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.