The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Christ of Fish by Yoel HoffmannAllen Hibbard
Yoel Hoffmann. The Christ of Fish. Trans. Eddie Levenston. New Directions, 1999. 150 pp. $21.95.
In one of the 233 short segments that comprise the work, Hoffmann’s narrator (omnipresent yet self-effacing) invites us to consider just what genre the book belongs to: “I want to ask: if these events were taking place in what they call a novel—would it be appropriate for Mr. Moskowitz to touch Aunt Magda’s flesh? Should he touch Frau Stier’s flesh? And perhaps (from some great hallucination) the three of them should let go of their cards and drop to the floor of the café, flesh upon flesh?” Indeed, the characters that inhabit the space of these pages (a small cast including the narrator’s father, Uncle Herbert, Pawel, Doktor Staub and his wife Hermina, Herr Stier, Adolf and Berthe Hertz, and Andre in addition to those just named) hover more like spirits than fleshly forms as they speak with one another beside the harpsichord, prepare strudel, dream of their European pasts, play rummy at the Café Pilz, philosophize, listen to Dvorak, and climb to the summit of Mt. Canaan. As in other works by Hoffmann (for instance Bernhard), contemporary political events in Israel/Palestine take up almost no space. Hoffmann’s world—airy, slightly aslant, transformed by a hint of magic or imagination or belief—is akin to those painted visions of Chagall or perhaps even Soutine or Kokoschka.
Death is the force behind and in these narrative fragments. The narrator places before us first the facts of his mother’s death soon after his birth, then the deaths of his father and Uncle Herbert, and finally the death of his Aunt Magda. What remains after death? These exquisite shards of memories, crystallized in language: an attempt to find out “how (by virtue of what principle) the universe keeps going.” [Allen Hibbard]