With the digitization of daily life, we're apt (or is it "apps?") to think that paper documents are a thing of the past. But two recent stories, one in The New York Times Sunday magazine and the other in The New York Jewish Week, remind us that in judicial as well as literary circles, paper is the real deal.
The feature story in the Times, which was smartly and imaginatively written by Elif Batuman, has to do with Franz Kafka's legacy, while that of The Jewish Week, the skillful handiwork of reporter Eric Herschthal, focuses on the afterlife of another celebrated writer, Chaim Grade.
Both men left behind a mass of papers - so many, in fact, that they've come to inhabit every nook and cranny of the dust-laden Bronx apartment Grade shared with his wife Inna and, near as anyone can tell, that of the cat-infested Tel Aviv apartment of Eva Hoffe as well. Hoffe, who in a delicious twist of irony, lives on Spinoza Street, is the daughter of Esther Hoffe (Are you still with me?) who was the secretary of Max Brod, the renowned keeper of the Kafka flame.
In both instances, the fate of these materials is up for grabs, giving rise to a truly Kafka-esque spectacle of multiple beneficiaries along with dueling librarians, archivists, court officers and lawyers, each of whom insists that his institution and no other is the most deserving repository. Meanwhile, public health authorities have also entered the fray, valiantly trying to defend Kafka and Grade's writings from the degradations of cats and mites.
Were all this not sufficiently complicated and messy, the absence of an original will compounds matters even further, underscoring how much we imbue paper with value. Photostats apparently exist but as far as the courts are concerned, they have no legal standing. Only the real McCoy will do. Authenticity, it seems, does not inhere in a Xerox.
As I lingered over every detail of these two riveting stories, both of which give new meaning to the notion of a 'page-turner,' I couldn't help wondering what Kafka and Grade would have made of it all.
Photo: Kafka trail (not Trial!) in Cologne. Creative commons content by Flickr user dev null.
