Here is some more about the four year trial concerning Kafka manuscripts. I wonder what Kafka would be thinking ... from the grave. First off, he gave charge to burn his manuscripts to the one person he knew would not do the deed. He knew this because Brod had previously told him he would not do it. So, would he have appreciated the legal limbo (to say nothing of the real limbo) these manuscripts have been in for decades. In a country where he sometimes wished he would move. And held up by the wiles of women - which and whom he so fondly embraced.

Kafka passport

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Woman Must Relinquish Kafka Papers, Judge Says

By JODI RUDOREN and MYRA NOVECK

JERUSALEM — An Israeli judge has ruled that a huge trove of documents written by Franz Kafka and his friend Max Brod that have been hidden from view for decades must be turned over toIsrael’s national library, which plans to publish them online.

Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach

Max Brod left Prague with a suitcase of Kafka’s work. Much of it has been hidden.

The ruling, made public on Sunday, came after a lengthy legal battle that divided literary scholars around the world and pitted the government of Israel against the reclusive daughter of Mr. Brod’s former secretary, who had possession of the papers and sold some of them for millions of dollars.

“This case, complicated by passions, was argued in court for quite a long time across seas, lands and times,” Judge Talia Kopelman Pardo wrote in a 59-page decision. “Not every day, and certainly not as a matter of course, does it happen that a judge dives into the depths of history and it is revealed before him fragment by fragment, shard by shard.”

The archive includes tens of thousands of pages, most of them written by Mr. Brod, a prolific journalist and novelist who carried a suitcase of Kafka’s work with him when he fled to Tel Aviv from Prague in 1939. Nurit Pagi, who is finishing her doctoral dissertation on Mr. Brod at the University of Haifa, said the material included letters, diaries, sketches and notations by Kafka — “1,001 things that are in this archive that was closed to research for 40 years.”

“This is a huge archive of massive breadth that has an economic significance, but first and foremost historical and literary significance,” Ms. Pagi said on Israel Radio. “And I hope it marks a change, a beginning, in adopting this whole culture which belongs to the heritage of the Jewish people and finally the state of Israel will fully adopt it and maybe even implement it.”

(more)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/world/middleeast/woman-must-relinquish-kafka-papers-judge-says.html?_r=1