Bernhard [Hardcover]

Yoel Hoffmann (Author), Alan Treister (Translator), Edward A. Levenston (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 17, 1998

Set in 1940's Palestine, Bernhard concerns a German-Jewish widower.

Devastated by the loss of his wife, Bernhard disconsolately walks the streets of Jerusalem, considering Gandhi, analysis, the beauty of his wife Paula's neck, his Arab neighbors, Kokoschka, the Messiah, and the inner life of his friend Gustav the plumber. As his hero tries to come to terms with his grief and the disasters of WWII, Hoffmann shows the slow remaking of an inner world.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In Israeli avant-garde novelist Hoffmann's startling minimalist collage, 50-ish, grief-numbed widower Bernhard Stein, transplanted from Berlin to Palestine, ruminates on his wife's death, on history and on the universe against a background of Hitler's rampage across Europe. A postmodernist kaleidoscope unfolding in 172 loosely interconnected vignettes, most of them a page in length or shorter, this experimental novel echoes Hoffmann's more conventional double-novella American debut, The Book of Joseph and Katschen. Bernhard, whose feverish ruminations hop from Spinoza to El Greco to Trotsky, is a man unhinged. His best friend, a plumber named Gustav, and Elvira Neuwirth, the cultured Viennese widow with whom he flirts, seem almost as unreal as his fictive alter ego, Moscow-born dermatologist D.S. Gregory, whose father lost a leg fighting in the American Revolution. Within these flights of fancy lies a searing meditation on loss of faith, the tragedy of modern history and life's apparent meaninglessness. Hoffmann's semantic riffs, historical excursions and self-referential metaphysical noodlings can be wearying. Yet he adds ballast to this tale by loading it with dark parables and dreams; Jewish ritual and lore; German, Yiddish and Arabic phrases (translated in the margins); and snatches of songs, childhood memories and sexual fantasies. His hypnotic prose fuses everyday events and surreal imagery with the lyrical intensity of a Chagall painting. Rights: Harris/Elon Agency.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Emotional intensity and a powerful sense of the fragility and impermanence of both the physical body and the social fabric are the distinguishing features of this 1991 novel by the Israeli author (Katschen & The Book of Joseph, not reviewed). A collage of brief vignettes presents the experiences and ruminations of Bernhard Stein, a middle-aged German Jew who, in the 1930s, has fled Berlin for Palestine, where he mourns the death of his beloved wife Paula and endures visionary glimpses of the exterior world's collapse as an objective correlative to the fragmentation of his own psyche (``When the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, the ships anchored in Bernhard's head go up in flames''). The novel's structure emphasizes the insistent onward momentum of Bernhard's chaotically busy mind: the 172 brief chapters overlap, the ending of one becoming the start of the opening sentence of the next. Redundancy and monotony arent entirely avoided, but Hoffmann does assemble a vividly individual character in his solipsistic protagonist's cleverly linked memories and fantasies. Bernhard's keenly felt longing for his late wife stimulates not only an unresolved relationship with an attractive widow but contrary intimations of the aroused body's imminent decay. News of Hitler's devastation of Europe and the war's ``progress'' on several fronts intensifies Bernhard's increasingly frequent withdrawals into the life he imagines for his invented alter ego ``D.S. Gregory,'' a dermatologist whose Russian father was a casualty of the American Revolutionary War. And the dreamer's hopeful recourse to the consolation implicit in poetry, biblical wisdom, and the philosophies of Descartes and Spinoza is rudely shaken by such implacable phenomena as the Palestinian government's decision to disallow ``ram's horns, whose sound resembles the sound of an air-raid siren, to be blown in the synagogues,'' and by the inability of his own arthritic fingers to form the sign ``V-Day.'' Not an easy read, but a further persuasive illustration of the genius of one of Israel's finest contemporary writers. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 172 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (October 17, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811213897
• ISBN-13: 978-0811213899
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,751,606 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb, post-modern, philosophic and very readable, September 29, 2000

By 

M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Bernhard (Hardcover)

With each book of Yoel Hoffmann's that I read, I become more and more impressed with his work. He builds his story out of small vignettes - real, imagined, and ruminations on either. These building blocks are often crafted out of the very ordinary - a cup of tea, a widow's birthday dance, a visit to a hospitalized friend, a fruit seller, shoe laces in Bernard's shooes - yet out of these very ordinary observations, a life story is built.

In this particular story, precision is emphasized. For example, parenthetical phrases are given to clarify sentences that are not unclear; these device builds an understanding of the inner thoughts of Bernard without describing and without using an omniscient narrator ... this is only one example of the incredible craft used to build the narrative.

This books succeeds in portraying a recently widowed Jew in Palestine coming to grips with the death of his wife and the horrors of WWII - portraying the crisis in understanding of fact, causality, spiritual understanding etc.

As this is the third incredibly excellent book I have read by Yoel Hoffman, I am astounded that he is not better known. Add this to any must read list.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb, post-modern, philosophic and very readable, September 29, 2000

By 

M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Bernhard (Hardcover)

With each book of Yoel Hoffmann's that I read, I become more and more impressed with his work. He builds his story out of small vignettes - real, imagined, and ruminations on either. These building blocks are often crafted out of the very ordinary - a cup of tea, a widow's birthday dance, a visit to a hospitalized friend, a fruit seller, shoe laces in Bernard's shooes - yet out of these very ordinary observations, a life story is built.

In this particular story, precision is emphasized. For example, parenthetical phrases are given to clarify sentences that are not unclear; these device builds an understanding of the inner thoughts of Bernard without describing and without using an omniscient narrator ... this is only one example of the incredible craft used to build the narrative.

This books succeeds in portraying a recently widowed Jew in Palestine coming to grips with the death of his wife and the horrors of WWII - portraying the crisis in understanding of fact, causality, spiritual understanding etc.

As this is the third incredibly excellent book I have read by Yoel Hoffman, I am astounded that he is not better known. Add this to any must read list.