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Yoel Hoffmann

Katschen & The Book of Joseph (New Directions Paperbook) Paperback – May 17, 1999

by Yoel Hoffmann (Author), David Kriss (Translator), Edward A. Levenston (Translator)

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"These two quietly stunning novellas mark the American debut of a writer of international importance."―Publishers Weekly

In kaleidoscopic fragments, Hoffmann refracts Jewish popular lore and folk wisdom through a postmodernist prism, brightening his prose with snatches of verse, songs, diary excerpts, letters, ominous dreams, lush erotic passages and Yiddish sayings. "The Book of Joseph" tells the tragic story of a widowed Jewish tailor and his son in 1930s Berlin. "Katschen" gives an astounding child's-eye view of a boy orphaned in the new state of Israel. The novellas radiate the original poetry of Hoffmann's atomized hypnotic language, which Rosmarie Waldrop has called "utterly enchanting―it's like nothing else."

Print length

162 pages
Language

English
Publisher

New Directions
Publication date

May 17, 1999
Dimensions

5.4 x 0.5 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

0811214052
ISBN-13

978-0811214056
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Yoel Hoffmann
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Paperback
12 offers from $8.55

Editorial Reviews

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"Magnificent. Dreamlike and powerful. These are both astonishingly fine works."
― Cooper Renner, elimae

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

"Israel's celebrated avant-garde genius-in English at last."
― Forward

"Like other Israeli novelists of his era, Hoffmann 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."
― Boston Globe

"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

"The stunning American debut of Romanian-born Israeli author Yoel Hoffmann."
― The New Leader

"These two novellas, Yoel Hoffman's English-language debut, deliver a cache of themes particular to post modern Israeli literature, all the while paying homage to Yiddish folklore and Jewish mysticism."
― Atlanta Jewish Times

"Unadulterated, cerebral and exquisitely phrased (most remarkably in this English translation), Hoffmann's writing pretends to nothing but what it achieves: a meditative journey through the mind, heart and history, the scope of which is so gratifying, so stimulating, so difficult to describe."
― Bomb

"Yoel Hoffmann's prose has a poetic quality, full of imagery and symbolism.... Hoffmann skillfully views life through the eyes of a confused and innocent young boy who possesses a vivid imagination and never loses hope regardless of his misfortunes."
― World Literature Today

About the Author

Yoel Hoffmann was born in Brasow, Romania in 1937. He is presently a citizen of Israel, and is Professor of Eastern Philosophy at the U. of Haifa. He has had a lifelong scholarly engagement with Hebrew literature, Western philosophy, and Japanese Buddhism. His is the winner of the first Koret Jewish Book Award. His books include The Heart is Katmandu, Bernhardt, The Christ of Fish, and Katschen & The Book of Joseph.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ New Directions (May 17, 1999)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 162 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0811214052
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0811214056
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6.7 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.4 x 0.5 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,972,628 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #56,931 in Religious Literature & Fiction
- #85,202 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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A major writer (in my opinion)

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 8, 2000

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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.

6 people found this helpful

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Natania Rosenfed

Poetic, deceptively light, and deeply moving

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 14, 2009

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.

3 people found this helpful

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Eileen G.

Two stories that disturb and amaze

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 5, 2001

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.

2 people found this helpful

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