After five long years, in what
seemed frightfully similar to the eternity of a Kafkaesque Trial, Judge Talia
Pardo Kupelman (K.) wrote,
"This case, complicated by passions, has been argued
in court for quite a long time across seas, lands, and times. Not every day… does
the opportunity befall a judge to delve into the depth of history as it unfolds
before him in piecemeal fashion," opening, she said, "a window into
the lives, desires, frustrations and the souls of two of the greatest thinkers
of the 20th century."
The judge ruled that the library of
Max Brod, Kafka’s close friend, be transferred to the National Library, in
accordance with his wish and intention.
After his death in 1968, Brod’s
secretary Eva Hoppe kept, and sold off, some of the important manuscripts. The remaining ones
include, as Ofer Aderet writes in Haaretz, Brod's unpublished diary, notebooks with
Kafka's writings, and correspondence of Kafka and Brod, among others with
Stefan Zweig and Shin Shalom.
Without forewarning, Eli Shimeoni
found himself transposed more than forty years back in time, walking down Tel
Aviv’s King George Street, sometime late winter or very early spring, if his
memory did not escape him. He headed for Pollack’s antiquarian bookstore, which
even as a young teenager he frequented as often as he could. He felt the thick
and heavy air of old books was rich and wise, a comfort and a relief, a refuge
from breathing the thick and heavy air of home, which he needed to escape.
Those days, after the war of the days of creation, arrogance was in the air.
Everyone seemed to fill their lungs with victory and invincibility. But young
Eli kept breathing the air of threat and fear, doubt and concern, the
compressed air that lay squeezed like the dust in the corners of his room and
under his parents bed sofa.
The old bookshop
granted an escape into a world of history books and timeworn atlases in which
he could sail across the sea of time and continents, where fear and excitement
and heroism were free and asked no price. It was a world of books that he could
browse but never buy, an odyssey that could only be traveled, but never owned.
Sometimes his
mind would play out heroic fantasies. However, unlike his school mates, he was neither
the warrior who saves his country, nor the soccer player who leads his team
into the world cup final, triumphantly circling the field wrapped in the
national flag while an ecstatic crowd sings the anthem. No, his libido was lit
by a raging fire, threatening the shop and its treasures from Heine to Freud as
if this was Bebelplatz, May 1933.
In sharp contrast to his usually slow, pale and shy
ways, he would courageously run into the fire and save the most valuable of all
the books and atlases and manuscripts.
But that grayish
winter day, as he stood outside the window to see if everything was in place,
his eyes caught sight of a letter, which must have been put there only days
ago. He could not make out the German writing, only that it was addressed to Dr.
Brod. His mouth got dry, searching for saliva, his heart pounded and his legs
trembled as he entered the store to inquire with the old salesman who might
have been much younger than he seemed to be behind those round glasses that
always slipped down his nose, who told him that Brod had passed away only a few
weeks earlier. Those were years that young Eli would swallow every scrap of
paper or piece of knowledge or story by Brod or Kafka. He had even read Brod’s
novel Tycho Brahe’s Path to God; though he had found the language
difficult, or perhaps simply was too young to grasp, he had been intrigued by
the conflict between the old and the new, past thoughts and new ideas. But he
felt particularly grateful to old man Brod for being wise enough not to follow
stupid Kafka’s request to burn his books – how could he want his books to be
burned!!! Of course he could not know that books would be burned less than a
decade later, but for sure he knew about Hananiah ben Teradion, the second century
religious teacher, who broke the Roman law against teaching the Scriptures.
When burned alive with his beloved, the forbidden Torah Scroll, he said to his
pupils, “I see the scroll burning, but the letters of the Torah soar upward.”
Young Eli admired
the courage of Dr. Brod, but could not really forgive Kafka for wanting to burn
his books – only, perhaps, that he had asked in such a way that Brod would
understand he did not really mean it. Eli had even seen old uncle Brod once or
twice in the street, and tried to follow him without giving himself away, but
was too scared that Brod would notice him and scold him and embarrass him and
bring him shamefully home to his parents, so he had always made it the other
way on Hayarden Street corner Idelson.
He often
wondered about the friendship between Franz and Max, and so much wished that
Franz would not have starved to death at such a young age – just imagine if he
would have lived with Dora across the street of Uncle Max! Write one more book,
please, just one!
As mentioned in Requiem,
one of Kafka’s manuscripts that may be found among the thousands of pages in the
boxes in the neglected apartment with abandoned cats in Tel Aviv’s Spinoza
Street may well be the story - according to leaks, likely by a foreign expert
on the Kafka material - about a rat, one among many in Prague’s sewage system. But
“this rat had a complex, golden mechanical device, a precise micro-cosmos built
into its mind.”
The rest is a
story yet to be told, though some of it, as far as we have been able to gather,
appears in Requiem (p. 57ff).
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