After a long and complicated drama that played out for five years in Israeli courts, a collection of Franz Kafka and Max Brod manuscripts will be transferred to the National Library in Jerusalem. The unique circumstances at play in this case have been previously written about by Elif Batuman.
Kafka Papers Overcome Kafkaesque Legal Issues
After the last word
This weekend--at 2:30 am on Saturday, to be precise--Twitter bot @everyword was set to complete its 7-year run with the final word in the English language: "zymurgy." Unexpectedly, the bot tweeted again half an hour later--with a nontraditional character it had surreptitiously glossed on the first run: éclair. Since @everyword, like Lazarus, probably won't get the same fuss after its second death, check out The Guardian's interview with creator Adam Parrish now.
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BOMBlog Double
Two fantastic interviews are up on BOMB Magazine's BOMBlog: In the first, Millions contributor Matt Jakubowski speaks with Shards author Ismet Prcic, and in the second, Swamplandia! author Karen Russell does a Q&A for San Francisco's Litquake.
Legs All the Way to the Sofa
“It is hard to see why anyone would abandon the generous Pearce Sectional Sofa, so we must assume that whomever was under that cozy throw was taken by force. More signs of abduction: reading glasses left atop a rare antique encyclopedia, a half-finished glass of wine, and a decorative conch shell that has tumbled to the floor, not to mention the wide-open French doors.” Pottery Barn catalogue descriptions written by an aspiring crime novelist.
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Bathtub Books
"At home, I dedicate occasional whole days to reading as if I’m a convalescent. The ideal place for this is the bath, where the body floats free," Rachel Kushner told The New York Times in a "By the Book" interview. Yet just because her reading style is leisurely doesn't mean her reading is; she discusses her love of Proust and avoidance of books known for their plots. For more Kushner, read our own interview with her or her 2013 Year in Reading post.
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“It is not enough to have his idea.”
Recommended Reading: Four poems by Darin Ciccotelli are up at BOMB.
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While the long-awaited conclusion of the trial in Tel Aviv Family Court over the Brod Collection is good news, I am afraid that with the promised ensuing appeals, which could take years to settle, it is only the illusion of a solution for researchers like myself, an “apparent aquittal,” as Kafka has the painter Titorelli explain to Joseph K in “The Trial”:
“The documents remain as they were, except that the affidavit is added to them and a record of the acquittal and the grounds for granting it. The whole dossier continues to circulate, as the regular official routine demands, passing on to the higher Courts, being referred to the lower ones again, and thus swinging backwards and forwards with greater or smaller oscillations, longer or shorter delays. Their peregrinations are incalculable.”
[The Trial, Vintage, p 198.]
Of course, I will be delighted if I am mistaken in this regard, and if the Brod Collection actually is made available to the public soon. My interest in the Brod Collection centers on 70 letters that Dora Diamant wrote to Max Brod over a 25 year period, for which I have a catalogued list. Those letters have extraordinary significance to the SDSU Kafka Project’s ongoing search for Kafka’s 35 letters and 20 notebooks confiscated from Dora Diamant by the Gestapo in 1933.
I would like to also add that I feel sorry for Eva Hoffe for the loss of her sister, and for the enormous cost of the legal battle to her own life. I also regret that for the researchers and experts who will be charged with sorting it all out someday, it may be too late to have Hoffe’s personal knowledge of the archive to help frame it.
This litigenous legacy is the last thing Franz Kafka would have wanted.
But clearly he envisioned an aspect of it in his literature.
— Kathi Diamant
Director, Kafka Project
Adjunct Professor, San Diego State University
Author, Kafka’s Last Love