performances by the Jewish theatre (17 of which he reviews in his diaries), while he does not attend any German-language performances at all. He comes not only because of her. He is fascinated by East European Jewish culture, enchanted by the ‘conciseness and speed’ of Yiddish, and he envies the freedom of the artists who had left their families, homes, and old traditions behind. Judging by the writer’s Diaries, however, he comes mainly for her after all.

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Portraits of Franz Kafka on exhibition at the Academy of Arts in Berlin, 1966, photo: Harry Croner / ullstein bild via Getty Images

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The week after the evening at Savoy, the protagonist of our melodrama returns in his notes to the character she played, Sulamit. On 22^nd October he confesses his love – only on paper, in secret from the world and from her (perhaps Mrs T. learned of Kafka’s feelings when Diaries was published in England in 1948). The next day, Kafka meets the actors at a café, and the day after that he watches her again from the theatre audience (he experiences ‘[…] the sudden flutter of a shudder upon my cheekbone, which I always feel when I hear her voice’). On 1st November, he writes: ‘She must have believed I loved her, as was indeed true, and with these glances she gave me the sole fulfilment that a young but experienced woman, a good wife and mother, could give to a doctor of her imagination’.

The climax comes on 5^th November, when Kafka sends the actress a bouquet of flowers after Goldfaden’s play Bar Kokhba. They speak afterward, yet Kafka cannot bring himself to meet the eyes of his beloved, two years his senior. That day he notes:

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I hoped, by means of the bouquet of flowers, to appease my love for her a little, it was quite useless. It is possible only through literature or through sleeping together. I write this not because I did not know it, but rather because it is perhaps well to write down warnings frequently.

The last mention of Mrs. T. in Diaries is from 7^th January 1912: Kafka meets the Czyżyk family – as there is also a husband in this drama – and instead of expressing his love and devotion, he only talks about the deplorable state of Jewish theatre and the incomprehensible lack of interest in their art from Prague’s Jews. Later, in a letter to his fiancée Felice Bauer, he mentions the actress referred to as a prima donna.

Cover of the book 'Poszukiwany Franz Kafka' (In Search of Franz Kafka) by Remigiusz Grzela, 2024, photo: Lira Publishing House

Mrs. T. resembled Kafka’s fiancée, at least according to Remigiusz Grzela, who reconstructs the fate of the Warsaw theatre troupe in his book Poszukiwany Franz Kafka(In Search of Franz Kafka). Mania (or Miriam) Fersztenfeld, the daughter of an inn owner in Częstochowa, married Emmanuel Czyżyk, who was 14 years her senior. She joined his theatre troupe (led by Icchak Löwy – more on him shortly) and travelled worldwide. She arrived in Prague with her husband and daughter (later a pianist), the latter of whom Kafka describes as ‘awkward’. In his Diaries, the author of The Trial does not mention the couple’s son (soon to be a photographer), who stayed with family in London during the tour. Mrs T. returned there in 1914 as Millie Chissick. She had a long career and performed on the Grand Palais stage, among others, retiring in the mid-1960s due to poor health. She died in September 1976. She never told anyone about knowing Franz K.

Flora K.

White stockings, short black trousers, a woollen vest, and a kaftan. On her head is a yarmulke restricting her hair, topped by a black hat with a rolled brim. Kafka describes her as a ‘male impersonator’, since she usually plays male roles. Like others, he is captivated by her stage energy, and the phrases she sings in Yiddish make him feel part of a Jewish family. Sometimes he thinks he loves her. However, when Mrs. T. appears on stage, he immediately forgets the singer. ‘Czyżyk was a dramatic actress, a heroine. Klug was a comedian, but sang beautifully,’ Grzela summarises. He also notes Kafka’s avoidance of the husbands of both actresses.

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Flora Goldberg Klug (Florence Klug), actress of the Jewish Theatre in Warsaw, photo: public domain

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Younger by three years than the Prague native, Flora Goldberg was born in Sierpc. She met Süsskind Klug, born in Brody (now Ukraine), in London. They performed on stages in Vienna, Berlin, Leipzig, Karlovy Vary, and Budapest before ending up in Prague. The Italian authors Guido Massino and Giulio Schiavoni reconstruct her fate in their book Stella Errante(Wandering Star). During World War I, the Klugs returned to Kafka’s city, performed near his office, and even formed the Jewish-Polish Orpheum ensemble. After her husband’s death in 1920, Flora emigrated with her children to New York, settling in the Bronx. She became a star of the American stage and, as Florence Klug, even made it to Hollywood. Her California grave bears an inscription next to the date of her death (May 1954): ‘A trouper to the end’.

Ichaak L.

Goldfaden’s Shulamis again. After the performance, the Warsaw troupe’s manager takes the stage to bid the audience farewell. The curtain won’t open. Löwy stumbles, grabs the curtain, which falls onto the stage along with the wire fixing, and he is pushed off the stage. Who is this unlucky man whom Kafka admires and whom he will soon start writing about?

Isaac Meir Levi (or Dżak Lewi) was from Warsaw, born in 1887 to an Orthodox Hasidic family. His passion for theatre took him to Paris, then Berlin, Vienna, Karlovy Vary, and finally Prague. There, he befriended Kafka, though their relationship was complicated. Ichaak Löwy, or L., as he appears in Diaries, is a ‘charming storyteller and gossip’ (according to Ernst Pawel, Kafka’s biographer), as well as a ‘humorist, ironist, a malicious wit with parables for every occasion’, who ‘begins to occupy Franz’s life’ (in the words of Grzela). They are drawn together by a similar history of toxic paternal relations. The Warsaw actor with bulging eyes mesmerises his Prague friend not only with his stage expression. It’s he, not the two fascinating actresses, who instils in Kafka a love of Yiddish and Jewish culture – not for its religiosity, but its community.

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‘Man behind Bars’ (Ger. ‘Mann zwischen Gittern’), a drawing by Franz Kafka, 1924, photo: Gemäldescan Christian Mantey – Kulturagent / public domain

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As Grzela notes, under the influence of Levi and his troupe, the tone of Kafka’s Prague writings changes:

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Evelyn Torton Beck concludes that it was during the Warsaw actors’ stay in Prague that Kafka’s writing was born. The scholar carefully traces his later texts and Jewish theatre plays, finding similarities and transfers. She recognises 1912 as a breakthrough year. That’s when Kafka began writing differently, imposing dramaturgy on his texts. The evidence is his work ‘The Judgment’, written on the night of 22^nd-23^rd September 1912 [...].

For Torton Beck, it is Kafka’s first mature text. It presents fictional events realistically, with perfectly-drawn characters in sharp conflict. Until then, Kafka had been experimenting. Encountering Dżak Lewi’s theatre group, like meeting a group of alchemists, distilled the language of his prose.

Kafka’s irony, observed in Metamorphosis and The Castle, may have its source in Jewish theatre. One of the characters in ‘The Judgement’ is based on Levi. Presumably inspired by his influence, Kafka began learning Hebrew. After the actor left Prague in 1912, they continued to write letters to each other, but their relations cooled soon after. Jacques Levi, the pseudonym he adopted, spent World War I in Budapest, then returned to his hometown. While he would eventually become a Yiddish stage star, he would also suffer from homelessness, poverty, hunger, and drug addiction. During World War II, he was in the Warsaw ghetto. In July 1942, before being deported to Treblinka, he gave another performance, interpreting songs from the Book of Job for the last time. Levi’s acquaintance with the Czech writer was immortalised by Isaac Bashevis Singer in the story ‘A Friend of Kafka’.

Dora D.

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Dora Diamant, before 1930, photo: public domain

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They met a year before his death while cleaning fish in the resort of Graal-Müritz. She had come as a volunteer to help in the kitchen at a summer camp organised by the Berlin Jewish People’s Home. This time, it was he – a thin, upright man with sharp features – who became the object of longing. She had seen him before, walking with his sister (she thought he was with his wife) and her daughters (she was convinced they were his). In the kitchen, she did not yet know he was the eagerly awaited Dr. Kafka from Prague (a doctor of law, though one might think medicine), a contributor to the Jewish charity just like Dora.

According to records, she was known as Dwojra Dymant, born in Pabianice in 1898, daughter of a Jewish entrepreneur. She learned Hebrew, worked as a teacher and caregiver in an orphanage, and occupied herself with literature. Additionally, she performed on stage in Będzin, and Kafka had a weakness for actresses. In the summer of 1923, she travelled with her wards to the Baltic Sea. While there, she had her heart stolen.

The pretext for their conversation at dinner was the language of the Holy Scriptures. From then on, everything moved quickly: walks together, plans to travel to Palestine, Kafka moving out of his home, living together in Berlin, raging inflation, financial troubles, dreams about opening a restaurant in the Holy Land, laryngeal tuberculosis, and a daily ‘prayer’, as Dora would call her beloved’s writing. Kafka’s deteriorating health forced him to return to Prague. They corresponded daily. They met again in the Wienerwald sanatorium.

In April 1924, Kafka was admitted to a Viennese clinic. Dora stayed by his bedside, arranging transfer to a private sanatorium. Franz asked Hersz Aron Dymant for his daughter’s hand in a letter, explaining that although he was not a believer, he wanted to convert. Dora’s father consulted a tzadik from Góra Kalwaria – the answer was negative and soon communicated to the prospective son-in-law. Nevertheless, Kafka planned to move to Poland. But he didn’t make it. He died on 3rd June 1924 in Kierling.

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‘The Thinker’ (Ger. ‘Der Denker’), a drawing by Franz Kafka, 1924, photo: Gemäldescan Christian Mantey - Kulturagent / public domain

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And Dora? This woman from Pabianice, who stood at Kafka’s funeral alongside his family, was left with the hairbrush that Franz never went anywhere without, memories she recorded in a diary (later discovered in 2000 by her American biographer Kathi Diamant, although the surname coincidence has not been confirmed as kinship), and 35 letters from her beloved, even though she claimed to have burned them all at the author’s request, along with twenty notebooks. Taking this baggage with her, she first returned to her homeland, then began fulfilling her dreams. The Academy for Dramatic Art of the Düsseldorf Playhouse, stage performances, marriage, a child (she named her daughter Franciszka, after her greatest love). She joined the Communist Party of Germany, and in 1933 the Gestapo confiscated all her written materials – including Kafka’s manuscripts, which she had not destroyed. They were not recovered.

She fled to Moscow, then to England, where, as a communist who had lived in Germany before the war, she was interned in a women’s camp on the Isle of Man. After the war, she began writing theatre reviews and lived in the same London neighbourhood as Millie Chissick. ‘Dora must have watched performances featuring her. Did they know each other? Did they ever meet? There are no traces indicating their acquaintance,’ claims Grzela.

Before her death on 15^th August 1952, Dora told Max Brod, Kafka’s friend, about their relationship. She also fulfilled her beloved’s dream of travelling to Palestine. The trip was financed with royalties from his publications, which the family of her late fiancé made sure were passed on.

Franz K.

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Franz Kafka, photo: Culture Club / Getty Images

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The writer’s last will and testament reads:

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Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me (in my bookcase, linen-cupboard, and my desk both at home and in the office, or anywhere else where anything may have got to and meets your eye), in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, to be burned unread; also all writings and sketches which you or others may possess; and ask those others for them in my name. Letters which they do not want to hand over to you, they should at least promise faithfully to burn themselves. Yours, Franz Kafka.

Knowing Brod’s opinion of his work, Kafka likely suspected he would not obey. The Trial was published a year after Kafka’s death, with the Polish translation coming a little over a decade later.

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Sources: ‘Dora Diamant: Aktywistka, Aktorka, Ostatnia Partnerka Franza Kafki’ (Dora Diamant: Activist, Actress, Franz Kafka’s Last Partner), https://www.porta-polonica.de/pl/. Accessed: 26 Aug 2025; Grzela, Remigiusz. Poszukiwany Franz Kafka (In Search of Franz Kafka), Warsaw 2025; Kafka, Franz. Diaries, Łódź 2022; Kardas, Klaudia. ‘Pabianicki Diament Franza Kafki, czyli Wielka Miłość z Naszym Miastem w Tle’ (Franz Kafka's Pabianice-Born Jewel, or, Great Love with the Motif of our Town’, [in:] Nowe Życie Pabianic (New Life of Pabianice), 14 Feb 2014; Kaszuba-Dębska, Anna. Bruno: Epoka Genialna (Bruno: A Genius Epoch), Kraków 2020; Massino, Guido. ‘Franz Kafka’s Vagabond Stars’, Digital Yiddish Theater Project, https://uwm.edu/yiddish-stage/franz-kafkas-vagabond-stars/. Accessed: 26 Aug 2025; Pawel, Ernst. The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka. Warsaw 2003; Prokopówna, Eugenia. ‘Kafka w Polsce Międzywojennej’ (Kafka in Interwar Poland), [in:] Pamiętnik Literacki (Literary Memoir), 76(4), 1985; Ziemann, Zofia, ‘Polish Kafka? O Pewnym Stereotypie Anglojęzycznej Recepcji Schulza’ (The Polish Kafka? On Certain Stereotypes in the Anglophone Reception of Schulz), [in:] Schulz/Forum, no. 15, 2020.

Originally written in Polish, translated by Adam Zulawski, October 2025

Language English