The recent death of Esther Hoffe, secretary to the man who famously defied Franz Kafka’s wish for his papers to be burned, has put the estate in question – and in the news again. As her mother did, reports the NYT, 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archivists up at night wondering about the condition of what they believe are letters, diaries, photographs and perhaps unpublished works of Kafka and Brod. “This material belongs in Jerusalem,” argued Mark Gelber, a Kafka scholar and a professor of comparative literature at Ben Gurion University in Beersheba. “Brod became a Zionist before the […]
