Israelia who knew Kafka

On the 50th Anniversary of his Death “He was leaning against the window-sill with a friendly smile, almost as if he pitied me and wanted to say: Why are you wasting your time and your talents on me, young man? It is hopeless, I can’t be helped any more. . . .” This is how Dr. Ludwig Nelken, a well-known Jerusalem physician, still remembers his visit to Franz Kafka in Fichtengrund near Berlin in March. 1924. It was in the third room Kafka had rented since his arrival in the city in September, 1923—the other two were in the Westem suburbs of Steglitz and Grunewald, somewhat closer to town. Dora Diamant, Kafka’s last companion, had established the connection between Dr. Nelken and his patient. Dr. Nelken had met Dora for the first time a couple of years earlier at his home town of Breslau. Dora had come to Breslau from her native Poland some time during the First World War—she then spoke Yiddish but learned German quickly. He remembers her attractive appearance, her intellectual alertness and the influence her conscious Jewishness exerted on a number of Jewish youngsters who without it might have chosen the easy path of complete assimilation or been lured into the extreme left-wing camp. Young Dr. Nelken had begun his medical career at the Jewish Hospital in Berlin as an assistant to Professor Hermann Strauss when in the early ‘twenties he saw Dora Diamant again. At that time she was a children’s nurse in the home of Dr Hermann Badt, a Well known Jewish-Orthodox leader and Ministerial director at the Prussian Ministry of Interior—incidentally the first Jew ever admitted to the civil service in Prussia. Once, Nelken heard her speak at a left-wing rally in the former “Preussisches Herrenhaus”, the other speaker being the leading socialist author, Angelica Balabanoff… Basically, however, Dora’s emotions and thoughts were concentrated on Jewish problems and she accepted a job as a social Worker in the Berlin “Juedisches Volksheim” (for Eastern-Jewish immigrant children) of Siegfried Lehmann, later founder of the Ben Shemen Youth Village in Palestine. In summer 1923. Dora escorted a group of Volksheim children on a vacation trip to Mueritz on the Baltic and it was there that Kafka met Dora for the first time. He was fascinated by her simplicity, originality and intelligence but obviously also by her deeply ingrained Jewishness, her knowledge of Hasidic tradition and of Hebrew. Once, in Mueritz, Dora read to Kafka a chapter from Isaiah… It must have been early in March, 1924, that Dora Diamant phoned Dr. Nelken at the Berlin Jewish Hospital and asked him to come and examine Kafka. “He was not in bed, when I entered his furnished room in a small Fichtengrund house”. Dr. Nelken now recalls, “but he was in a wretched state. If Only Streptomycin had been available then or any of the other medicines which have done So much for the cure of TB. .. . All I could do at the time was to prescribe something to alleviate the cough and other symptoms”. As Dr. Nelken refused to submit a bill, Kafka sent him a book with a personal dedication—not one of his own books, which would not have been in line with his modesty, but Georg Simmel’s work on Rembrandt. Nelken did not see his patient again. Before the month had come to a close, Franz Kafka and Dora Diamant left for Prague and from there went on to Vienna and the sanatorium in Kierling near Klosterneuburg, his last abode, where he suffered almost unbearable pains from his tuberculosis of the lung and larynx. On June 3, 1924, his suffering came to an end. Owing to the emigration of many Prague Jews to Palestine after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, various people here have been able to contribute essential details to the reconstruction of Kafka’s life—even apart from Max Brod, his closest friend and first biographer. Further stones to the mosaic have been supplied by the philosopher Felix Weltsch who at the time edited the Prague Zionist weekly “Die Selbstwehr” of which Kafka was a regular reader from 1911 till 1924. In a full-page obituary in his paper Dr. Weltsch wrote: “Few writers achieved so perfect a mastery of the German language as Kafka. But the soul that moved his writings was Jewish throughout. His torment was Jewish, as were his problems and his consequences. .. . He was deeply interested in everything concerning Palestine and its reconstruction, he studied Hebrew for years—for many months doing nothing else—and in his last years he seriously considered emigration to Palestine…” Incidentally, this article of the “Selbstwehr” was on view at the Kafka exhibition in the Jewish National Library in April, 1969. That Kafka was thinking of going to Palestine, has also been confirmed by two other notable Jerusalemites who knew him from Prague: Dr. Moshe Spitzer, the distinguished typographer and veteran publisher, and Professor Hugo Bergmann. Dr. Spitzer met Kafka in 1920 at the Prague convention of “Hapoel Hatzair” and introduced him to A. D. Gordon, its spiritual mentor. He told me that he remembers Kafka as “a shy, long-limbed man who usually walked with his head bowed in order not to look taller than those standing next to him—which increased the impression of shyness”. Professor Bergmann befriended Kafka for many years in school and university, till their ways parted: Kafka studied law and Bergmann mathematics and philosophy. As for Kafka’s plans to settle in Palestine, Bergmann believes: “It seems as if Kafka saw in Palestine the commencement of a new life—for the Jewish people and for himself personally—a genuine new beginning in purity, in the realisation of the celestial Jerusalem on earth”. Finally, Irma Singer of Deganiah sheds light on the strange fate of Kafka’s Hebrew teacher in Prague, Jiri Mordehai Langer. Together with Franz Kafka and Felix Weltsch, she participated in these lessons for some time. Jiri Mordehai Langer was a younger brother of the famous Czech-Jewish dramatist Frantisek Langer and no less gifted. In his interests, his views and his style of life he wavered between intense Hassidism and Jewish orthodoxy on the one hand and, on the other, a love of sport and other secular interests. Being a devotee of the Rebbe of Belz, he also wrote Hebrew lyrical poetry and various scholarly essays in which he applied Freudian theories to certain aspects of Jewish religious customs. Only in 1943 did Langer succeed in escaping from Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia and coming to Palestine as an “illegal immigrant” after an Odyssey of seven months. He was completely exhausted and incurably ill. He died at the age of fifty, but shortly before his death Max Brod and Sh. Shalom, who tried to ease his last few days, surprised him with the first copy of a Tel Aviv edition of his best Hebrew poems. Included in the volume was a poem Langer had written in June 1924 to mourn the death of his pupil, Franz Kafka.