Yoel Hoffmann is an Israeli educator, novelist, translator, and scholar. He taught Eastern philosophy at the University of Haifa for many years and did not begin writing fiction until in his forties. Today he is widely regarded as Israel's leading writer of avant-garde fiction.
Background
Yoel Hoffmann was born in 1937, in Brasov, Romania. He was a son of Austro-Hungarian Jewish parents. At the age of one Hoffmann and his parents fled a Europe increasingly under the Nazi influence for the British Mandate of Palestine. Shortly after the move, Hoffmann's mother died and he was entrusted by his father to an orphanage where he spent his time until his father re-married. His mother's early death and the years spent boarding with family members and in a children's home figure prominently in his work.
Education
As a young man, Yoel Hoffmann left his home in Israel and traveled to Japan, where he spent two years living in a Zen monastery and studying Chinese and Japanese texts with monks. He earned a Doctor of Philosophy in the philosophy of religion and Buddhism from Kyoto University, Japan. He also attended Tel-Aviv University.
Career
Yoel Hoffmann is a professor emeritus of Japanese poetry, Buddhism, and philosophy at the University of Haifa. He translated Japanese poetry and did not begin writing fiction until in his forties, and though chronologically a member of the sixties "Generation of the State," his work is oft-described as being at the forefront of avant-garde Hebrew literature.
Yoel Hoffmann's early work as a translator of poetry and Zen koans has informed his more recent novels, the first of which had its American debut in 1998. Though he translates other works into English, he has written his novels in his native Hebrew. The first of his works to be translated into English was the pair of novellas, Katschen and The Book of Joseph. The Book of Joseph tells the story of a Jewish tailor named Joseph who lees the cossacks of Russia only to find himself pursued by the Nazis in Berlin. Joseph and his son Yingele are killed on Kristallnacht by Siegfried Stopf. Their story is continued by Gumisht, Joseph's Polish apprentice, who comes to Berlin after spending the war in London and is devastated to find Joseph and Yingele gone. Reviewing the book for the New Leader, Betty Falkenberg compared Hoffmann's work in The Book of Joseph to that of Italo Calvino and William Blake, observing the author's talent for using telling details and noting the connection between personal tragedy and world events.
Published with The Book of Joseph, Katschen tells the story of a young boy bereft of family connections who is finally sent to work on a kibbutz. Unable to bear the dehumanizing regimen, Katschen seeks out his father, who has been institutionalized for insanity and breaks him out of his mental asylum. Though Hoffmann intimates that "a great disaster" lies ahead for the pair, the novella ends with Katschen's father asserting his recognition of his son.
Hoffman’s 2001 novel The Heart Is Katmandu also won praise for its explorations of the possibilities of words. The book is highly experimental, with both characters and authors sometimes addressing the readers. The layout of the text is also unusual, with blank space representing the distance between the main characters, Batya and Yehoahim, and divisions not by chapter but by 237 frames that counter the traditional linear movement of a story.
Connections
Yoel Hoffmann has been married twice.