In kaleidoscopic fragments, Hoffmann refracts Jewish popular lore and folk wisdom through a postmodernist prism, brightening his prose with snatches of verse, songs, diary excerpts, letters, ominous dreams, lush erotic passages and Yiddish sayings. "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 the new state of Israel. The novellas radiate the original poetry of Hoffmann's atomized hypnotic language, which Rosmarie Waldrop has called "utterly enchanting it's like nothing...

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...

Part novel and part memoir, Yoel Hoffmann s Moods is flooded with feelings, evoked by his family, losses, loves, the soul s hidden powers, old phone books, and life in the Galilee with its every scent, breeze, notable dog, and odd neighbor. Carrying these shards is a general tenderness, accentuated by a new dimension brought along by that great big pill of Prozac. Beautifully translated by Peter Cole, Moods is fiction for lovers of poetry and poetry for lovers of fiction a small marvel of a book, and with its pockets of joy, a curiously cheerful book by an author who once compared himself to...