My Father, the Messiah

“In a narrative that refuses the confinement of a single identity narrator, My Father the Messiah is a genre-bending book. Hochberg’s emotional and intellectual journey to contend with the legacy of her complex, mentally ill father and her identity as queer and Jewish—is heavy and at times dark, but her writing is concise, emotionally steady and often funny. It is a smart, tragic, hopeful, strange book, and I was totally immersed in it from start to finish.” - Mikhal Dekel, author of Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey

“Gil Hochberg has written a deeply compelling and moving book that offers a powerful account of her relationship with her father up to and after his death. In this decidedly queer father-daughter tale, Hochberg’s vulnerable exploration of the whirl of desires that animated their relationship and the way that these desires shift over time will leave the reader wanting more.” - Laura Levitt, author of The Objects that Remain

"A powerful account of watching a loved one descend into mental illness and the messy, emotional process of retroactively trying to come to grips with a parent’s life and legacy. It’s an insightful portrait of one woman grappling with the weight of personal history." - Publishers Weekly

"At the intersections of academic writing and memoir, scholarly life and familial history, religious belief and intellectual interpretation, we meet Gil Z. Hochberg and her father Yosef, a fellow academic and would be Messiah. During pandemic lockdown, Hochberg-fille is dangerously driven to all but live inside the words, delusions, and haunting connections still alive in her dead father’s personal archive of letters, poetry, journals, photo albums, and scholarly writing, given a room in five colored drawers in her apartment in NY, and then in these dramatic pages. Dr. Hochberg-fille gets closer and closer to the other’s illnesses—he is bipolar, and as a result physically frail, unstable, and often suffering extraordinary despair until his death—which allows for its own madness and this writing borne from trauma: a unique portrait of an itinerant feminist, queer, Jewish anti-Zionist who travels from her first home in Israel to those she establishes for own work and family in the US; a beautiful personal and scholarly look at familial, tribal, and national shame, love, sexuality, identity, memory, and anger of particular and pertinent use in this time of deep and necessary Jewish recalibration."

"Grappling with a prolonged losing of the father—across geographic distances, political-religious divides, and gaps of mental stability—Hochberg’s memoir digs through thieved archives and speculative accounts of her father Yossi. On the one hand, the book offers a perhaps not unfamiliar tale of ancestral Jewish migration from Poland to Kazahkstan, to the Palestinian Mandate, and eventually to the US and Tel Aviv. On the other hand, this adoring tale of paternal heritage refuses to shy away from the comically decrepit and gastronomically ugly, in its treatments of the father’s bodily decline as well as in its accounts of Hochberg’s own penis envy and sexual trauma. Hochberg crafts a portrait of transgenerational refugee and cosmopolitan experience that expand—in the most generous of ways—our notions of queer and crip relationality." - Rachel Lee, Professor of English and Gender Studies, UCLA

"Over the course of the book, the interplay of various elements of Hochberg’s and her dad’s lives yields a compelling portrait of someone slowly coming to terms with the death of a loved one. Readers who have dealt with similar tumult in their own lives will likely feel a strong connection with this work. Those with a specific interest in Jewish history and culture will also treasure the book as a deeply reported account of late-20th-century Jewish life amid various social upheavals. A compelling and well-crafted family portrait." - Kirkus