Remembering Samuel H. Friedman - Socialist (1897–1990)

Socialism in America is back in vogue.  Alas, it is the socialism of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and their enablers.

I knew a different kind of socialist, a man who ran for vice-president of the United States as the Socialist Party candidate. He sought office once before I was born (1952) and once when I was two (1956). I doubt he would have been comfortable with the direction taken by today’s American socialists and self-identified progressives as they maneuver to realign the Democratic Party into an illiberal and anti-Zionist orbit.

Sam Friedman

My old school American socialist was Samuel Herman Friedman -- שמואל פריעדמאן – who died on March 17, 1990, at age 93.  His yahrzeit according to the Hebrew calendar is 20 Adar I 5779 or Monday, February 25, 2019.

Lower East Side

Friedman was a recognized Lower East Side character. Our paths first crossed in the 1970s when he began coming to shul on Saturday mornings at Rabbi Seymour Nulman’s East Side Torah Center on Henry Street not far from his apartment on Grand Street and the FDR Drive.

He was a presence. A big whitehaired balding man usually dressed in a rumpled light grey suit, white shirt with black tie askew. My friend Aaron who sat upfront remembers him vaguely as "the guy who looked like Col. Sanders." 

His eyesight was failing, and he walked with a cane purportedly presented to him by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in Cairo.

Did I need to know more? Nasser. Socialist. Cairo. 

I also understood that he had married out – scandalous in my parochial world especially for a man of that age.

The Pull of an Old Socialist

In shul, he would stand in the back, without a tallit prayer shawl but with a flimsy black yarmulke on his head, against the wood-paneled wall and almost visibly absorb the sounds of the prayers. 

I have always had a soft spot for old people, for their  vulnerability so it was only natural that I struck up an acquittance with Mr. Friedman and tried to make him as welcome as possible. He and I had the back of the sanctuary mostly to ourselves. I had a pew of my own.  He had the wall. Nasser, socialism, Cairo, and out-marriage somehow never came up.

Almost no one else spoke to him, and he would never be given an aliya to the Torah or any other religious honor.

Later I discovered that he loved show biz and theatre songs especially if they came with a political message. He had a melodious (once booming ) voice and had been active with the Theatre Union and the Rebel Arts theatre group. 

Presumably, he found Rabbi Nulman’s sermon engaging at some level and the melodies that accompanied the service reassuring.

So, there he was with -- from my point of view -- all this Nasser, socialism, Cairo, out-marriage baggage in an orthodox synagogue on Shabbes. Not that there was any other kind in our immediate neighborhood.

Childless 

We became friendly enough for me to occasionally visit him and his wife Mary, who turned out to be gracious, at their home. The couple had no children. 

Mary Hough Freedman died on November 16, 2006, by which time I was already living in Israel.  

Up to his semi-retirement in the 1960s, he made his living mostly in journalism as a writer and editor at The New Leader and The Call, socialist newspapers, and as a teacher.  

In 1917, during World War I and the year of the Balfour Declaration,  he was the editor of The College Mercury a student newspaper at City College. His editorials controversially championed student pacifism. 

Bear in mind that many Jews in the US and Europe opposed the war because America and Britain were allied with the despicable Czarist Russian regime, a fountainhead of anti-Semitism. And at that juncture in history, the Germans were the good guys.

 

Working life

It did not fit the persona I had of him, but in the course of his career, he had been an editor at Women's Wear Daily magazine. With a graduate degree from Columbia, he also taught social science in high school and – this is worth underscoring – later in life working on behalf of the United Jewish Appeal. 

His sister Elizabeth Singer had made aliya.

 

He was the kind of socialist who had to work for a living, kept kosher after a fashion, and implicitly (at the very least) recognized the right of the Jewish people to a national home in Palestine.

Politics
Foremost, Friedman was a labor union activist. Politics was his passion. He and Mary would vacation in Putnam Valley, NY at the Three Arrows Cooperative Society with other socialists. Friedman was on the board of the Young People's Socialist League. In the 1940's he ran for one NYC or NY statewide office after another – state senator, comptroller, lieutenant governor, City Council president and so on. He was the socialist Harold Stassen – running frequently and never winning because the only viable election vehicles in the zero-sum US political system were and are the Democratic and Republican parties.

A good government reformer who went up against Tammany Hall (the corrupt Democratic machine) he got himself arrested lots of times – once in 1949 for supposedly speaking too loudly at a demonstration.

VP candidate

Norman Thomas

Darlington Hoopes

In 1952 and 1956 the country’s leading socialist Norman Thomas (a Christian but no friend of Israel's) argued against expending limited resources on another national presidential campaign, but the party decided otherwise. 

Friedman, a member of the Socialist Party's national executive board, was tapped to run for vice president with Darlington Hoopes (born to a Quaker family), who once served in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, heading the ticket. 

They never garnered more than 20,000 votes countrywide in either attempt.  

However, Mr. Friedman was running to spread the message that capitalism, as embodied by the two major parties, was not primarily interested in working people. Winning elective office was not his primary goal.

Campaigning for Civil Rights 

Friedman like many left-leaning Jews during the 1960s engaged in civil disobedience on behalf of African-American and Puerto Ricans. 

To my mind, at the time, this agenda seemed perverse. Yet in this respect, he was very much in the accultured Jewish mainstream.

  

Here is the place to point out that for poor working-class Jews like me living in Alphabet City on the Lower East Side -- it was not the blacks and Puerto Ricans who needed help from the Jews; we needed to be saved from them. 

During the 1960s and 1970s, the minority community was the main source of violent anti-Semitism in New York City.

There were 10,000 mostly elderly Jews living under the poverty level in my neighborhood. Most Jewish establishment organizations (the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, for instance) were spending the money they raised within the Jewish community on programs and institutions (like the Educational Alliance) that mostly catered to non-Jews – at a time when these monies were needed, desperately, in our community to fight poverty, to relocate at risk elderly people, and help with yeshiva tuition.

Only after journalist Paul Cowen exposed the plight of the Jewish poor in the Village Voice did funding priorities eventually and incrementally change – but by then for many elderly Jews, it was too late.

Mississippi Burning

In 1964, Sam Friedman was arrested with another younger New Yorker named Michael Schwerner. This was the Schwerner who was viciously murdered along with James Chaney and Andrew Goodman later that year by white racists in Mississippi. 

Friedman had planned to be in Mississippi with Schwerner to register blacks to vote. However, as fate would have it, he was drawn to visit Egypt (I suppose to lobby for peace) which is when, presumably, he got that walking cane from Nasser. 

 

Of course, Nasser was not interested in peace with Israel. Earlier in 1964, Nasser and the Arab League had created the Palestine Liberation Organization to legitimize their efforts to destroy Israel. The Arab League itself had been established in 1945 to block the emergence of a Jewish state, and when that failed in 1948-49, it organized a boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against a fledgling Israel. All this, of course, long before the West Bank came under Israeli control.  

But I digress.

Communists
Besides campaigning across America, Friedman frequently went abroad including as a delegate to the Socialist International no fewer than 16 times. (*)

Like all democratic socialists, he loathed Stalin for creating a genocidal totalitarian polity. In contrast, the US Communist Party led by Gus Hall was slavishly pro-Moscow. 

We once had a conversation about Lower East Side Congresswoman Bella Abzug who served in the US House of Representatives from 1971-1977 and had made her mark as an opponent of the war in Viet-Nam. 

Friedman disparaged Abzug as a Stalinist fellow-traveler perhaps because as a lawyer she defended Moscow-aligned American communists against the US government and had been a founder of Women Strike for Peace, a Soviet front-group.  

I am not sure where Mr. Friedman stood on the war in Viet-Nam (I myself flip-flopped on the war) but I do know that he supported NATO as a bulwark against Soviet aggression. 

Being a political junky, I took satisfaction in the company of a man who rubbed shoulders with Norman Thomas, David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and Sidney Hillman of the rival Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. 

In 1973, I moved to the more upscale Grand Street section of the Lower East Side into Co-Op Village constructed by the ILGWU and the ACW. Friedman lived in one of these buildings as well.

The New Left

Still, we came from different worlds, and our politics were informed by different eras and experiences. Born the previous century in Denver, he seemed to me to be genuinely American. I a New York-born baby-boomer was less secure in my skin. My father had survived Hitler's war against European Jewry. My mother had arrived from Poland before WWI. In her younger years she worked in a sweatshop. But Socialism was not on my horizon. 

As a teenager in the early 1970s, my route of political passage came via the Jewish Defense League not some socialist youth group. I took part in neighborhood safety patrols on Passover and raucous protests against Soviet treatment of Jews in the USSR outside Moscow’s UN Mission on East 67 Street.  

By then it was clear that the new left (alongside reactionary chauvinist demagogues of color) had spawned a new anti-Semitism to complement the Jew-haters on the old right.

I wish I had raised all this with Mr. Friedman, but I didn't. Maybe I thought it would seem unnecessarily contentious. 

At some point he became infirm and moved to a care facility in the Bronx and regrettably I did not stay in touch.

Post Ideological

If there is one thing, I learned in the decades since meeting Mr. Friedman -- and especially since I moved to Israel -- it is not to let ideology straitjacket my thinking. 

If socialism means Americans today benefit from old-age pension insurance (Medicare) and maybe – one day – universal health coverage such as we enjoy here in Israel than who cares if socialists pushed the idea? 

My politics do not always have to be either/or. Ideological consistency is not an end in itself.

For instance, I can oppose the criminalization of abortion while morally against abortion as a form of birth control. I can accept that some steps taken by Donald Trump are right and proper even though the president, unscripted, has caused grave damage to American political culture (and is a nasty piece of work).

Synagogue or socialism? Maybe by coming to shul, Mr. Friedman was late in life tacitly signaling against the world of either/or.

As for me, I’ll take a dash of Madison’s republicanism, a sprinkle of Jabotinsky’s iron wall liberalism, and, yes, a pinch of Samuel H. Friedman's socialism. 

May his memory be for a blessing.

View of New York City when Sam Friedman was in his 30s.

(*) As of 2019, the Jewish Labour Bund, Meretz, Labor, and the World Labour Zionist Movement are still members of the Socialist International.

Who Owns Kafka?

Kafka's Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy

By Benjamin Balint

Norton 2018 - 227 pages

You might think everyone is familiar with Franz Kafka – but I suspect lots of people know the name and perhaps the expression "Kafkaesque" and not much more. The phrase, as a matter of fact, connotes the absurdity of being helplessly caught up in an opaque bureaucratic labyrinth. 

I am racking my brain trying to recall which classics professor at Brooklyn College in the 1970s assigned us to read The Metamorphosis (written in 1912). However, I never forgot the first line of the book: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” 

And I still own the Schocken bilingual German-English edition that I bought used for $1.45. 

The other opening Kafka line that has stayed with me is from The Trial which begins (at least in my translation): “Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” 

I remember having to look up the word “traduced” which means defamed or slandered. I’m still waiting for a chance to use “traduced” in daily conversation.

Kafka’s books are not about the characters so much as they are about the situations in which they find themselves. If European Jewish philosopher Gunther Anders (1902-1992) is correct, Kafka could be pegged as the kind of skeptic who doubts his own skepticism.

Kafka 1.0

The Kafka basics are as follows: He was born in 1883 in Prague then part of Austria-Hungary into a German-speaking acculturated Jewish family. 

His day job after law school was as a risk-assessor at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Company. He wrote in his spare time and published little in his lifetime. 

In today’s parlance, we’d say Kafka had “issues.” His father who made his money in haberdashery goes down in history as domineering and aloof. The son as suffering from neuroses, low self-esteem (exemplified by how he denigrated his own writings) and difficulty forming lasting relationships with women. 

In a letter lashing out at his father, Franz wrote him: “You have been too strong for me. Sometimes, I imagine the map of the world spread out, and you stretched diagonally across it. Moreover, I feel as if I could consider living in only those regions that are not covered by you…” 

His mother was of little comfort. Julie Lowy came from a well-to-do family but was no less ill-equipped for parenthood. What Franz may not have appreciated is that both his parents came from dysfunctional homes. They had their own issues.

All this may have influenced how they reared their six children Franz being the first-born. 

Franz correctly viewed the Judaism they passed down to him as perfunctory. He was both drawn to and repelled by his heritage. 

Attraction-Rejection epitomized Kafka’s personality.

“My Hebrew name is Amschel, after my mother’s maternal grandfather, whom my mother – she was six at the time of his death – remembers as a very pious and learned man with a long white beard,” Kafka recorded mordantly in 1911.

At age 28 he took an interest in Yiddish theater. Kafka even gave a talk, in 1912, about the Yiddish language. He read the Hebrew Bible. He subscribed to Zionist periodicals. He studied Jewish history. He seems to have been a thinker who grappled with Jewish civilization, not someone who capriciously rejected it.

Fortunately, Franz Kafka did not serve in the Great War (WWI). He suffered from headaches, insomnia not to mention hypochondria. Mainly, however, his induction was deferred because his insurance company employers insisted that he was indispensable. He had what we baby boomers might call a draft card with a classification that made it unlikely he’d be called up. 

By 1917 (WWI began in 1914 and did not end until November 1918) he was diagnosed with tuberculosis for which at the time there was no cure. 

In and out of TB sanatoriums he died June 3, 1924 (at almost age 41) leaving an oeuvre of challenging writings behind.

What happened and what should happen to these writings is at the core of Benjamin Balint’s engaging book Kafka’s Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy. 

Max Brod

Kafka was no social animal, but in 1902 at Charles University he made one particularly good friend in the writer Max Brod. He was to Kafka what Paul the Apostle was to Jesus (though Jesus and Paul probably never met). 

Had there been no Max Brod it is doubtful readers in 2019 would be acquainted with Franz Kafka who published little during his lifetime – and then only under urging from Brod.

When Kafka died, Brod gathered his friend’s manuscripts, notebooks and sketchings and – instead of burning them as was Kafka’s written dying wish – organized, edited and embarked on their publication. 

Bang, bang, bang – Brod brought out three unfinished works – The Trial (1925) The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927). 

If Kafka wanted his manuscripts destroyed, he asked the wrong guy. As Balint points out, “Even in self-renunciation Kafka was beset by indecision."

Brod believed that Kafka’s surviving works were masterful. He convinced the German (later American and Israeli) publisher Salman Schocken to publish Kafka. When he moved briefly to Palestine from Germany, Schocken bought the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz in 1935 and left it to his son Gershom to run. 

Brod arrived in Palestine in 1939 with a suitcase full of original Kafka papers. He soon entrusted this cache to Schocken the elder to put in his fireproof safe.

Kafka as literature

The central figures in Kafka’s seemingly simple “naturalistic” stories which are full of irony and symbolism exist outside the parameter’s normal life. They're thrust into bewildering situations in which they struggle to understand what is happening to them and who they are – issues that go unresolved. 

In this sense, Kafka is in the vanguard of modernist literature.

Some think that Kafka anticipated “the dehumanizing effects of faceless bureaucracies,” in Balint’s terms. Kafka's characters find themselves brutalized for no crime at all as people did later in Nazi concentration camps, Soviet gulags, during Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” or at the hands of Islamist terrorists. 

Writing in brilliantly organized cleverly non-linear and compelling prose, Balint reveals the many shades of Kafka’s identity because resolving who Kafka was is central to determining what should happen to the original material that Kafka left behind. 

As Balint frames it the issue is whether the (a) Jewish people or (b) the State of Israel have a claim on his literary heritage or (c) should his papers be deposited in a repository that specializes in German-language literature? After all, he wrote in German.

More broadly, can an Israel that is ambivalent toward Diaspora Jewish culture claim to be the custodian of European literature survived that the Nazis? Post-Holocaust Zionists might have believed in the negation of the Galut but not in losing the Diaspora’s rich Jewish cultural heritage.

Balint informs us that after WWII, before the 1948 establishment of Israel, a committee of Zionists worked to salvage owner-less Jewish books and bring them safely to Israel for archiving. They were in a race to head off forfeiture of these books to the dustbins and junkyards of Europe. But they were also in competition with champions of Diaspora supremacy such as Hannah Arendt who wanted to bring the books to the US. 

Kafka’s Identity

In Balint’s telling Kafka was no "ASHamed" Jew ala the "Finkler" character created by British Jewish author Howard Jacobson. 

Was he a Zionist? Was he in some fashion a believer in divine salvation? Unclear. Was he a nihilistic existentialist wholly alienated from his heritage? Extremely unlikely, as I read Balint tell it. After all, how did he rebel against his father’s vacuous Judaism? By becoming after a fashion engaged in Yiddishkeit. 

Moreover, Kafka was touched personally by Jew-hatred. The only thing he was ambivalent about was what to do about it. 

He wrote in 1914 to a friend of his fiancée Felice Bauer – of course, he was unsure about Felice too, and they never married despite being engaged twice – that, “I admire Zionism and am nauseated by it.” 

Of course, if Kafka had jumped off the fence, he would not have been Kafka.

Elsewhere, in 1914, Kafka had written, “What have I in common with the Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.” 

The year before he had attended the Eleventh World Zionist Congress in Vienna. Kafka had to be in the city anyway for work, Balint reports. 

I find myself puzzled by Kafka’s thoughts about his Jewish identity like this one cited by Balint: “The insecure position of the Jews, insecure within themselves, insecure among people, should explain better than anything else why they might think they own only what they hold in their hands or between their teeth, that furthermore only tangible possessions give them a right to live and that once they have lost something they will never again regain it, rather it will drift blissfully away from them forever.” 

Huh?

However, Balint references Kafka’s friend Georg Langer writing in 1941 from Tel Aviv, and I feel buoyed: “Yes, Kafka spoke Hebrew. In his later years, we always spoke Hebrew together. He, who always insisted that he was not a Zionist, learned our language at an advanced age and with great diligence. Moreover, unlike the Prague Zionists, he spoke Hebrew fluently, which gave him special satisfaction, and I don’t think that I’m exaggerating when I say he was secretly proud of it…”

In Israel Kafka gets Cold Shoulder

After the state was established, Kafka did not become part of the Israeli literary canon, Balint observes. Nor has any city named a street after him. His works have not been systematically translated. 

In part, this is because Kafka worked in the German language and in the years immediately following the destruction of European Jewry, many Zionists were viscerally revolted by all things German – reading it, hearing it spoken in public, listening to German composers (Richard Wagner, for example) even taking West German financial reparations for Hitler’s genocide. 

But also, because, as Balint astutely observes “Kafka’s motifs – humiliation and powerlessness, anomie and alienation, debilitating guilt and self-condemnation – were the very preoccupation Israel’s founding generations sought to overcome.”

The Zionists had little use for wishy-washy handwringing as in this 1921 epistle to Brod: “I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.” 

Balint allows that “Kafka allowed himself to imagine moving to Palestine only when his illness was so far advanced as to make the move impossible.”

He also sketches Kafka’s fraught romantic life. Besides the many women along the way, he was engaged to Julie Wohryzek (a Yiddish-speaking Zionist), in a relationship with his translator Milena Jesenska (who was not Jewish but married to a Jew) and was tended to by his lover Dora Diamant (who had volunteered in the Jewish TB camp where they met) as his life was slipping away. She, not incidentally, did burn a few of his papers as he requested while he looked on. 

 
Best Buddies 

Prolific and better known, Max Brod (1884-1968) saved Kafka from obscurity. Since no good deed goes unpunished, Brod is today mostly remembered for his Kafka-connection rather than in his own right as a composer, author, playwright and newspaper columnist. 

Like Kafka, Brod was a Czech-born Jew who worked in the German language. Brod had the good fortune to escape the Nazi onslaught – just – and the daunting task of finding a place for himself in a Tel Aviv where his earlier Prague stature held little currency.  (*)

He settled for a less than prestigious job at the Habimah Theater in Tel Aviv and made the best of it.

Brod may not have been a passionate Zionist, but he did affiliate with the movement (seven years before meeting Kafka) when he joined Prague's Bar Kochba Association, which Balint tells us had only 52 members.

Brod’s subsequent literary work struggles with how the Creator of the Universe can allow evil – thinking of Hitler and the Holocaust – to have free reign. 

While still in Prague, he wrote a novel about Kafka (1928) and began arranging for the publication of his late friend’s work. He also wrote a biography of Kafka that came out in 1937.

As Balint characterizes it, Kafka and Brod were soulmates. Brod: “We completed each other and had so much to give one another.” Yet they were cut from a different cloth. Brod knew how to enjoy life; Kafka did go to brothels with him, but these were fundamentally different types. Brod was a high-volume writer who had many interests. Kafka took little pleasure from life, miserably destroyed some of what he wrote yet, parodoxically, found purpose only in his writing. 

“Brod,” writes Balint “obsessively collected anything that Kafka put his hand to. Kafka, in contrast, felt the impulse to shed everything.” 

Jewish angle

In the winter of 1981, I went to the Jewish Museum on Fifth Avenue and 92nd Street which was devoting a significant exhibit to Kafka. As a brand, Kafka is an easy sell. You can see that when you visit Prague today. Back in 1981, I purchased a Kafka portrait poster that now hangs in my study. His face is haunting; he looks downhearted and waning. He would soon be dead.

The New York Jewish Museum curators decided Kafka wrote as a Jew and that his books The Metamorphosis, for instance, might best be understood in allegorical terms about the Jewish predicament in the period leading up to the First World War (though not only).

Legacy Battle

Balint’s book opens in 2016 at the Supreme Court of Israel. At issue: “Does the estate of the German-speaking Prague writer Max Brod, who died at the end of 1968 nearing age 85, belong to Eva Hoffe or the National Library of Israel, or would it be best housed at the German Literature Archive in Marbach, Germany?” 

Eva Hoffe’s late mother Esther was Brod’s secretary and close friend. Esther and her husband Otto met Max Brod (whose wife Elsa had died in 1942) in Hebrew-language ulpan class. Max quickly developed into an honorary member of the Hoffe family. He and Esther in due course became intimate, according to Balint. 

A childless man, Brod was loved by Esther’s daughters Eva and Ruthie. 

In a will written in 1948, Brod identified Esther Hoffe as his only heir and executor. Whether the Kafka papers, part of Brod’s estate, were an outright gift to Esther or part of her inheritance became a matter of legal debate.

As the story opens, Eva Hoffe now herself aging is in physical possession of the Kafka and Brod material. She is fighting to hold on to these manuscripts that her late mother Esther inherited or was gifted and left to her and her sister Ruth (who died age 80 in 2012). 

The State of Israel had tried to take the Kafka papers soon after Brod died seeing them as the heritage of the Jewish people. In 1974, in Tel Aviv District Court, Judge Yitzhak Shilo probated Brod’s will ruling that Esther Hoffe “during her lifetime” could do whatever she wanted with her inheritance. 

With Brod deceased, Esther Hoffe began selling Kafka papers starting in 1988. She wanted to continue to sell them to the Marbach archive to make money.

Esther Hoffe died in 2007 and Eva probated her mother will. The National Library of Israel had been monitoring what was happening with the Kafka papers and went to Family Court to argue that Brod had intended Esther Hoffe give them to a reputable archive. 

It appears that Brod wanted his literary estate turned over to the National Library or some other repository while Esther Hoffe was still around. Did that include the Kafka papers? Not clear.

Judge Talia Kopelman ruled that the Kafka papers were not part of the inheritance case since Brod gifted them to Esther Hoffe while he was alive. 

In 2012, a Tel Aviv Family Court held that “Brod had bequeathed his estate – Kafka papers included – to Esther Hoffe not as a gift but in trust,” writes Balint. So, the papers should have gone to a public archive during her lifetime. 

Her daughters, Eva and Ruth certainly could not keep them. 

In 2015, the case wound its way to the Tel Aviv District court which rendered its verdict against Eva Hoffe. The court held that the Kafka material was part of Brod’s literary estate and he had instructed her to have them deposited at the National Library (or some other appropriate archive). 

Worth mentioning is Brod’s view about ownership. He saw as his property some of the manuscripts and the Kafka’s letters to him. “Everything else belongs to the heirs of Kafka.” Balint informs us that Kafka does have distant relations in London but they appear not to claim ownership and – if I understand correctly – want to see the literary legacy safely in a public archive. 

In 2016 Israel’s Supreme Court ordered Eva Hoffe to turn over Brod’s literary estate to the National Library (she would get royalties for any branded products generated). The court also asserted that Brod had possessed Kafka’s papers (the very ones Kafka wanted to be destroyed) but he did not legally own them. 

Loose Ends

The Kafka papers saga which Balint sets forth as plainly as possible is – at least to me – still confusing. 

In 1956, Salman Schocken purportedly moved Kafka material (entrusted to him by Brod) to a vault in Switzerland. These manuscripts than somehow made their way to Oxford’s Bodleian Library. To further muddy matters, Esther Hoffe also moved some Kafka papers to a Swiss bank vault. 

So, as I understand it, some Kafka papers are in Marbach; some in Oxford; some were in the Tel Aviv apartment – these by now in the National Library. Some had already been sold. No one seems to know precisely which papers were in the Hoffe home in Tel Aviv and which were stashed in safe deposit boxes outside Israel. 

For those of us who want closure, Balint reminds us that with Kafka things are never  straightforward. “In Kafka’s imagination,” he writes “intelligibility will not illuminate our messages until the Messiah comes. And yet the Messiah himself arrives too late. ‘The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary,” Kafka writes.”

If you are first now embarking on an exploration of Kafka, start with Balint’s multi-layered book. It is an excellent introduction to Kafka as literature, and it’s about who owns Kafka not just legally or literally but politically and morally. 

Further Reading

The Nightmare of Reason by Ernst Pawel

http://www.kafka-online.info/

https://kafkamuseum.cz/en/#domu

(*) Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. World War II began in September 1939.

Benjamin Netanyahu - Indispensable Man

It was French president Charles de Gaulle who mordantly remarked that “the graveyards are full of indispensable men.” True enough. For the foreseeable future, however, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s most indispensable man. He is already its longest-serving leader starting from 1996 until July 1999 then returning in March 2009.

Now, with elections looming in March 2019 Netanyahu is trying to extend his political longevity into 2023. His endurance is due to a combination of popularity, a canny ability to elbow aside prospective rivals and unparalleled competence.

Popularity

Like any politician, Netanyahu’s approval rating fluctuates. However, in poll after poll, he triumphs over all other party leaders. With Netanyahu in the number one spot heading the Likud slate, the party is projected to achieve a plurality of support in all polls with an average (as of November 2018) of 32 Knesset mandates. His nearest rivals are Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid Party with 18 and Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home Party with 11 mandates.

The once formidable Labor Party, rebranded as the Zionist Union and jointly led by Tzipi Livni in the Knesset and Avi Gabbay in the party chairmanship has yet to find its political footing. His only living predecessors are Ehud Olmert of the defunct Kadima Party and Ehud Barak of the Zionist Union/Labor Party. An embittered Olmert was released from prison in 2017 after serving time for corruption. Barak at age 76 fulminates against Netanyahu and hints of a comeback but few analysts take him seriously.

Netanyahu is more popular with his base than the public at large. His detractors think him Machiavellian, duplicitous and smug — willing to do anything to stay in power. His supporters would not automatically disagree. Over 60 percent of Israelis tell pollsters that they will be voting for a party other than Likud – some supposing their favored party will join a Netanyahu led-coalition while others hoping against the odds that Likud can be ousted.

Opponents would like to think the prime minister’s core voters are by definition illiberal, hawkish and religiously inclined. However, the 30 percent of voters who plan to vote Likud reflect a broad segment of the population.

Last Man Standing

Netanyahu spots, exploits and then discards capable political operatives. Just-resigned Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, and Education Minister Naftali Bennett were all once in his orbit. Lieberman went on to form Yisrael Beiteinu, Kahlon established Kulunu and Bennett brought together Orthodox Zionist factions under the Jewish Home Party.

Netanyahu maneuvered former Internal Affairs Minister Gideon Sa'ar into quitting by claiming he was conspiring against him; benefitted as police announced a sexual harassment investigation (subsequently dropped) against former Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom forced him to end his political career. He pushed out the principled but politically naive former Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon. He coopted Benny Begin (former Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s equally principled and politically inept son). He kicked Danny Danon a popular Likud minister upstairs to the UN ambassadorship and brazenly exploited party rules fine print to toss firebrand Moshe Feiglin off the Likud election slate.

Netanyahu has not groomed a successor, and no Likud MK has anything close to the prime minister’s gravitas. He has a barely cold peace with President Reuven Rivlin, age 79, a hawkish liberal in the Jabotinsky mold.

Competence

Journalists who have observed Netanyahu over the years admire his fitness for office even if they disagree with his actions. A strategic thinker, Netanyahu’s scope of knowledge is both broad and deep. He is a voracious reader and a quick study. He has been his own Foreign Minister, and no one seems to think there is a better person for the job.

The perception of expertise comes across to average Israelis who give him high marks for his handling of Iran policy. He presents as a steady hand on the helm. While he is not charismatic, he is a gifted speaker in both Hebrew and English.

Foreign leaders may not like what he says but cannot deny that he speaks with panache and authority. When he first took office in 1996, the Internet was not a widely used tool. Netanyahu quickly appreciated its potential and became a master of social media. He uses it to circumvent the Israeli press which he denounces (with justification) as elitist and hostile.

He knows how to take credit and avoid blame. As Israel’s budget deficit grows to 3.6 percent and while the finance minister and the governor of the Bank of Israel bickered over the wisdom of tax cuts, Netanyahu remained above it all basking in a comparatively strong economy.

Israelis credit him for outwaiting the unpopular Barack Obama and are appreciative that relations with the US have stabilized. Netanyahu is the face associated with brand Israel and some 74 percent of Americans have a favorable attitude toward the Jewish state. According to a recent Gallop poll, 83 percent of Republicans, 72 percent of independents and 64 percent of Democrats support Israel.

Corruption? So, what?

The prime minister or those around him are under multiple police investigations for possible fraud and moral turpitude. Under Israel’s system, the police investigate and can recommend that the Attorney General issue an indictment.
Case 1000 – The police allege Netanyahu accepted $280,000 worth of luxury gifts from wealthy friends in return for favorable government treatment.

Case 2000 - Netanyahu is alleged to have cut a deal with tabloid newspaper Yediot Aharonot publisher Arnon Mozes to limit the circulation of the only pro-government tabloid Israel Hayom owned by Netanyahu-backer Sheldon Adelson in exchange for favorable coverage in Yediot

Case 3000 - Figures in Netanyahu’s inner circle including his attorney David Shimron are purported to have peddled influence in the procurement of German submarines and patrol boats for Israel’s navy.

Case 4000 - relates to whether the Netanyahu’s wife Sara dangled a telecommunications company executive regulatory relief in return for favorable coverage from the company’s Walla news

Case 1270 - Refers to whether a former Netanyahu spokesperson Nir Hefetz indirectly dangled the job of Attorney General through an intermediary to a sitting judge.

Separate from all this, Mrs. Netanyahu is in court for allegedly using public monies to pay for restaurant meals to be delivered to the official residence despite having chef on staff. She says she was saving the government money.

Veteran Jerusalem Post political reporter Gil Hoffman maintains that Israelis do not mind if Netanyahu appears a tad corrupt because culturally they admire a politician who is nobody’s fool. Better to have a political figure who cannot be taken advantage of than one who is incorruptible but naïve.

Further reading:

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu
by Anshel Pfeffer

The Netanyahu Years
by Ben Caspit and Ora Cummings

The Resistible Rise of Benjamin Netanyahu
by Neill Lochery

(c)

GAZA: You call these options?

1. Israeli Pyrrhic victory – winning means you get to keep Gaza

2. Ousting Hamas on behalf of the PLO/Fatah/Palestinian Authority and then turning over Strip to these morally bankrupt and corrupt and thugs. This approach would also unite the two Palestinian Arab entities without any recognition of the right of the Jewish people to a national homeland (anywhere) in Palestine

3. Status quo – keeping in mind Hamas does not want the Strip to be refurbished or economically viable - it wants things more or less where they are

4. UN Trusteeship for Palestine – but this would require tremendous international leadership and an admission that the Palestinians Arabs are far from ready for independence. Aint gonna happen

Looking at US elections from Zionist viewpoint - Snap Judgement

Here is what I ask:

What kind of Democrats won?

What kind of Republicans won?

My "pro-Israel" yardstick:

1. Against pushing Israel back to the 1949 Armistice Lines

2. Against flirtation with Hamas, Fatah or BDS (the rebranded long-standing Arab boycott of Israel)

That’s it.

Criticism of Israeli policies is fair game. Especially if it is informed and contextualized.