Tales Dreamlike and Precise
FALKENBERG, BETTY
Tales Dreamlike and Precise Katschen & The Book of Joseph By Yoel Hoffman Translated by David Kriss, Alan Treister and Eddie Levenston New Directions. 165 pp. $17.95. Reviewed by Betty...
...Weist du wer ich bin...
...Like Yingele, Katschen has lost his mother and is a dreamer...
...At 93 pages, the second is the longer one and opens the book...
...aah...' "Those first two words of the Mourners' Kaddish end "The Book of Joseph...
...He knew that a great disaster was at hand but his heart quivered with happiness...
...Herr Still offers that he comes from a village in Austria called Heiligenblut, near the Grossglöckner, where the mountains "reflect the thunder, which reverberates in the valley like a giant bell...
...When the Kraft durch Freude ("Strength through Joy") program is set up by the Nazis, Siegfried goes to work paving the autobahn...
...An ominous beginning...
...He resembles Italo Calvino's Mr...
...Na [That's it], I'm already quite good with a club," Siegfried thought...
...The tale's main thread comes to an abrupt end on Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, when Joseph and Yingele fall victim to a rampaging thug: "Siegfried raised the club and hit Yingele's head, a single blow...
...Meanwhile, the Nazi basilisk begins to stalk the streets of the city...
...In common with Blake, Hoffman can "see a World in a Grain of Sand...
...Palomar trying to observe a wave, where microcosm and macrocosm merge, shift and come together again...
...vayiskadash...
...Siegfried's brutishness is contrasted with the gentle, loving exchanges between Joseph and his son, or against Joseph's silent, and not quite silent, musings about his dead wife...
...The kibbutz is a fearful place where orphans are taken in, but dehumanized by a strict regimen...
...For Joseph's vision, like that of the true mystic, extends beyond perceived reality, to the sphere known in the Kabbalah as Malchut—the revealed world: "As the years went by, Chaya-Leah's face receded, and...
...But when he wakes from his daydream, Joseph sees the fear in Yingele's eyes, and realizes he was speaking to Chaya-Leah...
...Ending up in Berlin, he spends the next 10 years sewing trousers for a clientele that includes a law clerk, a butcher and a judge...
...Joseph is a Jewish tailor who flees Russia with his infant son, Yingele ("Little One"), after Cossacks kill his wife...
...Then he imagines that what has happened was only a dream, and that he is now sitting, as he did every evening, sewing stockings, and that Chaya-Leah is sitting at his side...
...This encounter makes him understand that what passes in this world for sanity is shallow materialism (he does not formulate it this way, happily), whereas what is called madness is unfogged inner vision...
...Na, Yah...
...Katschen" has other qualities...
...It meanders through terrain heavily studded with Zen riddles and images from the Kabbalah...
...Then, with a second blow, he hit Joseph in the chest...
...Herr Still felt the dread spreading in his chest...
...Suddenly Katschen understood that what was had already been, and what was to be would not be...
...Soon, when the people here turn to me...
...aah...
...The Book of Joseph" ends, not with the death of the tailor and his son, but with a kind of epilogue in which a survivor registers their loss...
...After the War, he returns to Berlin to look for Joseph, and the boy, whom he had come to love...
...Katschen is handed around to different family members and forms a close tie to his uncle, a sad taciturn man, not unlike his father, but well-meaning relatives pack the boy off to a kibbutz...
...Unable to endure the cold inhumanity of the kibbutz, Katschen runs away and is finally taken to the mental hospital to meet his father...
...Old odors return to his nose...
...Katschen asks his father...
...Do you know who I am...
...Indeed, Hoffmann must have given many a headache to the translators, and one is left to ponder why this extraordinary author, himself the translator into English of the Japanese text of Zen Koans called The Sound of One Hand, has here turned his own Hebrew text over to others...
...Siegfried said...
...In a tavern he listens to a couple of drunks named Gouged-Eye and Cut-Foot carry on a weird Daliesque, apocalyptic banter...
...The result, dreamlike and precise, wrenches your heart...
...Of the two works, "The Book of Joseph" is by far the more compelling...
...In the winter, when there are snowflakes on the windowpanes of Berlin, Joseph sees the winds that blow in the forest across the frozen plains...
...One day the Jewish tobacconist on Friedrichstrasse, Herr Still, plucks up the courage to start a conversation with Siegfried as he buys his daily pair of cigarettes...
...There he marries her and becomes a partner in her father's firm, "Goldstone and Kis, Tailors to the Queen...
...Siegfried Stopf (SS...
...The second novella in this slim volume takes us to Israel, some time in the early '50s...
...But sometimes her face comes to him and appears for a moment in the face of Yingele...
...he can see her only through a cloud of fog...
...Whatever the disasters that may and surely will lie ahead, the novella ends on this affirmative note...
...Characters and events are compressed to their essence in a single phrase or sentence...
...Suddenly it seemed to Gurnisht that in a world without Joseph and without Yingele, his strength would fail...
...Then: "In the bedroom at the end of the tavern the German woman took off her dress, lay down on the floor, spread her legs and said 'Komm.' And without knowing what he was doing, Gumisht came upon her and shouted: 'Yisgadal...
...Reviewed by Betty Falkenberg Freelance writer...
...Zwo,' [German dialect for two] Siegfried said and laid the pennies on the counter...
...Gumisht ("Nothing-at-all") is a Polish Peer Gynt of sorts, once Joseph's apprentice...
...Early on in the story Gumisht goes to London in pursuit of a woman he had met in Berlin...
...When a scientifically oriented teacher cuts a leaf in half with a carving knife to demonstrate photosynthesis, Katschen thinks, "The work of the people in this place...
...contributor, New York "Times Book Review" The stunning American debut of Romanian-born Israeli author Yoel Hoffman, Katschen & The Book of Joseph, consists of two novellas...
...Walking around the city, it does not take long for him to get the picture...
...Later in the story we find Siegfried in his room crushing bedbugs by candlelight and lining up the dead ones in rows...
...they will cut my name off...
...who delivers the death blows, is first glimpsed on page one, where he is just a boy, staring at his legs, watching the golden down spread over his thighs...
...Ja,' said Ernst, 'Katschen.'" With this one word, his name, spoken by his father who recognizes him for who he is, Katschen's quest for his self is achieved...
...Together the father and son steal away from the asylum and wander out of the town through fields: "Where the fields ended stood a mountain, its peak wrapped in clouds like a white bandage...
...As for the rest," writes Hoffman, "it is already written in history books that Joseph was left up there, alone, and said, 'Mayn got, Mayn got farvos haslu mikh farlozn!' and died...
...But the hair on his legs will grow dark, "and things ran on until in nineteen hundred and thirty-eight what happened happened...
...His final words are a Yiddish rendition of Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani, ("My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me...
...What would you like?' he asked...
...His father, declared non compos mentis, has been shut away in a mental institution...
...At times funny and always engrossing, it is full of intriguing interlingual wordplay...
...He feels that everything is being cut down or cut off, to achieve uniformity...
...is cutting...
Vol. 81 • May 1998 • No. 6
