Suffering for true love

Franz Kafka suffered because of his family, his work and his writing, but some of his most acute anxieties arose over women. Almost every relationship caused him anguish. Each attempt to form a secure attachment proved as intense as it was destructive.

The tortuous "struggle" for Felice Bauer, the Berlin businesswoman to whom he was twice engaged, ended in failure, as did his wooing of the Czech writer Milena Jesenska.

Although these passions were inspirational for The Trial and The Castle, they wrought havoc on Kafka's life. Indeed, his devotion to art precluded marriage.

The exception to this tragic pattern was Dora Diamant, the only woman with whom he enjoyed more than momentary contentment.

An emancipated Jewess like Felice, but blessed with an Eastern European temperament like Milena, Dora combined traits that Kafka had previously encountered only in separate-women. Passionate but playful, enlightened but religious, independent but committed, she was in some ways a perfect match.

Indeed, they each longed for the culture embodied by the other. Yet, with the irony that, as he noted, was typical of Kafka's existence, by the time they met it was already too late. He had less than a year to live.

Hitherto relatively little has been written about Dora as a person, and in this, the first biography, Kafka's Last Love, Dora's namesake Kathi Diamant aims to set the record right. It is a remarkable tale, which crisscrosses Europe from Poland to Germany and from Austria to Russia, ending in England, where Dora spent her final years.

Dora was born to an orthodox Jewish family at Pabianice near Lodz, central Poland in 1898. She imbibed the traditional Chasidic lore from her father, Herschel - a true "diamond", according to the local Wonder Rabbi.

However, Dora rebelled, espousing the liberal creed and the Zionist cause. She ran away from home, learned German, trained as a kindergarten teacher and worked among schoolchildren for the Berlin Jewish People's Home. In this role, while helping at a holiday camp for refugee children at Muritz on the Baltic, she met Kafka in the summer of 1923.

The main facts about their subsequent liaison are well-known, but Kathi Diamant astutely combines printed and unpublished sources - including letters, memoirs, conversations, the Comintern files in Moscow, and Dora's newly discovered diary - to create a vivid and coherent account.