Katschen And The Book Of Joseph [Paperback]

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

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, 29 May 1998

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. Billed as novels, these three works come only as close to being novels as Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities ever did. The dense narratives unfold through something akin to parable, paying intricate tribute to an elusive subject matter. A scholar of Hume, Zen Buddhism, the Kabbalah, Hoffmann endows his wrenching stories of personal loss with the weight of history's missteps. What these courageously unusual and poetic books give to the reader is a language through which to contemplate God-godless politics, godless history-without commitment to anything but the pure gesture of contemplation. -- Bomb, Fall 1998

Unconventional brilliance and originality. . . . A cause for celebration. -- Forward

Yoel Hoffmann's prose has a poetic quality, full of imagery and symbolism; although the two unique novellas, The Book of Joseph and Katschen, are in prose, in many respects they read more like poetry. Hoffmann interweaves several beautiful poems between the paragraphs in The Book of Joseph. The paragraphs are like collages that, when placed together, tell the tragic story of a tailor and his son, devoutly religious Jews whose lives end tragically in 1938 Berlin at the hands of a brutal Nazi. Hoffmann writes Katschen is a similarly poetic, imagistic and minimalist style. Katschen, like The Book of Joseph, possesses dark humor and ends ominously. 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, Summer 1998

"First published in Israel in the late 1980s," Publishers Weekly wrote of Yoel Hoffmann's Katschen & The Book of Joseph, "these two quietly stunning novellas mark the American debut of a writer of international importance. 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."

Yoel Hoffmann is Professor of Eastern Philosophy at the University of Haifa, and has had a lifelong scholarly engagement with Hebrew literature, Western philosophy, and Japanese Buddhism. Critically acclaimed in Israel, as well as in Germany and France, he has published five fiction books, including Bernhardt and The Christ of Fish, both available from New Directions. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.