Who does Kafka belong to? We know the story, which has become legendary: before his death in 1924, Kafka wrote a testament letter to his friend Max Brod asking him to “burn without restriction” all his manuscripts. Brod went against his wishes and became the heir, the editor, and the first guardian of Kafka’s posterity, dedicating part of his life to making his friend’s work known. And indeed, in the space of a few decades, a small, unknown Jewish author from Prague became one of the most important literary figures of the 20th century. Benjamin Balint had devoted a breathtaking investigation – Kafka’s Last Trial:The Case of a Literary Legacy (W.W. Norton, 2018) – to the fate of these manuscripts: their departure from Europe in 1939, their survival in Israel where they were taken by Max Brod, and their legacy to Brod’s mistress Esther Hoffe, who left them to her own daughter Eva. Successive transmissions which, from the 1970s onwards, were contested: first by the Israeli National Library, then by the German Literary Archives in Marbach. The case went all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court. Starting with Benjamin Balint’s book, Philippe Zard looks back at what he reads as a “literary-political thriller, set against a backdrop of legal conflict and a war of memory” in which Europe (in this case Germany) and Israel symbolically fought over the final destination of the archives of the author of The Trial.
As we wait for the release on Netflix of the third season of the Turkish series Kulüp [The Club] – a look at the history of the Jewish community in Istanbul in the 1950s – K. looks back this week at this programme shot in Ladino, in which dozens of Turkish Jews played. An unprecedented visibility was given to a minority in a country where Jews are more generally represented in a caricatured and malicious way. The text by François Azar recalls how the Jews of Turkey have gone from 100,000 people at the beginning of the century to 10,000 today, and sets the series in its historical context. He thus focuses on one of the last Jewish communities in the Muslim world, which seems to be on borrowed time today.
The third article in K. this week is a testimony – a personal and intimate account, but one that touches on the history of a language and its dispersed community. Who are the Judeo-Spanish? Alain de Tolédo tells how his particular ancestry, at first poorly understood, became a motif of his life.
