HOW MY NOVEL BECAME AN OBSESSION

Christine Estima remembers the moment she decided to rescue Milena Jesenská from Kafka's shadow

I came across the story of Milena Jesenská by accident. It was 2013, and I was living in London, UK in pretty dire straits. I wasn’t selling many stories and my writing career was almost a fiction itself. That’s when I found out there was a fellowship being offered by a university in Vienna that would fund the creation of projects for European journalists (remember the UK was still part of Europe at this time). The fellowship was called The Milena Jesenská Fellowship for Journalists. Naturally I applied, but my interest was piqued. Who was this Milena Jesenská? I’d never heard of her.

So I searched online and found a sparsely populated Wikipedia page. Okay, she was Franz Kafka’s first translator…. They had a brief love affair…. His letters to her were published in the 1950s in the epistolary book Letters to Milena. Okay, neat I guess? But still, I wasn’t satisfied. There was still something nagging at me to find out more about her. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Something was telling me I needed to know more about her story.

I began to look for books either written about her or by her. I found that almost everything written about her was only published in either Czech or German, however I managed to find five books that were translated into English. I bought and devoured all five. I learned that she and Kafka met twice for two lovers’ trysts, but it’s not known what happened during them. After Kafka died, she became instrumental in fighting the rise of fascism in Europe, hiding Jews and dissidents in her home, helping them escape over the border, and writing for banned publications denouncing the Nazis. She was arrested by the gestapo in 1939 and died in a concentration camp in 1944.

When I was done reading, I stared off into space, absolutely gobsmacked over the life of this brave, unconventional woman with moxie, gumption, and chutzpah.

But tantamount to all that, I was struck by the fact that I’d never heard of her. I began mentioning her to others, even those who considered themselves followers of Kafka, and no one I spoke to had ever heard of her.

I found that to be such a shame.

Perhaps the biggest shame is that Jesenská is not even considered a written authority on her own life. She is only remembered (if she is remembered at all) not by her own words, but by the words of others. She is mostly remembered in the epistolary book Letters to Milena, which was published in the 1950s by Kafka’s editor and friend Max Brod against Kafka’s final wishes. The book only contains Kafka’s letters to her. Milena’s letters to Franz have never been found.

At this point, I said to myself, “Someone ought to write a novel about her.”

Then I realized, “Wait a minute… I’m someone.”

One of the more striking aspects of Jesenská’s story that captivated my attention was the fact that she had such fortitude in a time when women were expected in polite Viennese society to stay on the sidelines. In 1918, the Great War had just ended, and if one didn’t die in the conflict, the Spanish flu epidemic finished off the job. Men were coming back from the front with hastily patched-up faces and phantom limbs. There were coal and fuel shortages, breadlines, and inflation was out of control. Respectable women were selling their bodies on the streets to support their families. And here’s Milena, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, who decides, come hell or high water, that she’s going to be an author. It’s so ostentatious, brave, and brazen. And my body of work has always been drawn to the stories and voices of women who find their power, and have the courage to use them against all odds. As the kids might say, I stan a queen.

In recent times, there has been a wonderful, corrective push to acknowledge the achievements of women that historically were attributed to men. Known as “The Matilda Effect,” much ink has been spilled revealing how often women are only remembered by the men in their lives (who stole their ideas). When we look at famed literary love affairs, for decades our understanding of women such as Hadley Hemingway, who was Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s third wife, or Zelda Fitzgerald, wife to F. Scott Fitzgerald, has almost exclusively been through the eyes of their famous husbands. Luckily, the times being what they are, contemporary literature has finally tried to offer these unheard viewpoints a microphone.

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain recounts the marriage between Hadley and Ernest Hemingway from her point of view when the young couple first moved to Paris from Toronto and he began work on The Sun Also Rises. It details Hadley’s love, pain, mourning, healing, and hope as her relationship with Ernest breaks down amongst this philandering and disloyalty.

Then author Therese Anne Fowler gave us Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald to offer Zelda’s oft-ignored viewpoints on her marriage to F. Scott, how she was unjustly called mentally infirm, and how she saw the relationship between her husband and Hemingway as they gallivanted around 1920s Paris together.

Today, more and more novels attempt to offer a glimpse into the overlooked lives and views of the women who loved famous men like Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring about a fictional affair between Jan Vermeer and his muse Griet, or Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell about Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway.

These are just a couple of examples from the literary world where we as both authors and readers are attempting to reevaluate what we know about history, and reveal the unknown stories of the women who deserve their due.

Milena Jesenská was so much more than a footnote in history, or some man’s lover, and she has been overlooked and glossed over for far too long. That is the idea behind crafting Letters to Kafka, which is my attempt to restore her voice. This novel imagines what she might have said in her lost letters to Kafka, and also imagines from her POV what might have happened during those two trysts. The act of writing this in her voice is critical because it restores her as a written authority on her own life, and it removes her as a passive object in the story. This is done so that, henceforth, she might not simply be known as Kafka’s lover, but that he might be known as hers.

CHRISTINE ESTIMA is an Arab woman of mixed ethnicity (Lebanese, Syrian, and Portuguese) and the author of the novel Letters to Kafka and the short story collection The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society. She has written for the New York Times, The Walrus, VICE, the Globe and Mail, Chatelaine, Maisonneuve, the Toronto Star, and the CBC. Her story “Your Hands Are Blessed” was included in Best Canadian Stories 2023. She was shortlisted for the 2018 Allan Slaight Prize for Journalism and a finalist for the 2023 Lee Smith Novel Prize. Estima has a master’s degree from York University and lives in Toronto.