"Splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come. This is the essence of magic, which does not create, but summons." --Franz Kafka, Diaries, October 18, 1921

The Magical Mystery Literary History Tour was aptly named. Beginning the first day and culminating the last one, the Kafka Project's mission in Eastern Europe has been smiled on by the mysterious forces that moved me to undertake it. As I compile the results of the research for a final report, I'd like to tell you about only two of the forty days: the first and the last. Then you tell me if you think magic is afoot! 

We left San Diego on June 15 (see Episode #1 Magical Literary History Tour) and landed in Prague the next day, June 16. When we arrived at our hotel, Judita Matyasova, an impish 29-year old Czech woman with her own Franz Kafka project, was waiting for me with a reporter from a leading Czech newspaper. Lucie Bartosova, pictured at center below, an editor at Lidove Noviny, was the first of three sets of journalists and photographers we met with that afternoon.

Following our interview, Lucie told me that she read my book in a library a few years ago, but always wanted her own copy, which she had just received from England a few days earlier. As she leafed through it again, she thought: "I'd love to meet the author." The next day, she learned I was coming to town and got the assignment to interview me.

By Byron LaDue, Kafka Project founding member & research associate

The search for Kafka's lost papers in the expansive region of Silesia has always relied on determination, luck, coincidence and the kindness of strangers. There was no definite plan when we arrived in Krakow, only a general idea to find some archives and pass out the Kafka Project Alert so that the archivists could recognize the missing Kafka treasure. And Kathi's belief that we needed to be here in order for "Something to Happen." A month ago we arrived in Krakow. There happened to be a Jewish Cultural Festival going on, beginning the day we arrived. As a part of the festival we decided to take Yiddish lessons at the Galicia Jewish Museum.

For an article she is writing, Kathi interviews the museum's director, Kate Craddy. As the interview concludes, Kate mentions, as an afterthought, that the US Embassy is throwing a Fourth of July party that very evening. She gives us the name of Susan Parker-Burns, Consul for Press and Culture at the US Consulate in Krakow as a contact. So we show up, get in the receiving line at the entrance to the party at the Sheraton, mention the name of Susan Parker-Burns, and, even though we admit that we don't know her and she doesn't know us, we know she is leaving on vacation and we need to speak to her tonight. We're a little bit dressed up and have our American passports and the next thing we know we're shaking hands with the US Ambassador to Poland. 

The Kafka Project has landed in Bedzin, in Upper Silesia (which is actually south and east of Lower Silesia). Byron and I are staying at a small, two-star hotel (one of only three hotels in town) across the Przemsza river from the 14^th century castle, the symbol of Bedzin, which is celebrating its 650^th anniversary this year.

It is a coincidence that we are here since we weren't planning to come back after the Magical Mystery Literary Tour made a quick stop on our journey between Prague and Krakow. But maybe it's not such a coincidence. On our first morning, when I looked out the window, a van with the number 108 was parked outside.

Hi fellow online travelers! Tomorrow we head for Silesia, where we have made a wonderful contact with a professor, Pawel Jedrzejko, at the University of Silesia, who is very enthusiastic about helping in our mission to find a missing literary treasure.  I'm looking forward to meeting and I hope working with him. This was exactly the kind of person we needed to connect to, and it's thanks to a lovely staff at the US Consulate in Krakow. On Thursday we headed south for the weekend and spent a lovely weekend in Zab, a small village in the Tatra mountains of Poland, about a three hour drive from Krakow. Byron wanted to write this one for you. So I give you LaDue who has "The View from Kafka's Head."

By Byron LaDue: We had given up on finding the sanatorium where Franz Kafka spent several months attempting to recover from tuberulosis. We didn't have much to go on. All we had was that Kafka had stayed at a sanatorium at Matliary in the Tatra mountains in Czechoslovakia. Kathi googled Matliary, but only a few references came up, nothing specific to the name or place today. There were Kafka references that related to Dora's story (this was the place Kafka met Klopstock, whose words "Who knows Dora knows what love means" are on Dora's tombstone.) There was also a picture of Kafka at Matliary. We have been staying on the Polish side of the Tatra mountains. Matliary would be on the Slovakian side. Ever since she saw them in the distance on our first trip to Poland in 2001, to research Dora's life in Bedzin for her book, Kathi's wanted to go to the Tatra Mountains. We are now at the base of the Tatras, about a three hour drive from Krakow, just outside the main town of Zakopane at a lovely hotel called Redyk in the village of Zab, the highest village in Poland, where you can see outside our window a lovely view of Polish farmland backed by mountains. Friday we visited the main village of Zakopane and found it to be a very popular tourist location for Polish families. There was a long line of traffic leading into the village offering a water park, river rafting, mountain trams, biking and a huge outdoor pedestrian alpine mall, Krupowki Street, several blocks long full of pedestrian traffic. There was a multitude of shops, street entertainers (including an actual dog-and-pony show) and a waffle and fruit treat which I couldn't resist.

We took a tram up into the foothills in the direction of our village, Zab, and then walked along an extensive row of vendors and rode back down the mountain on a chairlift.  It was a lot of sightseeing, a lot of walking and a lot of tourists. Having done Zakopane on Friday we decided that on Saturday we would just "drive around." We took off around noon in our rented Hyundai Getz with a hazy destination of another mountain tram located on our tourist map.

Before we knew it we were driving from Poland into Slovakia, which is now a separate country from the Czech Republic. We found the small village where the tram was located, a place called Tatranska Lominca. I changed some Polish Zloty into Slovakian Crowns (different from Czech Crowns) and we had lunch at a roadside hotel to get our bearings.

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.

Kafka is a headliner! Franz Kafka is in the international news this week. July 3 marked the 125th anniversary of his birth with special events held in his honor in Germany and elsewhere. The following story broke July 8 in Ha'aretz, one of Israel's major daily newspapers, and today a follow up article appeared in The Guardian in London. The front page tease reads: Franz Kafka: Papers Found. The headline itself reads:

"End of a Kafkaesque nightmare: writer's papers finally come to light
Documents hoarded for 40 years in Tel Aviv flat by executor's secretary"

These are not the same papers the Kafka Project is looking for in Eastern Europe, although I think it a lovely omen that this is the second Kafka discovery since the Magical Mystery Literary History tour began last month. The first discovery was in Prague in mid-June of a previously unknown, unpublished letter Kafka wrote to another lover, Julie Wohyrzek, in 1919. The papers which are about to be uncovered in Israel are extremely important to Dora's version of events. When they are made available, a second edition of my book, Kafka's Last Love: The Mystery of Dora Diamant, will no doubt be necessary. These papers, which belonged to Max Brod, contain dozens of letters that Dora Diamant wrote to Brod after Kafka's death in 1924 until her own death in 1952. They also contain Dora's last will, which no one but Max Brod (and Ester Hoffe) has seen. It's an extremely important discovery, and the Kafka world is indeed "holding its breath."

There is also a fascinating review by Zadie Smith in The New York Review of Books (July 17, 2008) of a new book about Kafka. Definitely worthwhile reading. Zadie Smith is a London-based best-selling, award-winning novelist who made headlines herself last year with the announcement she was writing a musical about Kafka. One can only hope.

(Thanks to Ehud Gelb, Dale Estey, Steve Schlesinger and Miriam Shekter for keeping me informed while I'm on the road!) 

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.

While the Kafka Project cooks up new angles of approach for the research in Poland, let's revisit some earlier points of interest, shall we? This will be fun, if you ever intend to visit, and one would fervently hope, spend some time in the fabulous city of Berlin. 

Getting around via BVG:  If you are moderately fit, the best way to navigate is to use the public transportation system, BVG, which is nothing less than brilliant. Our last Friday in Berlin, Byron and I went from our incredibly bizarre dinner experience at Unsicht-Bar Restaurant in the center of Mitte to our sleepy southern suburb in Kleinmachnow in about 45 minutes. Just before midnight, we left the dark restaurant (review to come) and traveled by tram to the U-bahn, changed to the S-bahn, where we'd left our bikes earlier that day, and then biked the two kilometers home from the Zelendorf Station. A taxi ride from roughly the same location took about the same time, but cost $60, six times as much. 

If you are staying more than a few days, go ahead, spring for a week-long pass. You can go anywhere and everywhere, and not worry about buying a ticket. It's a public transportation theme park with unlimited rides on buses, trams, streetcars, S-bahn and U-bahn trains. It's easy and fun even if you have absolutely no German language skills. Just ask Vernetta, my tap dance teacher and one of the Magical Mystery travelers. She was thrilled with her proficiency getting back from a shopping excursion at KaDeWe. 

You can't get lost in Berlin. Not really, not for very long. 

One chapter has closed and another begun. The Magical Mystery Literary Tour has ended. Our intrepid adventurers have all left Berlin. Some returned home, some continued on extended journeys to England, Spain, Poland, and within Germany. Many of them have stories to tell you, and I will be sharing them with you as the Kafka Project's research in Eastern Europe unfolds. In all, the tour was indeed magical. We had astoundingly beautiful weather, and although we were a most diverse group, we all got along very well. Good friendships were formed. It was such a good experience we may indeed do it again next year.

And now the Kafka Project has begun in earnest. The first step in the Kafka Project's Eastern European Research began with a meeting in Kleinmachnow, south of Berlin, in a bird and flower-filled garden on a quiet cobblestone street.

Byron and I are the guests in the home of the family of another of Kafka's loves, Grete Bloch. Eva Bloch Turner, and her husband Jack. The Turners keep a garden apartment in this lovely house built for Eva's grandfather in 1933. Until the reunification of Germany in 1989, this peaceful and quiet street lined with mansions and villas was in East Berlin, and only the best, highest-ranking Communists lived here.

The Magical Mystery Literary History Tour travelers include architects, writers, editors, paralegals, software designers, computer engineers and self-described "geeks," homemakers, dancers, teachers, account executives, shop foremen, administrative assistants, water purification specialists, a doctor and even a clinical psychologist, helpful additions on any group tour, even a magical one.

They also include members of my family: my husband Byron LaDue, who posted an earlier blog entry (Kafka Project does Prague), my sister, Trudi Diamant, born in Germany and now living in Florida, and my cousin Karen and her husband Bob Willis of Virginia, have also joined the Kafka Project's mission to recover a lost literary treasure.

I have asked our group to contribute to this Kafka Project blog, in order to share with you the varied experiences we are having. While I've been able to participate in several of the city tours and meals--I try not to miss one of the great feasts we've been having--a good part of my time has been laying the groundwork for the upcoming research and getting the word out to the media. In Prague especially, the press coverage has been impressive, and many helpful new contacts have been made as a result.