Posted on July 18, 2008 by Steve Pollak
This is the woman everyone wants to talk to about the possible "treasure trove" of Kafka material stashed away in a Tel Aviv apartment for the last 40 years.
Her name is Hava Hoffe and she was photographed outside her Tel Aviv apartment on Tuesday by HaAretz photographer Dan Keinan.
What's the big deal with this lady? Here it is: Hava and her sister Ruth inherited a Tel Aviv flat belonging to their mother, Esther Hoffe, who died last year. Esther Hoffe had been the secretary to the executor of Kafka's estate, Max Brod, who died in Israel in 1968 and left Esther most of the materials in his personal archive. In the 1980s, she sold Kafka's manuscript of The Trial for close to $2 million. And while some other materials were smuggled out of Israel over the years, during her lifetime Esther Hoffe mostly refused to let researchers look at the rest of the archive.
Now that she's died, journalists and Kafka scholars have begun descending on Tel Aviv in hopes of finding out what else might be locked away in the apartment.
HaAretz's Ofer Aderet broke the story earlier this month and has been writing quite a bit about it ever since. As of Thursday, Hava Hoffe still had not permitted anyone to inspect the documents in her mother's apartment.
Guess we'll just have to wait and see what's in there. I'm not expecting much, though. From what I've read, Israeli authorities had to remove cats and dogs from Esther Hoffe's apartment before she died because the neighbors complained about the smell.
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