The Shunra and the Schmetterling
Peter Cole
(Author)
Yoel Hoffmann
(Author)
Description
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 sentiment. Instead, the boy's deadpan registration of the human comedy around him is offered up as strangely magical fact. Beautifully translated by Peter Cole, The Shunra and the Schmetterling is fiction for lovers of poetry and poetry for lovers of fiction--a small marvel of a book, and one of the author's finest to date.
Product Details
Price
$16.95
$15.76
Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date
May 17, 2004
Pages
128
Dimensions
5.58 X 0.38 X 7.98 inches | 0.34 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780811215671
BISAC Categories:
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Become an affiliateAbout the Author
Peter Cole is a professor of history at Western Illinois University in Macomb and a research associate in the Society, Work and Development Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Cole is the author of the award-winning Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area and Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia. He coedited Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW. He is the founder and codirector of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project.
Yoel Hoffmann was born in Brasow, Romania in 1937. He is presently a citizen of Israel, and is Professor of Eastern Philosophy at the U. of Haifa. He has had a lifelong scholarly engagement with Hebrew literature, Western philosophy, and Japanese Buddhism. His is the winner of the first Koret Jewish Book Award. His books include The Heart is Katmandu, Bernhardt, The Christ of Fish, and Katschen & The Book of Joseph
Reviews
"A writer of international importance...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."