I am Joseph, or the Tin Box

This unique book should not exist.Its manuscript was purportedly recovered from a tin box buried in the ruins of the Lvov ghetto, written by an enclave of German-speaking Jews in hiding during the Second World War.They left it behind with no expectation it would ever be read: a shockingly bold literary work rivaling the most innovative novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with one difference. Its author, improbably enough, is Joseph — the biblical Joseph. The subject: his own family saga.The result is an inside account of dysfunction and trauma rippling across four biblical generations. Abraham emerges as unhinged by faith, Sarah struck dead by grief, Isaac broken by terror. Rebecca betrays one twin for the other, Rachel waits in the dark for her stepson, Jacob heaps deception upon deception: all culminating in Joseph's own brothers leaving him in the desert to die.But he survives. And he is determined to understand, no matter what the cost. So he writes.And all of it in the form of a verse-by-verse commentary, the form Jewish tradition has used for two thousand years to honor these figures, here turned upon them with an unsparing candor and psychological acuity never before undertaken.The manuscript surfaced decades later and was entrusted to Bernhard Efraim, a German-born London lawyer, who spent ten years translating and annotating it. For the first time in his life, he also started keeping a diary. Those diary entries, woven into the book, tell a second story — that of a man who thought he had escaped his past, only to find himself, in the end, irresistibly drawn back into it.Efraim himself believed the manuscript too heretical to publish. The decision fell to his daughter and granddaughter. Upon his death in 2025, they decided it was too important to keep hidden from the world.In the literary tradition of W.G. Sebald, James Joyce, and Edmond Jabès. Read more