Kafka, Love and Courage: The Life of Milena Jesenska

""Milena,"" observed a friend at a Prague cafe in the 1920s, ""looks as careworn as six volumes of Dostoevsky."" It was not easy to live intensely and freely amid the economic and political anxieties of the interwar years. Although Franz Kafka's letters to her (her own half of this fervid correspondence being lost) have given her a footnote in literature, and her publisher a misleading--if market-targeted--title for this biography, its interest is more in the evocation of bohemian, intellectual central Europe, particularly Vienna and Prague, from the close of the first World War into the second. Even hampered by drug addiction and occasional kleptomania, Jesenska eked out a freelance career writing about feminism, fashion, urban style and family life. Almost never earning enough for real independence, she depended on a supplement reluctantly supplied by her father (a Czech dental surgeon)and on her two husbands and several lovers. Jesenska first came to know Kafka through translating his German originals into Czech, and throughout her abbreviated life--she died at 47--she also translated Stevenson, Stendhal, Flaubert, Gorky and Poe. The hopeful years, however straitened, ended with the West's sellout of Czechoslovakia to Hitler. When the Germans occupied Prague, she contributed defiantly to the underground press until her arrest in November 1939. Jesenska died in the Ravensbruck concentration camp in 1944, 51 years before she would be honored at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem as a ""righteous gentile"" for her efforts in saving Jews from the Nazis. A BBC World Service journalist with Prague credentials, Hockaday writes simply and poignantly about an unconventional minor heroine of her time, often letting Jesenska speak through her own writings. Illustrations. (Mar.)