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.