Katschen & the Book of Joseph [Hardcover]

Yoel Hoffmann (Author), David Kriss (Author), Alan Preister (Author), Edward A. Levenston (Author), Eddy Levenston (Author), Alan Treister (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1998

two novels, tr from the modern Hebrew

Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

[N]ew beginnings awaken Hoffmann's characters to foreign, often spectacular landscapes, and the author's prose ... insures the reader an equally enlightening experience.

Review

Among the revelations to arise from reading more widely is the way I find myself surprised by books that jump out of odd corners, tapping into fascinations I didn't even know I had. [This] is just such a volume, composed of two novellas that, in merging the textures of magical realism with an unsentimental appreciation of history, allowed me to consider the losses of the holocaust in a new way. -- New York Newsday, "Our Favorite Books of 1998," David L. Ulin, 27 December 1998

Anyone who would like a new and delightful literary experience is invited to make the acquaintance of this unique Israeli writer. Yoel Hoffmann's fusions--of the Kabala with Zen; of the delicacy of Central European Jewish humor with the utter gravity of Transcendentalism--are stunning. From subtle literary language Hoffmann strikes miraculous sparks, the like of which have not been seen in world literature for quite some time. But heaven forbid, this is not just abstract writing. Full of color and rich with a variety of eccentric heroes, in this book Israel of the 1950s becomes a stirring and exciting place. -- A.B. Yehoshua

I don't know how many times in a generation such command of language appears....Like a line of Raphael or a glissando of Szighetti or the gesture of a sage. For years I haven't laughed like that. Just because of beauty. -- Ariel Hirshfield

If one wished to attach adjectives to Hoffmann's fiction, which is the most unusual being written in Israel today, besides 'avant-garde,' 'postmodernist,' and 'minimalist,' 'Zenlike' would not be a bad one. Hoffmann's writing has Zen's playful seriousness, its love of the compactly enigmatic, its relentless striving to make one open one's eyes and see the familiar afresh...sketching it with the speed, economy, and controlled esprit of a Chinese landscape painter. -- Hillel Haikin, The Jerusalem Report

Israeli literature today includes a roster of superb writers--Aharon Appelfeld, Amos Oz, and A.B. Yehoshua to name only a few. Yoel Hoffman is of their caliber.... Like other Israeli novelists of his era, Hoffman faces the challenge of voicing the unspeakable. He has a Mozartean sense of the emotional interplay of light and shadow, and in his close stitchery of everyday life and mythical experience, his many-colored Joseph's dreamcoat is seamless. -- The Boston Globe, Robert Taylor

Yoel Hoffmann is one of the most precious voices in Israel's contemporary literature: his writing has about it the poetic, dream-like quality of an ancient myth, combined with a fierce, 'molecular' precision. Reading Hoffmann's subtle prose is like viewing the same universe, alternately and with the most skillful modulations, through a telescope and a microscope, only to find out, in awe, that the astral view and the infinitesimal view are actually one and the same. -- Amos Oz

Yoel Hoffmann's work is a sublime poetic creation of amazing force....Like emeralds on a crystal thread, fragments slowly unfold and combine to form the life story of characters. -- Batya Gur

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (May 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811213730
• ISBN-13: 978-0811213738
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,659,117 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

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A major writer (in my opinion), June 8, 2000

By 

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

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Katschen & the Book of Joseph (Hardcover)

This book contains two novellas - each excellent and unlike each other.

The Book of Joseph is written in a mix of poetry and prose. It follows, to varying degrees of detail, the lives of several individuals who lead intersecting lives. Don't consider this "just another Holocaust novel" - it is a significant and unique addition to the corpus of Jewish Holocaust literature.

Katschen is a very low key novella following the life of an orphan in Palestine - describing life through the very imaginative child's point of view. Katschen's view is a delightful mix of naivete, taking words literally, and a vivid visual imagination. His life is followed through care by an aunt, by an elderly uncle, thru a kibbutz, a friendly Arab, the police and finally by his father - a man confined to an insane asylum through most of the story.

Both tales include footnotes that translate the bits of German, Yiddish, Hebrew and Arabic that occasionally occur. This multilingual facet is the only trace of a scholarly background on the part of the author.

Yoel Hoffman is an author with absolutely stunning control over his story - an unerring sense of concrete detail in sparse prose. I have yet to find any of his work less than awe inspiring.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Two stories that disturb and amaze, February 5, 2001

By 

Eileen Galen (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Katschen & the Book of Joseph (Hardcover)

These novellas require readerly effort and patience. In what at first seems like a bit of a patchwork they tell a sort of blinding truth, in the tradition of Hasidic folk tales. God is not only a presence, but a character. In a mirror of the human mind, an assortment of worlds - places, times, emotional and mental states - somehow coexist. There are important yet homely recognizable details plucked from bourgeois prewar European life, but no quaintness in the descriptions of the characters' histories in Europe (mainly Germany, Hungary, Austria, Rumania) and then Palestine and Israel. For example, the protagonist segues quite reasonably from a consideration of an ice cream cone to the burden of his father's mental illness - in several paragraphs. Love among people (parents and children; men and women) is often a troublesome thing. "Women, Joseph thinks, yearn to embrace a man, and a man yearns to embrace his Creator [...]"

Patience is required, and rewarded. The presence of the several languages (German, Yiddish, Hebrew, Arabic and the English of the translation) is the tip of the iceberg, really, in these stories that attempt so much. Definitely worth reading.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poetic, deceptively light, and deeply moving, October 13, 2009

By 

Natania Rosenfed - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Katschen & The Book of Joseph (New Directions Paperbook) (Paperback)

All of twentieth-century Jewish history is in these two deceptively slight (and light) novellas: diaspora, Ashkenaz, Sepharad, the Holocaust, Ostjuden, German Jews, the Yishuv. Hoffman is wondrous at conveying the love between parents and children, at capturing a whole segment of history in one vignette or metonymic image, and at portraying the psychology of a sensitive and intelligent small child. One might almost say his is a childs'-eye view of the world, but it's a wise child who understands sorrow as well as the absurdity of life. An authority on the Zen Koan, Hoffman writes prose the way Zen masters wrote parables and haikus: a drop contains an ocean.