The Kafka Project waits. This part is what my friend Anthony Rudolf, one of the Kafka Project advisors in London, calls "the hard slog." Exactly what are we waiting for?

We are waiting to learn the locations of Nazi-era archives in Silesia, where Franz Kafka's missing papers were last traced. In Berlin ten years ago, I had to wait in some cases for months. I don't have that kind of time now. Byron and I leave Poland on the 24th of July, so there is pressure to move quickly. Time is running out to find these papers before they are lost forever. Locating these archives before they are opened, and providing information on what is missing is vital to discovering it. Even to people I meet on the street, who express even the slightest interest, I hand a copy of the Kafka Project ALERT, which identifies what exactly is lost and describes it in detail so that it can be recognized. The ALERT also establishes who owns these 35 love letters and 20 notebooks--the Kafka Estate of London, England. I have had the ALERT translated into Czech, Polish, Slovak and German. These are the languages spoken in the area which encompass Silesia. 

Connections have been made, phone calls placed and emails sent. Now we wait for responses and answers. The connections have been remarkable. Last week, at a Fourth of July celebration held by the US Consulate in Krakow, I met the US Ambassador to Poland, Victor Ashe, and more importantly for the Kafka Project, the US Consul General Anne Hall, who offered the resources of the US Embassy.  A graduate student at the oldest university in Eastern Europe, Jagiellonian University, Magda Kozlowska, is helping with contacts and translations. She is writing about the Kafka Project for Jagiellonian's Jewish Studies Department. A couple of responses from my queries have arrived, but are fairly disheartening, indicating that Silesia is too big and our search too vague. But we already knew that. This search is the first step to getting the word out that these papers are missing.

But while we wait, we have made excellent use of our time.

What a week! The 18th Jewish Culture Festival, the largest Jewish festival in the world, began the day we arrived in Krakow. Centered in Kazimierz, the ancient Jewish district on UNESCO's World Heritage List, this lively festival is attended by people from all over the world, and features theatre performaces, lectures, films, tours, concerts, classes, workshops, art installations, museum exhibits, and much much more. The music is extraordinary. We heard music spilling from synagogues, much as Dora must have done when she lived here in 1918. We heard many different styles of Klezmer music, as well as Hasidic, classical, and Jewish folk music. The culminating concert, Shalom on Szeroka Street, attended by thousands, started with rain showers in the evening and didn't end until two a.m. 

Byron and I took a week-long free, but intensive Yiddish class this week taught by wonderful Anna Gulinska at the Galicia Jewish Museum, and participated in a Yiddish singing workshops taught by Jeff Warschauer in the afternoons. We attended free Klezmer concerts held on tiny cobbled squares, surrounded by people from all over the world. 

One of our favorite groups we heard perform at the daily evening free "Concert between Two Synagogues." Konsonans Retro is a group of family members from the Ukraine.

When Byron and I were here in 2001, Kazimierz was a bit depressing, with little life left in the narrow lanes. Only old photographs, like this one below, showed the Jewish life on the ancient streets.

We have arrived! We are in Prague, the city of Franz Kafka's birth, the majestic city of towers, bridges, and winding cobblestone streets. Wish you were here too!

Well, you can be. You can come along with us on the "Magical Mystery Literary History Tour" online and follow our adventures over the next 10 days with 22 intrepid travelers, as we visit ancient castle towns and the cultural and royal capitals of Eastern Europe. Our first destination is Prague, which we will explore over the next three days. Next we will visit Krakow, the cultural capital of Poland for two days, and then we travel on to the capital of Germany, Berlin, where we will stay for three more nights, until the tour ends on June 24.

The Magical Mystery Literary History Tour is the kick-off for the Kafka Project's Eastern European Research Project, which I'm conducting this summer in Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The Kafka Project, based at San Diego State University, is the official investigation into the missing papers (consisting of 20 notebooks and 35 letters, all unpublished) of Franz Kafka (pictured), one of the most influential figures in world literature. Confiscated by the Gestapo in Berlin in 1933 from Kafka's last love, Dora Diamant, these papers have been missing for 75 years, but it is possible that they can be found, if we look for them.

I first came to Prague in 1985, when it was under Communist rule. I haven't been back since 1991, shortly after the Velvet Revolution, when it still remained untouched by the modern world. On my first two visits, I fell in love with this strange castle city of a hundred spires and dark, twisted alleys, where Kafka lived and was buried. Even without the perpetual San Diego sunshine I so love, I wanted to move here and live here forever. I admit I'm anxious to see how much it has changed since then.