1937 -
Israeli writer and scholar.
Yoel Hoffman was brought to Palestine as an infant by his Austro-Hungarian Jewish parents. His mother died a couple of years later and his father entrusted him to a day-care home, whose owner became Hoff-man's beloved stepmother when he was seven.
As a college student, Hoffman studied Hebrew literature and Western philosophy but wrote his thesis on Far Eastern philosophy. He had lived in a Japanese Buddhist temple where he studied Chinese and Japanese texts with Zen monks. His academic work ranged from comparative philosophy to interpretations of haiku and Zen koans. A professor at Haifa University, Hoffman began to write fiction in his late forties. Although chronologically a member of the sixties "generation of the State," his writing is in the forefront of the Israeli avant-garde of the nineties.
With his first collection of stories, The Book of Joseph (1988), Hoffman began his lyrical, experimental literary journey. But only with Bernhardt (1989) and Christ of Fishes (1991) did his mature creative voice emerge. In atomistic texts of unusual typography and poetic rhythms, Hoffman blended Far Eastern with Western philosophy, minimalist aesthetics with unbridled imagination, murmuring of the heart with rationalism, and educated awareness with Nirvana-like trance. Hoffmann's personae - middle-aged widowers, orphaned children, lonely aunts - often speak or remember in their German mother tongue, transliterated phonetically into Hebrew and glossed in the margins. Reconstructing a culturally and psychologically complex metabolism of loss, Hoffman's work negates boundaries between life and death, self and other, man and woman, human and animal.
Bibliography
Gold, Nili. "Bernhardt's Journey: The Challenges of Yoel Hoffmann's Writing." Jewish Studies Quarterly 1, no. 3 (1993/1994).
Hoffman, Yoel. Katschen and the Book of Joseph, translated by David Kriss et al. New York: New Directions, 1998.
Hoffman, Yoel, compiler. Japanese Death Poems: Written byZen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death. Boston, MA: Charles E. Tuttle, 1998.
— NILI GOLD
UPDATED BY ADINA FRIEDMAN
