- Paperback: 176 pages
- Publisher: New Directions (April 16 1999)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0811214052
- ISBN-13: 978-0811214056
- Product Dimensions: 20.2 x 13.8 x 1.1 cm
- Shipping Weight: 191 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,955,036 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||
Product Details |
Product Description
World Literature Today, Summer 1998
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.
Bomb, Fall 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.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
"HERR ZILBERMANN, THESE DAYS EVERYONE sews on a Singer," the Singer agent said and removed his hat. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
"HERR ZILBERMANN, THESE DAYS EVERYONE sews on a Singer," the Singer agent said and removed his hat. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Two stories that disturb and amaze,
By
This review is from: Katschen And 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.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A major writer (in my opinion),
By
This review is from: Katschen And 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.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
5.0 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews) 5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A major writer (in my opinion),
By M. J. Smith - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Katschen And 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,
By Eileen Galen - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Katschen And 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,
By Natania Rosenfed - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Katschen And The Book Of Joseph (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.
|
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
