My Father, the Messiah

Columbia literature professor Hochberg (Becoming Palestine) pieces together a fragmentary, introspective account of her late father’s complicated life. By the time he died in 2013, Yosef Hochberg had transformed from a highly productive statistician and professor to a bipolar, physically ill man convinced he was the Jewish messiah. Mining her own memories and papers found in his second wife’s apartment in 2013, Hochberg traces her fraught relationship with her father in nonchronological snippets, mixing grim recollections of his last days in the hospital with idyllic vignettes of their summers together after her parents divorced, excerpts from the many letters he wrote her, and writings in which he discussed his feelings of sexual inadequacy and growing sense that all Jews must reject “Christian” thought, including Western medicine. She also interviews former colleagues and family members, documenting the impact of his scholarly work on the field of biostatistics, which involves the application of statistical methods to biology and medicine. While her father remains a somewhat elusive figure, this serves as 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. (Feb.)