KATSCHEN and THE BOOK OF JOSEPH

by Yoel Hoffmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 28, 1998

Two novellas, first published in 1987, by an Israeli writer--roughly contemporary with Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua--whose powerful portrayals of endangered and wounded Jews offer an interesting stylistic contrast to the fiction of Abaton Appelfeld. ""The Book of Joseph"" mingles together diary excerpts, lengthy verse passages, and scraps of myth and folklore with its tense coiled-spring narration of a widowed tailor and his son who escape post-Revolution Russia only to end up in Berlin on the verge of Hitler's ascendancy, and at the mercy of ""two yellow-haired, blue-eyed gods."" ""Katschen,"" set in Palestine, movingly details the hesitant bonding of a frail preadolescent boy with his widowed father, a withdrawn, despairing madman. Strong and memorable stuff, deftly translated into appropriately incantatory, accusatory English sentences.

Pub Date: May 28, 1998

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 160

Publisher: New Directions

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998

Categories: FICTION