Kafka, the Doll, and the Imaginary Letters

“Anyone reading Kafka must simultaneously build and make music. They must achieve a level of expression so plastic that every turn of word and thought acquires its own resonance—just as sometimes, the mere sight of a cathedral makes us hear invisible, imagined bells.”
— Joseph Roth

The Jerusalem Ballet has embarked on an unusual experiment: a new production entitled Kookl@, created by Nadya Timofeyeva in collaboration with choreographer Martin Schönberg. The ballet is inspired by a mysterious (and perhaps fictional) episode from Franz Kafka’s life. According to the tale, Kafka encountered a little girl crying in a Berlin park; she had lost her doll. Kafka, ill and already viewing the world with a kind of X-ray vision of the soul, told her the doll hadn’t disappeared—it had gone traveling. And so he began to write the girl letters from the doll.

In each letter, the doll changed names, moved to a new city, told stories of her adventures, and promised to return. This anecdote was shared with the world by Kafka’s friend Max Brod—guardian of his archives, who famously refused to burn Kafka’s manuscripts despite his request—and Brod in turn cited Dora Diamant, Kafka’s last love, as the source.

In the ballet, the doll comes to life and begins a journey across lands, cultures, and inner worlds; each step opens up new realms of wonder and discovery.

This story is almost a myth. Or a parable. It lacks documentary proof, but it has long since migrated from European memory to the Jewish bookshelf. It has become part of a legacy that says: even when your world falls apart into scattered paragraphs, you must continue to live and write. Especially for children. Especially with imagination.

“In our ballet, the lost doll is not just the start of a children’s story, but the beginning of a deep, nearly invisible journey,” says Nadya Timofeyeva, artistic director of the Jerusalem Ballet. “It is the journey of a girl learning to cope with loss; of a childless man discovering his love for a child; and perhaps even of Kafka himself—who searched all his life for a language that could express the impossibility of true connection. Through the imaginary letters written on behalf of the lost doll, our production Kookl@ opens a world where imagination is not an escape from reality, but a way into it. Each letter becomes a movement-based act of mercy. Imagination becomes a form of care; invention, a way to be present. In this seemingly simple story, the true essence of human existence emerges: we lose, we search, we create—and through this fragile power to imagine and share, healing becomes possible. Kafka—so often a figure of alienation—here takes a step toward someone. He comforts, and in doing so, he invents. This is a story about how one becomes a creator by responding to pain with a fiction full of emotional truth. A fiction born of love may be more real than reality itself.
We can’t always change the world. But we can fill it with compassion. And that matters—here, in our country, in our world, in our time.”

                                 Illustration by Dorit Talpaz

If you listen closely, you’ll notice that the title Kookl@ is, of course, a transliteration from Russian. And the creators chose not to translate it into any other language.

“The title of our ballet, Kookl@, resonates in surprising and interwoven ways across the three languages we use,” Timofeyeva explains. “In Russian, it means ‘doll’—a child’s toy, a symbol of imagination, loss, and emotional attachment. In English, ‘kook’ means an oddball or eccentric—someone who sees the world differently. And in Hebrew, ‘קוקל’ refers to a rare bird of the cuckoo family. But unlike the common cuckoo, this bird does not abandon its chicks to others—it raises them itself. Its call is low, guttural, like a distant echo. In Mali, India, and other cultures, this bird is associated with time, transitions, and secret presences. And the @ symbol, naturally, evokes email. So this one word—Kookl@—brings together three symbolic levels: childlike, wandering, and mystical. It became the natural title for a ballet in which a child loses a doll, and an adult tries to return it—through imagined letters.”

The ballet’s musical leitmotif is Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, which contains a theme echoing the call of the cuckoo bird, passed between instruments and orchestral layers. This motif becomes a sonic symbol of memory, longing, and spiritual movement—the ballet’s inner current. The score also includes music by Leroy Anderson, Astor Piazzolla, and Jean Sibelius’ Violin Concerto.

Nadya adds that one of the core themes of Kookl@ is “Kafka and us”—for the ballet addresses the psychic experience of living under invisible war.

“Kafka was born and raised in a world where fear was the background noise: the state machinery, a domineering father, the early rumblings of World War I—still unborn but already felt in daily life. He worked in an insurance office, where humans were reduced to files and statistics. He wrote of systems where no one is to blame, yet everyone is complicit. He described horror not as an event, but as the silence between words.
Today, we live in a state of war—fear flows endlessly from phones, from screens, from the digital ether. Like Kafka, we try to hold onto our humanity, to keep working, learning, living—while also struggling to comprehend a world whose structure is collapsing, where the soul is always a few seconds behind.
In our production, Kafka is not a symbol or a hero. He is a mirror. He reflects how a person survives a system they can neither escape nor understand—yet still seeks a way through movement, through music, through the belief that even in a broken world, one can write a letter… even if it’s from a lost doll. Perhaps Kafka showed us how to explain the world to a child under any conditions—and how to remain human when the world defies explanation.”

The world premiere of Kookl@ will take place on September 17, 2025, at 8:00 PM at the Rebecca Crown Hall of the Jerusalem Theatre. Reserve your tickets here.