Franz Kafka
He wrote The Trial and The Metamorphosis; he named the modern dread of the machine
It must not be printed that he was indifferent to Jewishness—that is the commonest error about him. From October 1911 he immersed himself in the Yiddish theatre (the actor Jizchak Löwy), studied Hebrew, and in Berlin in 1923–24 took Hebrew lessons from Puah Ben-Tovim and attended lectures at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. He was sympathetic to Zionism without joining it; near the end he sent Hugo Bergmann in Tel Aviv a postcard about his intention to come to Palestine.
He is buried in the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague-Žižkov, 11 June 1924. All three of his sisters—Gabriele, Valerie and Ottilie—died in the Holocaust. And the plan to open a small restaurant in Tel Aviv with Dora Diamant is known from Dora herself and remains her account.
Places
Sources
Documents of the period
- F. Kafka, Letter to His Father (1919); the diaries 1911–24 — his father's Judaism — and the Yiddish theatre, Hebrew, the Hochschule
Basis: documents and evidence.