Hoist by our own keyboards

So anyone who put their money on "It was all a stupid misunderstanding", collect your payout.

We met up at the sandwich shop which has replaced Pho Lily. It has offerings I haven't seen anywhere else and I was eager to try the bánh mì ốp-la, but instead of a Vietnamese omelette, I got a slightly Annamited fried egg sandwich. Pasillero decided to be even more adventurous and got bánh mì bột lọc, which contained pork belly-filled tapioca dumplings.

We casually caught up on the last couple of weeks while lightning danced in the southern sky. Once we were convinced the storms had passed us by, he proposed heading over to Clark for dessert at Gelato Frío. It was only after we were well underway that he seized the third rail. "So what happened?" We ended up comparing phones and finding that not only had he never gotten the messages I sent two weeks, but I'd never gotten his messages--and he tried at least three times, on three different days.

So one simple failure of technology led to both of us thinking we'd been ghosted or worse. I'm still impressed with how calmly he dealt with it all. My aggrieved texts on Easter Sunday must have struck him as nothing short of bizarre, but he was polite and accommodating and as a result we both ended up back at his apartment last night making up for lost time like two men half our ages.

So that's all sorted then. Several times as I was polishing scripts in my head, I reminded myself that it didn't make sense to do this when I didn't even know what the basic facts were. I barely touched on the points that I so carefully laid out here yesterday; I didn't need to, since he's already well aware of them. If you were startled out of sleep yesterday evening, it was probably my sigh of relief.

My life as a cat

A few months ago I picked up a slim volume called Katschen; The Book of Joseph by Yoel Hoffmann. He's a Jewish Israeli author I'd never heard of before (to be honest, the only one I've read is Amos Oz) and the book is a translation of two novellas, each centred on a young Jewish boy growing up in somewhat bewildering circumstances.

Of the two, I liked "Katschen" more. The eponymous protagonist is an orphan of sorts (with his mother dead and his father in an instution) who gets passed around like a parcel from uncle to aunt to kibbutznik to Bedouin to Yemenite to policeman, finally ending up reunited with his father. It's a fascinating cross section of life in Mandatory Palestine seen through the eyes of an imaginative boy.

It's also (no prizes for guessing this) a semi-autobiographical first novel. Like Katschen (i.e. Kätzchen), Hoffmann was born in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire before being brought to Palestine, lost his mother at an early age, and was separated from his father (who put him in an orphanage until remarrying). What makes it interesting is how well-observed the milieu is and how successful the author is at channeling the voice and perceptions of a child.

Although only slightly longer, "The Book of Joseph" is substantially more ambitious, covering a longer period in a milieu Hoffmann knows less about (Nazi Germany) and seeking to provide a more comprehensive picture of that milieu. Although Yingele is arguably the novella's focus character, the chief protagonist is his father Joseph, a tailor struggling to raise him after the death of his wife.

It's also formally more ambitious, being told in snippets and occasionally slipping into poetry or song. There's also the parallel narrative of a Nazi youth woven in. (No prizes either for guessing where that story is headed.) Overall, it's rather successful up until the last section which is a run-on compilation of one-sentence impressions of the Berlin ghetto. I guess he's aiming for a fragmented but multifaceted portrait of what was lost with the liquidation of the city's Jewish community, but it ended up being a chore to get through.

I didn't pick it up on account of its use of language but that did add to the appeal. German and Yiddish are sprinkled liberally throughout, along with the amount of Hebrew you'd expect in a work about Jews and some Arabic as well. (The Bedouin speaks almost entirely in monosyllabic imperatives, which provides opportunity for some wordplay based on the homophony of German komm and Arabic قم.) All of this is carefully glossed in footnotes which I could for the most part ignore.

As for what to read next, my neighbour read Slaughterhouse 5 on her day off yesterday and just handed it off to me. Meanwhile a friend just finished The bone people and wants me to read it so we can talk about it. Of course, he also wants me to read Rayuela for the same reason and there seems little chance of that happening.