World on tenterhooks

Tel Aviv, Aug. 18: Franz Kafka’s final wish before his death in 1924 — that his papers be burned — was famously defied by his friend, the writer Max Brod. The world got The Trial, The Castle and the adjective Kafkaesque; Brod got the papers.

When Brod fled to Tel Aviv from Prague on the last train out in 1939 as the Nazis rolled in, he had with him a suitcase full of Kafka’s documents.

Here, he took up with his secretary, and when he died in 1968, he bequeathed to her the remaining Kafka papers, as well as his own from a rich cultural career. For nearly 40 years, the secretary, Esther Hoffe, held the world of Kafka scholarship on tenterhooks, keeping the documents in her ground-floor apartment on Spinoza Street, some of them piled high on her desk (it was originally Brod’s), where she typed all day and took her meals.

The last time a scholar was permitted into the apartment was in the 1980s. Later, Ms. Hoffe sold the manuscript for The Trial for $2 million. No one knows what remains.

Since her death last year at age 101, her 74-year-old daughter, Hava, has indicated that a decision about the coveted papers will be made in the coming months. While most of the Kafka estate is already in archives in the Czech Republic, Britain and Germany, some may still be inside the scuffed front door of the Hoffe apartment.

As her mother did, Hava Hoffe is keeping scholars and archivists up at night wondering about the condition of what they believe are letters, diaries, photographs and perhaps unpublished works of the two authors, with Kafka one of the best-known authors of the 20th century.

“Brod was an extremely versatile, fertile, even obsessive writer who kept a diary,” noted Nurit Pagi, who is writing her doctoral dissertation on Brod at the University of Haifa. “What we believe Hoffe must have is the diary he kept from the day he arrived in Tel Aviv in 1939, filled with observations. For researchers, it would be very significant.”

The question preoccupying Israeli scholars is not only whether or when Hoffe will sell or donate the literary estate to which she and her older sister, Ruth, are heirs, sharing it with the world. It is also whether a way can be found to keep the trove in Israel, which many here consider its rightful home, as the stronghold of Jewish national and historic heritage.

“This material belongs in Jerusalem,” argued Mark Gelber, a Kafka scholar at Ben Gurion University in Beersheba. “Brod became a Zionist before World War I, lived and worked here and is buried here. Less well known is the fact that Kafka was a totally engaged Jewish personality and writer with many intimate connections to Zionism and Jews.”

Gelber noted that the national library in Jerusalem contained papers of such major Jewish personalities as Einstein and Martin Buber, and so it would be a natural home for Kafka’s as well.

This is far from a universal view, however. To many, Kafka’s novels and stories of existential despair written in German seem more consciously worldly than linked to any nationalist movement. The claims on Kafka by German or other archives seem to them just as strong.

A new book, which coincides with the 125th anniversary of Kafka’s birth, The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay by Louis Begley, argues that Kafka was deeply ambivalent about his Jewish identity, indeed about any collective identity.

“I admire Zionism and am nauseated by it,” Begley quotes from Kafka. Also: “What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself, and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.”

In response, there is a whole scholarly arsenal wielded by Gelber and others showing that Kafka learned Hebrew (his exercise books with vocabulary still exist), took the Zionist project seriously and had even hoped to move here. In 1949, for example, Kafka’s last lover, Dora Diamant, in whose arms he is said to have died a quarter century earlier, wrote to Brod saying Kafka’s life-long dream was “to make aliya and come to Israel,” using the Hebrew word for immigration to Israel.

Some here note that papers as precious as those belonging to Kafka and Brod may not be legally taken out of Israel without the national archives having a chance to register and make copies of them. But Ofer Aderet, a reporter for the newspaper Haaretz who has written extensively on the Kafka papers, notes that many suspect that Esther Hoffe successfully evaded the law.