Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) -- A cache of Franz Kafka’s letters, sketches and other personal belongings is heading for an Israeli court battle that might have sprouted from the imagination of “The Metamorphosis” author himself.

Much about the case remains unclear, including the exact contents of the collection, which Esther Hoffe, a secretary to Kafka’s executor, bequeathed to her two daughters when she died in 2007 at age 101. Since then, only Hava Hoffe, her sister Ruth Wisler and a few Kafka experts of their choosing have viewed the legacy, according to the daughters’ lawyer, Jeshayah Etgar.

The fate of the cache will be determined in the Tel Aviv Family Court, and the timing of the ruling may be set by Israel’s High Court of Justice, Etgar said during an interview at his office in the city. The documents themselves remain in two bank vaults where Esther Hoffe had kept them.

The papers could help scholars locate some Kafka notebooks that the Gestapo confiscated from the author’s companion, Dora Diamant, said the director of the Kafka Project at San Diego State University, Kathi Diamant, in an e-mail. That’s because the collection, according to an inventory made in the 1980s, includes letters from Dora, she said.

“The letters are extremely important to the ongoing work of the Kafka Project to recover the writings of Franz Kafka, stolen from Dora by the Gestapo in Berlin in 1933,” said Diamant, who began studying Dora because they share a surname.

Max Brod

The dispute over the papers began with Kafka’s executor, Max Brod, a German-language author best known for his Kafka biography and historical novels. Though Kafka’s last wish was for his papers to be burned, Brod kept them, ensuring the publication of “The Trial” and “The Castle.” When Brod died in 1968, he left some of the papers to Hoffe.

For decades, Hoffe declined to make the papers available to the public, frustrating archivists and scholars alike. Kafka specialists had hoped her daughters would open the files, providing new insights into the author, who died of tuberculosis in 1924.

When the sisters, now in their 70s, attempted to ratify their mother’s will in January 2008, the state of Israel intervened. The case landed in the family court, where the National Library of Israel became a party to the proceedings.

Staffers at the National Library are concerned that the papers aren’t being stored properly and that the sisters may want to sell the material to the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, Germany, according to Meir Heller, the attorney for the National Library.

Brod’s Will

The court case hinges partly on a dispute over Brod’s will. According to National Library attorney Heller, the will cited the library as a potential heir and stipulated that Esther Hoffe during her lifetime should have handed the documents to either the library or a similar institution for safekeeping and presentation to the public.

“Hoffe did not fulfill her obligation as set down in Brod’s will,” Heller said in a phone interview. “This decision was not to be handed down to her daughters and cannot be by law.” Any sale to the Deutsches Literaturarchiv would also violate Brod’s will, Heller said.

Etgar, the Hoffe sisters’ lawyer, disputed that, saying the Tel Aviv District Court ruled in 1974 that Brod’s will gave their mother the right to do whatever she wished with the papers. The ruling stated that the papers were no longer part of Brod’s estate, he said.

Heller said the National Library wasn’t party to the 1974 proceedings and that the ruling was actually unclear.

“If anything, the ruling states that the manuscripts and other material that Hoffe left at her death cannot be given to her daughters since it is Brod’s will -- not Hoffe’s -- that must govern the bequest,” Heller said.

‘The Trial’ Manuscript

Ulrich von Buelow, head of the manuscripts department at the Literaturarchiv, confirmed in an e-mail that Hoffe had told the archive that she planned to donate the papers to the German library. The archive already owns the handwritten manuscript of Kafka’s “The Trial,” which Esther Hoffe sold at a Sotheby’s auction in London for $1.98 million in 1988.

The National Library maintains that Hoffe sold the manuscript of “The Trial” and other Kafka documents against the instructions of Brod’s will, said Heller. The library would like to see the papers return to Israel to correct “a historical error,” the lawyer said.

Etgar has filed a petition with the High Court, asking it to order the family court to expedite the case. So far, all the hearings have been held behind closed doors. Etgar likened the proceedings to the plot of Kafka’s novel, “The Trial.”

“In ‘The Trial,’ the judges did not have the right to read the judgment before signing it and the defendant never had the right to know what the charge was against him,” Etgar said. “Here we see Kafka’s ‘The Trial’ coming alive.”

The first open-court session will be held in Tel Aviv court on Jan. 19, 2010, according to Heller of the National Library.

To contact the reporter on the story: Gwen Ackerman in Jerusalem at gackerman@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: October 19, 2009 18:00 EDT