Max Brod (Hebrew: מקס ברוד; 27 May 1884 – 20 December 1968) was a Bohemian-born Israeli author, composer, and journalist.

[1] In 1939, as the Nazis occupied Prague, he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine, taking with him a suitcase of Kafka's papers, many of them unpublished notes, diaries, and sketches.

Max Brod was born in Prague, then part of the Kingdom of Bohemia in Austria-Hungary, now the capital of the Czech Republic.

At the age of four, Brod was diagnosed with a severe spinal curvature and spent a year in corrective harness; despite this he would be a hunchback his entire life.

From 1912, he was a pronounced Zionist (which he attributed to the influence of Martin Buber) and when Czechoslovakia became independent in 1918, he briefly served as vice-president of the Jüdischer Nationalrat.

He settled in Tel Aviv, where he continued to write and worked as a dramaturg for Habimah, later the Israeli national theatre, for 30 years.

Brod was also close to Israeli author Aharon Megged, with whom he had many philosophical discussions as they walked along the beachfront in Tel Aviv.

At that time, however, something seems to have attracted him to me, he was more open than usual, filling the endless walk home by disagreeing strongly with my all too rough formulations.

The relatively short working hours gave him time to begin a career as an art critic and freelance writer.

Notwithstanding their inability to write in tandem – which stemmed from clashing literary and personal philosophies – they were able to publish one chapter from an attempted travelogue in May 1912, for which Kafka wrote the introduction.

Even after Brod's 1913 marriage with Elsa Taussig, he and Kafka remained each other's closest friends and confidants, assisting each other in problems and life crises.

[7] He justified this move by stating that when Kafka personally told him to burn his unpublished work, Brod replied that he would outright refuse, and that "Franz should have appointed another executor if he had been absolutely and finally determined that his instructions should stand.

"[8] Before even a line of Kafka's most celebrated works had been made public, Brod had already praised him as "the greatest poet of our time", ranking with Goethe or Tolstoy.

As Kafka's works were posthumously published (The Trial arrived in 1925, followed by The Castle in 1926 and Amerika in 1927), this early positive assessment was bolstered by more general critical acclaim.