Christine Estima's Letters to Kafka​

Reviewed by Pamela Hensley

(House of Anansi, 2025)

In 1919, desperate for money, the writer Milena Jesenská sent a letter to Franz Kafka, asking for permission to translate his short story "The Stoker" from German to Czech. So began a correspondence that led to a brief yet intense love affair four years before his death. More than 150 letters were exchanged; twice they met in person. From the bones of this enticing true story, Christine Estima constructs her debut novel, Letters to Kafka.
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Educated at a renowned girls' school in Prague, Milena enjoys a privileged life until she marries Ernst Pollack, a Jewish intellectual, against her father's wishes. In 1918, they flee to Vienna where, in the ruins of the First World War, she encounters poverty for the first time. Her husband, unfaithful and unable to support them, spends his afternoons in opulent coffee houses while she must fend for herself. With impressive speed, she learns German through conversation and finds work as a translator. When this isn't enough, she poses as a porter and steals from travellers at the Westbahnhof. "The Affable Thief would slip a few fingers inside the luggage for loose coins or a stray silver pendant." But like her husband, Milena is drawn to the world of art and ideas, and coffee houses are where the intelligentsia gather. Overcoming humiliation, she joins him at the table, listening to writers, architects, musicians, and other artists until one day, her future crystallizes: “Being there among so many great minds made me think…I’d like to try my hand at writing.” She becomes a correspondent for the Přítomnost newspaper, a cultural journal based in Prague, then a translator for Kafka. Though it doesn't last, their relationship is deep and passionate and leaves a mark on both of them. Less than twenty years later, the Second World War breaks out and the Nazis roll into Prague. By this time, Milena, a Gentile, is divorced from Pollack and working back at home as the editor of the Přítomnost. She is an outspoken critic of the war and is arrested for resistance activities, as well as promiscuity and consorting with Jews. Though she burns the letters re-drafted in this novel, she is sent to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women, where she dies in 1944.

While there is great promise in the premise of this book, I found the prose disappointing. Weak similes and metaphors persist throughout ("With no privacy or peace, my plans to seduce Franz at home have crumbled like a day-old croissant"). The dialogue can be unnatural ("What was the impetus behind your sudden decision, then?"), and the mention of well-known artists sounds overly contrived ("Is Werfel still having an affair with Alma Mahler while she's married to Walter Gropius?"). Despite the potency of the time and place, this reader felt little emotional pull, only a vague sense of what was at stake. Still, in contrast to Kafka's own nonfiction collection, Letters to Milena, published after the deaths of both author and addressee, Letters to Kafka glimpses his and Milena's profound connection through her lesser-known perspective. Estima reminds us of a woman whose legacy is greater than that of a “muse to a great man”.

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Pamela Hensley is the Managing Editor of yolk literary journal and creator of the podcast How I Wrote This. Her fiction has been published in The New Quarterly, Queen's Quarterly, Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, The Dalhousie Review, The Antigonish Review, EVENT magazine and elsewhere.