Yoet Hoffmann. The Shunra and the Schmetterling.

Cohen, Leslie

Yoel Hoffmann. The Shunra and the Schmetterling. Peter Cole, tr. New York. New Directions. 2004. Unpaginated. $16.95. ISBN 08112-1567-9

THE SHUNRA AND THE SCHMETTERLING is a ramble through the narrator's childhood landscape in which bits and pieces of Yoel Hoffmann's formative years sparkle briefly, very reminiscent of haiku. In the opening lines of the book, Hoffmann depicts the task of writing a memoir as almost magical, saying: "From oblivion there ascends, like that legendary bird rising from its ashes, the veranda on which my father's father Isaac Emerich sat, along with my grandmother Emma." Hoffmann connects the veranda--grandparents and all--to the Garden of Eden, Napoleon, and ancient and modern battles. In the fragmented style that characterizes postmodern literature, the momentous is everywhere juxtaposed with the trivial. Thus, innocent games played in the schoolyard are interspersed between scenes of the death of the narrator's mother, his father's remarriage, and--much later--his father's death. Similarly, a description of soldiers stepping on a land mine is followed closely by a recollection of the evening sky as a startling visual image: "Each night the moon came and stood over our heads like the big rock in Magritte's painting." Like the moon, the emotional landscape is viewed from a great distance.

While there is much attention to the details of everyday life--as they flash by in a kaleidoscopic array--no attempt is made to interpret them or the feelings they inspire in the narrator. Informing the reader that "My raison d'etre you'll have to seek in biology books," Hoffmann eschews documentation in favor of poetic prose. The text is organized into minichapters, with subsections that resemble the stanzas of a poem. Meaning resides as much in the organization of the text as it does in the words themselves. Although rendered from the child's-eye point of view, the text is written in rich, sophisticated, and decidedly adult language--or languages, to be more precise, as Hoffman introduces Yiddish, Icelandic, French, German, and Aramaic into the text, echoing the street sounds that typified the era of early statehood in Israel. (The narrator's neighborhood in Ramat Gan--near Tel Aviv--was home to immigrants from many European and Mediterranean nations.)

The Shunra and the Schmetterling (i.e., "the cat" in Aramaic and "the butterfly" in German) focuses on concepts and meaning. Writing of his school days, Hoffmann recalls, "They taught us the difference between objective and subjective. ... Objective is the shadow a sick man casts on the carpet between the hours of five and six, in November. Subjective is the need to sleep, or the sick man remembered a year later." By this definition, the novella is definitely subjective. Readers who welcome lyrical prose in lieu of plot will delight in Hoffman's novella, and in a philosophy of writing that inspires contemplation.

Leslie Cohen

Kibbutz Ein Hashofet, Israel