Kafka’s Last Love: Book Talk by Kathi Diamant
Learn about lesser-known aspects of Dora Diamant’s life and work as a Yiddish activist, actress, and a Yiddish theater critic. Our speaker is Kathi Diamant - the Director of the Kafka Project at San Diego State University, and an expert on Dora Diamant. She is the author of the book “Kafka’s Last Love: The Mystery of Dora Diamant” This event is a part of YAAANA's Mame Loshn Festival of Female Creativity in Yiddish. Kathi Diamant has many careers: author, actor, broadcaster, journalist, public speaker, tour director, tai chi teacher, and adjunct professor at San Diego State University, where she has served on the faculty of SDSU’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) since 2008. For the past two decades, she has directed the Kafka Project at SDSU, the official international search for Kafka’s lost writings stolen by the Gestapo in Berlin in 1933. Her immersion research into Franz Kafka’s life yielded many new discoveries, and her biography, Kafka’s Last Love, received critical acclaim internationally, and here at home, where she won the Geisel Award, the "Best of the Best" in the San Diego Book Awards. Since the first US publication in 2003, Kafka’s Last Love has been published in a dozen editions, including translations in French, German, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, Turkish and more. Her Kafka Project efforts in recovering Kafka’s manuscripts in WWII-era archives in Germany and Poland earned her a 2012 residency as an East European Scholar at the Wilson International Center in Washington D.C. She has lectured on Kafka in England, Canada, Mexico, Germany, and the Czech Republic, taught literature courses on Kafka at SDSU and UCSD, and is recognized as one of the leading Kafka experts in the United States.