The tubercular Franz Kafka, escaping

the domestic confines of Prague, spent

most of the months before he died in Berlin

with his lover, Dora Diament.

Some of the time he studied the Talmud

in the free library of the long established

Higher Institute for Jewish Studies

with its eclectic and diverse collection

of more than fifty five thousand books.

The Weimar Republic’s ‘wild und wollig’

creative freedoms, he wrote, whirled about

outside the groves of academe, and inside

his head. For a long time he had admired –

from Mitteleuropa’s bourgeois distance –

the Hassidim for their pious excesses

in the shetls in the east, among

the unceasing forests the goyim owned,

a dybbuk behind every birch tree.

But among the Talmudic scrolls, he would dream

of the dry heat of Palestine; the rustle

of date palms; the sparse hills, and tinkling flocks

of goats and sheep; the valleys of infinite

groves of ancient olive trees, with their rough bark

and silvery leaves; of being well, and safe.