At the outset of her fascinating memoir, Gil Hochberg declares herself:
My father’s archivist…But writing about him is also writing with him. This book is written between our bodies. Between identities, temporalities, memories, spaces, genders, and sexualities. Between the living and the dead. It is made of his writings and mine: his writings to me, his writings about writing, his writings about my writings, and my writings about his writing. Not mine. Not his. He/I. His/Mine. We. Us. I. My memory, his. His body, mine?
Fearlessly revealing, My Father, The Messiah exposes the slippages between herself and her troubled father Dr. Yosef Hochberg, a once brilliant statistician. After her parents’ divorce, Gil is raised in a Tel Aviv suburb while her distant father lives the life of a peripatetic professor in various American university towns and cities. Yet the two remain close, spending summers together and sending letters in between. The father of those blissful summers is devoted, imaginative, playful, and encouraging.
When her father finally returns to Israel, Gil keenly anticipates an adult version of their relationship, but instead recoils from his frightening transformation as he embraces the language of fundamentalist Zionist zealotry and psychotic fantasies. The severity of his mental illness was not immediately apparent. After all, her father’s transformed language and delusions merely reflected and regurgitated one part of Israeli society’s messianic and religious zealotry.
Though undoubtedly it did not feel so at the time, certain episodes may read as dark comedy. At one point, after being coldly rebuffed by her mother when Gil reaches out to reveal she is a lesbian, she eagerly meets her father in a Tel Aviv café. What follows is a “mutual ‘coming out’ meeting.” Impatiently dismissing the weight of her sexual self-discovery, he confidently discloses his own momentous revelation: “I am the real Messiah.”
Her father’s world rapidly shrinks as friends and colleagues withdraw. Only his second wife, Miriam, remains a “devoted subject” during his euphoric states and rescuer after his harrowing suicide attempts. Reflecting on the irony of his condition, his daughter muses: “One man proclaiming to be Messiah ends up in a mental institution subjected to electroshock therapy. Another becomes a leader of the largest Hasidic movement in the world. Perhaps this is the true tragedy of madness.” Hochberg recounts her father’s euphoric manic highs and depressive spirals in gripping detail. For a time, she clings to the hope that the mischievous and brilliant man she once knew will reemerge, even as he slips ever deeper into conversations with biblical prophets and kings.
It isn’t until long after her father’s death, that Hochberg confronts the devastatingly painful revelations of his deeply personal writings. These reveal a far sadder, lonelier, and tortured figure than the playful and ebullient man of her childhood memories. Traversing the years 1949 to 2024 with gripping candor, Hochberg also revisits her own struggles with acute depression and the challenges that expressions of her nascent queer identity posed in childhood. She warmly credits her father for “the gift of queer survival.”
How fortunate we are that Gil Hochberg persevered in her difficult journey. This cannot have been an easy story to tell, and she acknowledges her struggles and self-doubts throughout it all, up until the book’s late revelations. Shedding surprising new light on her father’s tormented ego, these offer a hint of redemption. This brave, risk-taking memoir is a triumph, an unforgettably affecting rendering of the trials and vicissitudes of mental illness, grief, mourning, queer identity, and religious fervor and alienation. And most importantly, the resolute love at the heart of it all.
Ranen Omer-Sherman is the JHFE Endowed Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Louisville, author of several books and editor of Amos Oz: The Legacy of a Writer in Israel and Beyond.
