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The rest is Commentary...
Every month, Commentary explores a key Jewish thinker or writer, with a brief biography, an introduction to their major works, and suggestions for further reading. Enjoy!
Author of the Month for May
| AHARON APPELFELD is considered one of Israel's finest writers. A Holocaust survivor and post-war refugee, he made his way to Italy and immigrated to Israel in 1946. Born in 1932 in Czernovitz, Bukovina (now part of the Ukraine), his mother was killed during the Holocaust, and he and his father were sent to a concentration camp. Appelfeld escaped at the age of eight, hid in Ukranian forests and later worked in Soviet army field kitchens |
Aharon Appelfeld |
| before emigrating to Palestine in 1947. After fighting in the war that followed Israel's independence, he attended Hebrew Univ., his first formal education since the first grade. He has since taught at several universities. Appelfeld, who writes in Hebrew, is haunted by the Holocaust, but he hardly ever writes about the camp experience, instead concentrating on the event's historical margins, both before and after. Appelfeld's work is recognized worldwide as among the most profound literary explorations of the Holocaust, and has met with international critical and popular acclaim. Appelfeld has received the Israel Prize, and he is a winner of the National Jewish Book Award. | |
Essential Reading
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The Story of a Life
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Acclaimed novelist Appelfeld survived the Holocaust and came to Israel in 1946 as an orphan. He was seven when war tore apart his comfortable, assimilated Jewish home in the Ukraine, barely 13 when the war ended. His memoir, translated from the Hebrew, is not a chronological narrative but a frank, searing discussion about what and how he remembers, what it means to be Jewish, and how to write about it without sentimentality or rhetoric. Some of the literary stuff gets tedious; it's the memories through the eyes of a child that are the drama here. Almost mute after years in hiding in the forest, he wants to forget, and in Israel, he's encouraged to do so and to fight and farm for a strong homeland. But he makes his story from the experiences he cannot speak about. Whether it's his mother's murder ("I didn't see her die, but I did hear her one and only scream") or the brutality and humanity among the traumatized survivors in the displacement camps, the sharp, unforgettable vignettes tell the truth.
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Typical of Appelfeld's work is his first internationally known novel,
Badenheim 1939, which details the agreeable Austrian vacation of a Jewish family as they ignore the portents of impending tragedy.
This beautiful novel opens on the eve of World War II as a group of middle-class Jews arrive in the resort town of Badenheim, somewhere in Austria, ready to spend another idyllic summer vacation. But Europe in 1939 is no vacationland. Rumors of war rumble into the resort town, but the characters struggle to convince themselves that everything is perfectly normal. The great pleasure of the book comes in the Kafkaesque quality of Appelfeld's eye for the everyday and his restrained prose, set against the intimations of the approaching catastrophe.
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Tzili: The Story of a Life |
A moving story of a young Jewish girl whose family accidentally leaves her behind when they flee Poland. She survives the Holocaust hiding in the forest, where she finds love and a sense of belonging.
The Conversion At the start of The
Conversion, Karl Hüber has just converted to Christianity. Now in his 30s and never happily identified as a Jew, Karl isn't exactly a true believer in the Christian Trinity either. He has converted only in order to strengthen his chances for promotion within the civil service. The place is Austria, the time pre-World War II. Most of Karl's high-school friends converted long ago; and all through her final illness his mother urged him, "If your career requires you to convert, do it. I won't be angry with you. A person has to advance. Without advancement, there is no purpose or meaning to life." In due course he gets his desired position. But when a proposal to demolish the Jewish shops in the city center comes before the city government, Karl finds himself cast as Defender of the Jews. In fighting for fair compensation for the shopkeepers, he finds himself valuing his people and heritage as he never did before. A Table For One: £19.95
In this treasure of a book, Appelfeld reveals the centrality of Jerusalem in his life and work. However, his "city of light" proved far more than a shelter and the place where he came of age and spent his adult life: it became his inspiration - the quarry of his imagination.
A Table For One is set in the intimate Jerusalem cafes of the 1950s and 1960s, where the scent of the fresh roasted coffee and cigarette smoke wafted in with the elan of a lost European culture. Appelfeld found that it was only in a cafe and only in a Jerusalem cafe that he could write his novels, shaping meaning and wholeness out of the fragments of his painful past. The writer's son, Meir Appelfeld, paints the cityscapes, vistas of the city, where he himself lives. The result is neither the monumental nor historical Jerusalem that one finds in a guidebook, but a precious, low-key place which fuses with time in an everyday, tangible intimacy. Previous
Authors of the Month
£11.95
Under The Light Of Jerusalem
by Aharon Appelfeld,
Meir Appelfeld
Abraham Joshua Heschel
