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Title: The Shunra and the Schmetterling by Yoel Hoffmann, Peter Cole ISBN: 0-8112-1567-9 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: May, 2004 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: "Butterflies stood at the edge of the eye."
Comment: Lively images of the cat (shunra) and the butterfly (schmetterling) chase and play through the memories of a poetic child as Yoel Hoffmann, one of Israel's most celebrated writers, recreates childhood and the coming of age. More than sixty years have passed since the speaker first lived in Rabat Gan, and the passage of time has intensified some memories, eliminated the irrelevancies from others, and connected the fantasies of childhood with the perennial mysteries of adulthood. As he begins to recall images from his life, the veranda on which his grandfather sat rises from memory, "like that legendary bird rising from its ashes" and becomes "the veranda of the world itself," a symbol of the experiences of the family and, ultimately, the history of the Jewish people, a veranda with "A broken railing. Grillwork like Auschwitz. A floor laid with tiles of pogroms...Nuremberg laws in the plaster..."

Not a manifesto or catalogue of wrongs, this "memoir" is the vivid and poetic evocation of one boy's life, the people he remembers from a seemingly ordinary Israeli village, and his discoveries about dreams and the passage of time. Impressions from past and present flow through the speaker's consciousness, unfiltered, with one idea reminding him of another from another place and time. Gradually, the reader meets the speaker's grandfather, father, and deceased mother, the neighbors, his teachers, and his friends, all of whom have sought sanctuary in Israel from other places. Words in Aramaic, Hebrew, German, Yiddish, and even Icelandic, are sprinkled casually throughout the story, a natural part of the speaker's memory and the collective memory of his village and country.

Though "A butterfly big as a volume of Talmud stood above our heads" throughout the speaker's childhood, the adults in the village have had more difficult lives, all of them having escaped from various wars. Soon it is time for the speaker to serve in his own army and fight in his own war, an experience which marks him forever. Nature imagery--of birds, animals, clouds, and the sky--permeate this impressionistic painting of a poet's life, giving depth and color to instants in time and to moments in history. Through intense, compressed and sometimes elusive pictures, the story--and our understanding of the speaker--do gradually emerge, insinuating themselves into our own consciousness and speaking directly to us, a powerful communication between author and reader which transcends time and place. Mary Whipple