Kafka, davka across the GWB
A few weeks ago we referred you to an exhibit marking the 100th anniversary of Franz Kafka’s death, showing off the National Library of Israel’s collection of Kafka artifacts.
Fortuitously for those of us on this side of the Atlantic, it turns out that the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan has its own Kafka exhibit.
The small but wide-ranging display, up through April 13, explores the lasting legacy of the Jewish icon. It presents, for the first time in the United States, some of the “extraordinary holdings” of the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, including manuscripts, correspondence, diaries, and photographs related to the writer, whose works are so canonized that the term “Kafka-esque” has become part of the English lexicon.
Among the items on view include the original manuscript of “The Metamorphosis,” in German; a model of the Kafka family’s apartment in Prague; and endearing, funny postcards he sent to his favorite sister, Ottla.
It also includes two examples of Kafka’s writings in Hebrew, including the draft of a letter he wrote to his Hebrew teacher, a young woman named Puah Ben-Tovim, in 1923.
“Kafka learned some Hebrew as a boy — enough to get through his bar mitzvah — but in his mid-thirties he returned to the language and began to study it seriously, with the help of books and private lessons,” the placard next to the letter to Ben-Tovim tells us. “He did not know how to write ‘Europe’ in modern Hebrew, so here he wrote it out phonetically instead, followed by ‘laugh not’ in brackets.”
The other Hebrew text on view is a small notebook, dated “1917 or later,” filled with German words and their Hebrew translations. “These words give us an insight into Kafka’s preoccupations at the time,” the accompanying text reads. “Many concern matters of health. On this page we see ‘illness,’ ‘enema,’ and ‘I weigh.’” (Yes, the writer was something of a health nut, and would die of tuberculosis when he was 40.)
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
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