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After years of disputes, Franz Kafka and his friend's papers are free from a Zurich vault and heading to Israel

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August 7, 2019 17:18
1 min read

After years of fractious legal disputes, the papers of the Czech Jewish novelist Franz Kafka and his close friend, Max Brod, have finally been returned to Israel from the Zurich bank vaults where they were held.

The National Library of Israel (NLI) is celebrating the arrival of hundreds of letters, manuscripts, journals and notebooks, hand-written by both Kafka and Brod, finally carrying out Brod’s wishes that the papers should go to Jerusalem.

Kafka died in 1924. Though he famously told Brod, who was also a writer, to burn all his unpublished manuscripts, Brod just as famously refused, and as executor of his literary estate, proceeded to publish Kafka’s work and burnish his reputation as one of the 20th century’s greatest writers.

As well as writing the first biography of Kafka, Brod published Kafka’s three major novels (The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika), as well as short stories and letters.