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AUTHORS | ||
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Yoel Hoffmann Romanian-born Yoel Hoffmann, Professor of Eastern Philosophy at the University of Haifa, has published six fiction books with New Directions. He has been acclaimed as "spectacular" (The New Yorker), "radiant" (World Literature Today), "superb" (The Boston Globe), "a reason to celebrate" (Hadassah Magazine), and "a writer of international importance" (Publishers Weekly). Winning the very first Koret Jewish Book Award, Yoel Hoffmann was cited for creating "something rare and precious ... astonishingly fresh and new." Minna Proctor's omnibus review of Hoffmann's works in Bookforum is available online.
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The Shunra and the Schmetterling by Yoel Hoffmann; translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole Yoel Hoffmann, "Israel's celebrated avant-garde genius" (Forward), undertakes a story strictly from the child's-eye view and creates one of his most beautiful books to date. "Hoffmann is not just
a good writer but a great one...What Hoffmann has achieved here
is a kind of magic." |
Shunra is
Aramaic for "cat." Schmetterling is
German for "butterfly." In Yoel Hoffmann's new book, these and numerous
other creatures, cultures, and languages meet in a magical shimmering
hymn to childhood. Hoffmann traces his hero's developing consciousness
of the ways-and-wonders of the world as though he were peering through
a tremendous kaleidoscope: all that was perceived, all that is remembered,
is rendered in fluid fragments of color and light. With remarkable
delicacy and sweep, Hoffmann captures childhood from the amazed inside
out, and without the backward-looking wash of grown-up sentiment. Instead,
the boy's deadpan registration of the human comedy around him is offered
up as strangely magical fact. Beautifully translated by Peter Cole, The
Shunra & the Schmetterling is fiction for lovers of poetry and
poetry for lovers of fiction—a small marvel of a book, and one
of the author's finest to date. |
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Bernhard by Yoel Hoffmann; translated from the Hebrew by Alan Treister & Eddie Levenston "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... a further persuasive
illustration of the genius of one of Israel's finest contemporary
writers." |
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| 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. | ||
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The Christ of Fish by Yoel Hoffmann; translated from the Hebrew by Eddie Levenston "These exquisite shards of memories, crystallized in language:
an attempt to find out "how (by virtue of what principle) the
universe keeps going." |
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Yoel Hoffmann's novel The Christ of Fish, revolving around its heroine Aunt Magda, offers a heart-stopping view into the soul of things. Hoffmann makes a beautiful, epiphanic mosaic out of 233 pieces of Aunt Magda's life in Tel Aviv. Originally from Vienna, still speaking German after decades in Israel, and a widow, Aunt Magda has "divided her life into two periods: 'When my husband was alive' and 'now.'" "Now," ever elusive and ever inclusive in Hoffmann's work, contains her childhood, her marriage, her nephew, her best friend Frau Stier, Wildegans' poetry, apple strudel, two stolen handbags, Bing Crosby, a favorite caf, and a gentleman admirer. Spontaneous and dreamlike, Hoffmann's images of reality shift in currents of "realness,"creating moments of absolute clarity -- life, seized as it is and of itself-- from the "cotton reels of memory." One reel concerns the title fish: "At the beginning of the fifties (Food was scarce in those days. Once a month, in exchange for government stamps, we ate a yellow chicken.) on Passover Eve, Aunt Magda's friend Berthe came to visit her and brought her from the Jordan Valley a large carp in a metal bucket....Aunt Magda filled the bath with water and put the carp in it. Two whole days the carp swam up and down the length of the bath. On the third day, Aunt Magda declared that the carp 'thinks just like we do,' and sent Uncle Herbert (an expert in Sanskrit) 'to put the fish back in the sea.'" |
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The Heart is Katmandu by Yoel Hoffmann; translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole "Sensual details of everyday
life are magnified and distorted in Yoel Hoffmann's uncommon romance, The Heart Is Katmandu,
translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole. Yehoahim and Batya come together
in modern-day Haifa; each has an uncertain past that includes lost
love. We are given a glimpse into their minds, where ordinary words
and objects become totems, religion and art serve as touchstones, and
meaning is as ephemeral as love itself. Less a novel than a loosely
woven series of impressionistic prose poems, this will enchant and
baffle discriminating readers." |
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The Heart Is Katmandu tells a tale of new love -- of paradise gained. Set in today's Haifa and presented in 237 dream-like small chapters, it is a book in which shyness and stumbling tenderness emerge triumphant. Poet Peter Cole has made a beautiful translation, capturing Hoffmann's intense and unfathomably original style. A starred Kirkus Review acclaimed the novel "Beautiful, humane, priceless." |
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Katschen and The Book of Joseph by Yoel Hoffmann; translated from the Hebrew by Eddie Levenston, David Kriss, and Alan Treister "The stunning American debut
of Romanian-born Israeli author Yoel Hoffmann." "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." |
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| Katschen & The Book of Joseph makes an amazing American debut for Israeli writer Yoel Hoffmann. Intensely moving, the two novellas display the entirely original poetry and hypnotic verve of Hoffmann's atomized language, which Rosmarie Waldrop has called "utterly enchanting--it is like nothing else." "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 Palestine. "When Yoel Hoffmann's books first appeared in the late 1980s," Professor Nili Gold has commented, "they seemed to have tunneled their way into Israel from afar....Technically of the same generation (the 'Generation of the State') as canonical realist writers like A.B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz, he didn't begin to publish fiction until his late forties, and in many ways he represents a generation of one, at the edge of the Israeli avant-garde." | ||
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©2008 by New Directions
Publishing Corp. |
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