Ilse Esther Hoffe (8 May 1906 – 2 September 2007) was a Jewish woman known for being the secretary and presumed mistress of writer Max Brod.
Hoffe and her husband Otto met Max Brod in Israel soon after he had escaped Prague ahead of the Nazi invasion of the rest Czechoslovakia in March 1939.
Because of differing interpretations of Brod's final wishes, it is not clear if she was a beneficiary who gained ownership of the papers, or an executor responsible for eventually fulfilling Brod's intent to hand the papers over to the National Library of Israel or as he had expressly stated and left to her or the decision of her daughters to the City Library of Tel Aviv or another domestic or international public archive.
[1] The next year, she was arrested at the Tel Aviv airport on suspicion that she was attempting to remove original manuscripts without first filing photocopies with the National Archives, as required by law.
Eva, who lived with her mother for 40 years and had control over the papers until their ownership was assigned to the Israeli National Library in 2016 by a highly controversial court decision, died 4 August 2018.