Kafka’s Tel Aviv booty

July 27, 2008 - 12:00 PM by

Kafka!During the same month in which the world’s literary eyes were focused on Jerusalem following Mark Twain-themed real estate landmark reports, the Tel Aviv-Kafka connection is buzzing hard as well, as a White City-based heiress is transformed into some kind of curmudgeonly cockroach by book lovers the world over.

One of 20th-century fiction’s most influential figures, Prague’s Franz Kafka first met Max Brod, a fellow Jew, in 1902, when the two were students at Charles University. Close friends from then until Kafka’s passing in 1924 at age 40 (he had suffered from tuberculosis, insomnia, depression, migraines, anxieties, boils and other complications), Brod enabled and encouraged Kafka’s creative output throughout the anguish.

Kafka ordered that all of his manuscripts be destroyed, and when he died, his girlfriend, Dora Diamant, heeded these wishes for the most part (the Gestapo ended up seizing some writings from her in 1933). Brod, serving as the writer’s literary executor, began publishing many as-of-yet unknown works, writing in 1925 that “Franz should have appointed another executor if he had been absolutely and finally determined that his instructions should stand.”

When the Nazis took over Prague in 1939, Brod packed up what was left of the Kafka archives and moved to Tel Aviv, where he worked as a researcher for the Habimah Theatre Company. He returned many works to Europe in various stages, including a large donation to Oxford University’s libraries in 1961, before he died in 1968, at which point his possessions were turned over to a friend named Esther Hoffe.

That’s when things started getting really Kafkaesque. Despite refusing to play ball with the State of Israel, Hoffe sold a Kafka text for £1m at Sotheby’s in the 80s and was even once busted at Ben Gurion airport trying to smuggle manuscripts in her luggage. Writings that are likely to have meditated on personae who felt like pawns amid bleak societies of red tape were being wrestled over by an extremely private woman and the Israeli government.

Esther Hoffe passed away last year, her damp, furry apartment potentially containing unknown written treasures.

But authorities in Tel Aviv have warned that the papers, with their high sulfuric acid content, may have stood up poorly to conditions in Hoffe’s damp flat in the centre of Tel Aviv and to the hordes of cats and dogs which she kept until… health inspectors intervened after neighbors complained about the stench.

Now Hoffe’s daughters are looking to finally unload the archive, but the local bureaucrats aren’t giving up just yet:

“I’ll persistently demand that no material connected to Franz Kafka leaves the State of Israel,” the state archivist, Dr. Yehoshua Freundlich, told Haaretz…. German parties have over the past few days expressed great interest in receiving the material, and estimated that it contains an original manuscript of one of Kafka’s stories along with his illustrations, as well as letters from his close friend, the writer Max Brod.

Exactly what types of works are being kept from public eyes remains an unknown variable, however. Even though many of us like to imagine lost novellas telling heady tales of introspective intrigue, the reality remains anyone’s guess:

“It’s very difficult to know what might be in her flat,” said Ritchie Robertson, the professor of German at Oxford University, which holds the bulk of Kafka’s known manuscripts. “But my own suspicion would be that there would be nothing of any significance by Kafka,” he said.

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One Comment on Kafka’s Tel Aviv booty

  1. Israelity » Time doesn’t pay on Wed, Nov 5th 2008 8:25 PM

    2. [...] In a bizarre tale involving old time pieces, a notorious super-thief, a former queen of France and an Israeli woman living in LA, The Associated Press recently published a report on the recovery of items stolen in Israel’s most damaging heist ever in terms of value. As far as intrigue goes, the story may rival the news from July about Kafka’s lost writings possibly being horded in a cat- and mildew-filled Tel Aviv apartment. [...]

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