{"id":2237,"date":"2009-10-24T10:26:45","date_gmt":"2009-10-24T14:26:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=2237"},"modified":"2009-10-24T10:26:45","modified_gmt":"2009-10-24T14:26:45","slug":"literary-estates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/literary-estates\/","title":{"rendered":"Literary Estates"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"KafkaDoor\"<\/a>Jamais deux sans trois. <\/em>The old French saying proved accurate again: I had barely gotten over the weirdness of Paul Zukofsky\u2019s announcement<\/a> as to his intent to wring every possible & impossible penny out of his father Louis\u2019s literary estate, research & researchers be damned, that by chance I perused Pierre Assouline\u2019s blog La r\u00e9publique des Livres<\/a>, the latest post of which mentions Michael Orthofer\u2019s\u00a0 The Literary Saloon<\/a> speaking of the diabolical trio formed by Beckett\u2019s publisher, Borges\u2019 widow and Joyce nephew (oh, yes, I\u2019ve dealt with this one, yikes\u2026) when it comes to permissions. Assouline adds that Orthofer missed the husband of Tintin creator Herg\u00e9\u2019s widow who belongs to the same level of hell. And the trois<\/em> came via the latest Spiegel International<\/a> Kulchur page, which details the Kafkaesque trials & travails of Eva Hoffe, daughter of Max Brod\u2019s assistant, and inheritor via her mother of Kafka\u2019s papers. Below the opening paras of the article. You can read the full version here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

The Trial<\/h3>\n

Fight for Kafka\u2019s Papers Winds through Israeli Courts<\/h4>\n

By Christoph Schult<\/strong><\/p>\n

Before his death in 1924, Franz Kafka left his papers to Max Brod who rushed them out of Czechoslovakia ahead of the advancing Nazis. Now, the daughter of Brod\u2019s late secretary wants to sell them to a German institute. But the legal battle in Israel has become Kafka-esque.<\/p>\n

Someone must have been spreading lies about Eva H. because, although she keeps no valuables in her apartment, an intruder broke in late one night. Her cats suddenly raised their heads, and then the silhouette of a muscular man wearing white gloves appeared in front of the glass pane of her bedroom door.<\/p>\n

Eva Hoffe, 75, picked up her mobile phone and dialed 100, the number of the Israeli police. \u201cThere\u2019s a burglar in my house, Spinoza Street, Tel Aviv,\u201d she whispered. \u201cAre you sure that he\u2019s still in your apartment?\u201d asked the voice on the other end of the line. \u201cHe is standing in front of my bedroom door,\u201d replied the old woman. By the time the police arrived, the mysterious intruder had fled.<\/p>\n

Hoffe doesn\u2019t believe this was a coincidence. A few days before the sinister nocturnal encounter, a detailed article had appeared about her in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz <\/em>\u2014 exactly the kind of attention she didn\u2019t want. Eva Hoffe is the daughter of Ilse Ester Hoffe, the former secretary of the late author Max Brod.<\/p>\n

Brod is primarily known as Franz Kafka\u2019s friend, mentor and biographer. It wasn\u2019t until Brod posthumously published the novels \u201cThe Trial\u201d and \u201cThe Castle\u201d in the 1920s that Kafka became world famous. Without Brod, Kafka\u2019s works would have been forgotten.<\/p>\n

Kafka suffered from a wide range of mental and physical conditions and, before he died of complications connected with tuberculosis in 1924, he entrusted Brod with a sheaf of handwritten documents and asked him to destroy the unpublished manuscripts after his death. Brod ignored his friend\u2019s last wishes. When the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, he packed the documents in a suitcase and fled to Tel Aviv. Brod died there in 1968 and bequeathed these papers to his secretary Ester Hoffe. When she died two years ago at the age of 101, her two daughters, Eva Hoffe and the older sister Ruth Wiesler, inherited the collection \u2014 at least that\u2019s what they thought.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jamais deux sans trois. The old French saying proved accurate again: I had barely gotten over the weirdness of Paul Zukofsky\u2019s announcement as to his intent to wring every possible & impossible penny out...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}