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A friend of Kafka
By Ofer Aderet / Photo by Ilya Melnikov , By Ofer Aderet
What secrets are contained in the papers of author Max Brod, Franz Kafka's friend and literary executor? For 40 years, Brod's estate was jealously guarded by his close friend Esther Hoffe, who sold parts of it, including works by Kafka, to the highest bidder. Now, the Israel National Library has gone to court to retrieve this literary treasure

The Tel Aviv District Family Court is housed in an ordinary office building in Ramat Gan, between a carpet shop and a convenience store. Dozens of people crowd in here every day, waiting to hear judgments on banal, but sometimes fateful, matters - property agreements, divorce terms, wills and inheritances. It's doubtful that any of the people swarming and jostling through the corridors in recent months knew that among the files piled on the shelves of the court secretariat is one - indistinguishable from the others - that could interest millions around the world. There is nothing in the serial number or names on the outside of this file that reveal its significance, or the reason why a few people in the know are waiting in suspense for the judge's decision.

Brod died in 1968, and by rights the papers he left behind - which include the last remnants of Kafka's writings - should by now have been safely ensconced in an archive, a museum, or a library, open to the public, to scholars and to Kafka's many admirers. Instead, they are in private hands, apparently being kept in a residential apartment and a number of safes in Tel Aviv.
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After the situation came to light in a series of articles in Haaretz a year ago, the National Library in Jerusalem filed suit against the woman in possession of the estate, Eva Hoffe, 75, of Tel Aviv. A former El Al flight attendant, she inherited the papers from her mother, Esther Hoffe, Brod's assistant, companion and the beneficiary of his will, who died two years ago. The court was asked to order Eva Hoffe to hand the papers over to the library so they could be sorted, catalogued and made available to the public.

The hearings - replete with emotion, suspense, shouting and threats - have since continued behind closed doors at the Family Court. Until about a week ago, few people on the outside knew what was happening. Authorities on German literature across the world who have been researching Kafka's writings for years and were asked what they thought about the trial, were surprised to hear about it.

Nobody knows for sure what the estate contains. In the 1970s, there were letters, drawings and manuscripts by Kafka himself, but these may have been sold off over the years. Still, among the thousands of documents that remain, there are certainly items that illuminate unknown aspects of the life of the great writer.

The story began after Kafka died of tuberculosis in an Austrian sanatorium in 1924. Going through the papers on his desk, Max Brod found a folded note addressed to him in his friend's handwriting. This note, along with another yellowing slip of paper, turned out to be Kafka's will. In it, he gave detailed instructions: "Dearest Max," Kafka wrote, "My last request: Everything I leave behind me ...[is] to be burned unread - everything that can be found in my posthumous papers (thus in boxes, cupboards, desks, at home and in the office, or wherever else they may be that you come upon them) of diaries, manuscripts, letters, my own and those written to me, sketches and so on, should be burned unread and without remnant, even all the written or drawn things that you or others have, that you might have asked for in my name. If there are letters that people will not turn over to you, at least they should promise to burn them themselves."

Kafka made it clear that he wanted everything he had written, except six stories that had already been published, to be consigned to the flames, but he was at pains to make it clear that "I do not mean by this to express the wish that they [the six stories] be reprinted for the benefit of coming generations; on the contrary, my true desire will be fulfilled if they are all lost. But as they are already in existence, I am not stopping anyone from having them, if he feels like it."

During his lifetime, Kafka published only a few works, and they did not draw any special attention. If his will had been executed according to his instructions, his major novels - "The Trial", "The Castle" and "Amerika" - and most of his short stories would have been lost to the world. But Brod did not follow the instructions; instead he spent much of his time locating, editing and publishing all the works of his late friend, including correspondence, diaries and notebooks.

In March 1939, as the Nazis were entering Prague, Brod and his wife escaped on the last train leaving the city and headed for Romania, whence they sailed to Palestine. Traveling alongside Brod, who was an ardent Zionist, was Kafka's other close friend, the philosopher Felix Weltsch and Weltsch's nephew, Chaim Adler, who was later to win the Israel Prize for education and who is the only one of the trio still alive. Brod, then 55, carried with him one suitcase, which contained the manuscripts of the novels and stories of Kafka, as well as the rest of his papers.

It was from this apartment that Brod continued editing and publishing parts of Kafka's legacy. After his wife died in 1942, he was assisted in this work by Esther Ilsa Hoffe, another new immigrant, 22 years his junior. He had met her at a Hebrew class in Tel Aviv. Hoffe was married, with two daughters, and she took Brod, the new widower, into her family and treated him like part of her household.

"Our home was his home, he didn't have another one," she said in an interview with Haaretz in 1968 that ran in the paper's "Women and Home" section. For 26 years, Esther handled Brod's manuscripts with devotion, proofreading them and preparing them for publication. "It was very difficult to make out his handwriting, I was the only person who could decipher what he had written," she said in the 1968 interview.

But this dedication, it transpired in years to come, had other aspects - fanatical, obsessive and covetous. The close link between the two, apparently also a romantic one, enabled Hoffe to obtain full, exclusive and dangerous access to the treasure that Brod had rescued from Prague - Kafka's literary legacy.

In 1956, Kafka's writings took another trip across the sea. This time, Brod took the manuscripts of the three novels to Switzerland, for fear that the Suez Campaign would become a regional conflagration. Brod never kept the entire treasure to himself. A few years later, he donated the manuscripts of "The Castle" and "Amerika" to Oxford University, where they are today. He kept the manuscript of "The Trial," which his good friend Franz had given him as a gift.

The current court case revolves around this interpretation of the will. What happened between Brod's death and the year 2007, when Esther Hoffe died at the age of 102, can only be seen as a betrayal. But unlike Brod's betrayal of Kafka, thanks to which the world has enjoyed the creations of the great writer, Hoffe's betrayal of Brod only distanced the writings from the public at large.

In the late 1980s, Hoffe and the National Library signed a memorandum in which terms were laid down for the transfer of the Brod estate, or part of it, to the institution. But the conditions were replaced or altered each time the library fulfilled its side of the deal. Ultimately, until the day she died, Hoffe never handed the estate over to the library.

Six years after that, as if in a self-fulfilling prophecy, Hoffe sold the most important and most valuable item in Brod's estate: the manuscript of "The Trial." Kafka, who had given it as a present to Brod, had asked in his will that it be burned. It certainly never occurred to him that a woman he never knew would sell it in Germany and get rich off of it.

To cover her tracks, Hoffe made use of Sotheby's auction house in London, which sold the manuscript to the German book dealer Heribert Tenschert, who was acting on behalf of the Bonn government, when he made the highest offer for this literary gem - $1.98 million, breaking a world record for the amount paid for a modern-era manuscript. "From my point of view, the price was a very low one," he told the media at the time. "This is the most important work of literature in German of the 20th century, and Germany had to possess it." And indeed, Germany did gain possession of it, and it was placed in the German Literature Archive in the city of Marbach, where it lies to this day in a secure strongbox.

When Esther Hoffe died two years ago, she bequeathed dozens of letters and books from the Brod estate to her two daughters, Eva and her older sister, a cosmetician by the name of Ruth Wisler. This is what she wrote: "The drafts, the letters, and the drawings by Kafka that the late Max Brod gave me as a gift, I gave as a gift in May 1970 to my two daughters, in equal parts. Kafka's books from Brod's library remain in the possession of my two daughters."

Following the publication of the articles in Haaretz a year ago, the National Library, represented by Dr. Meir Heller, tried to put a stop to the wanton irresponsibility. At the very last moment, just before the will took effect, he submitted a petition to prevent transfer of the Brod estate to the two daughters.

Toward the end of Esther Hoffe's life, there were many reports that the Brod estate was not being kept in proper physical conditions. "Cats Amble among Kafka Manuscripts" read a headline in Yedioth Ahronoth in June 2006. Last month, the apartment on Spinoza Street appeared to be deserted. A strong stench emanated from it, and many cats could be seen in the vicinity. Subsequent visits revealed that Eva Hoffe would go to the apartment several times a day to care for the cats, who apparently regard the apartment as their home.

"Brod would turn over in his grave if he knew how his estate ended up," says Nurit Pegi, who is writing a doctoral dissertation on Brod at Haifa University. "It is safe to assume that he would have expected the executor to have his works published, with exactly the same determination that he displayed many years earlier to have Kafka's works published. He certainly would not have wanted all this to be left in a drawer or a safe deposit box in some bank, getting moldy."

The question of what exactly there is in the Brod estate that Eva Hoffe controls has occupied many scholars across the globe for years. The wildest fantasy of Kafka fans is that there are unpublished stories by him that Brod decided to withhold for reasons known only to himself. A more reasonable, but no less exciting theory is that most of what remains are personal materials of Brod himself that deal, inter alia, with his friend Kafka and which may shed new light on him.

Brod wrote and received thousands of letters to and from friends, relatives and colleagues in the literary world. Researchers presume Brod kept several sketches and drawings by Kafka. Today, after Kafka has long become an icon and a cultural hero, even a few tiny new fragments of information about his life would be a sensational discovery. The most important and intriguing items in the estate are Brod's private diaries, which have never been published. They might shed new light on his relationship with Kafka and perhaps reveal unknown aspects of the connection, aspects that Brod wanted to keep secret.

In fact, there were plans to have the diaries published 20 years ago. In 1988, a few months before she sold "The Trial" in Germany, Esther Hoffe signed another lucrative deal for the sale of the rights to the Brod diaries. A five-figure sum was deposited in her bank account by the prestigious Zurich-based publishing firm of Artemis & Winkler, but Hoffe did not keep her side of the bargain: Even after receiving the money, she would not part with the diaries.

It was Eva Koralnik of the Liepman literary agency in Zurich who mediated the deal between Hoffe and the publishers. "It is a sad story that made us and our client very angry," she says. "For years we tried to persuade her to honor the agreement, but she always refused." Ultimately, she says, "The publishers both lost the money and could not publish the diaries."

Asked why they never sued Hoffe, Koralnik replies: "What could we do? She was an old woman. We did the best we could, but when someone refuses to cooperate, they cannot be forced." According to Eva Hoffe herself, as quoted in Der Spiegel in 1993, "Publishing the diaries is liable to expose something terrible." The German weekly hinted that it was a case of an embarrassing romantic triangle.

Another publisher that has an unsettled account with the Hoffe family is the Israel-based Schocken, (owned by the same family that owns Haaretz). After Kafka died, Zalman Schocken purchased the rights to publish his works, and according to sources close to the firm, also the rights to his manuscripts. "If there are manuscripts by Kafka in the Brod estate, they belong to the Schocken family," say those sources.

The estate includes 70 letters exchanged by Brod and Kafka's lover, Dora Diamant, over a more than 20-year period. According to Kathi Diamant of San Diego State University in California, author of the biography of Dora, "Kafka's Last Love: The Mystery of Dora Diamant," these letters, which include references to their common friend, Kafka, have never been published although they have great scholarly value. A short passage from one of them that leaked out of the closely-guarded estate makes it clear how important they are, telling the tale of a sad incident directly connected to Kafka's lost legacy.

It concerns a desperate letter Diamant wrote to Brod in 1933. "Kafka's things have vanished. Letters, pages from his diary, and everything else that I had," she wrote. Diamant, a Jewish communist, was referring to a raid by the Gestapo on her house in Berlin, where she kept 35 letters Kafka had written to her and 20 notebooks he kept and which have never been published.

Her nephew, Zvi Diamant, 62, lives in Holon. Ten years ago, he headed a group of relatives who had a headstone placed on her until-then unmarked grave in London. Ironically, like the testaments of Kafka and Brod, her will was also violated, as she had asked to be buried in Prague, alongside Kafka. However, her relatives never saw her complete will - it and the letters she wrote to Brod are among his papers, in Eva Hoffe's apartment probably, far from the public eye.

"I do not understand Eva Hoffe's conduct and I can find no logical explanation for the stubborn concealment for so many years of the material in Brod's estate," says doctoral student Pegi. "After all, if Brod's memory were so close to her heart, as she claims, she would open it up to everyone who is interested so that his legacy will indeed be preserved in the dozens of articles and books that would be written about him."

Pegi adds that, "It must be remembered that Brod was a key figure in German Jewish literature before the Second World War. The publication of his diaries and the letters he received from intellectuals and artists throughout that period, as well as of his as-yet-unpublished plays, short stories and novels that have been known for years to be in his estate, would only refresh the memory of him, and contribute toward his being given the central place he deserves."

Another party has recently joined the case: the German Literature Archive. That well-heeled institution has hired an Israeli lawyer to try to secure the estate for itself, claiming that its proper place is alongside the other writings of Kafka and Brod which have already been there for years and which are open for the scrutiny of scholars and other visitors.

A visit there two years ago revealed that the documents are wonderfully cared for, in a way the National Library in Jerusalem would find difficult to match, at least as long as it remains in its present dilapidated premises. The National Library, however, has no intention of giving up and is ready for a protracted legal and public battle. "Removing cultural treasures from Israel because of the means at the disposal of foreign factors is a deplorable phenomenon that harms the progress of scholarly research in Israel," says a library source. "We will not acquiesce in the transfer of this material outside of Israel's borders."

In early September, Hoffe petitioned the Supreme Court to order the Family Court to allow her to execute her mother's will and to get her hands on the money coming to her. "There are assets worth millions of shekels just lying in my late mother's estate that have been attached by the Family Court judge for no reason," the petition says, while her own economic situation is "particularly grave" and she is "down to her last crust of bread." W
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