Word: appelfeld
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...ceremony was short, subdued, and without ostentation. Only afterward, in the church's reception room, did the voices return to normal. Wine, homemade pastries, and sweets were served." It is in this simple way that Aharon Appelfeld's The Conversion opens, and the novel to come will be as short, subdued and without ostentation as the beginning three lines. In the midst of this deceptively unadorned prose, however, lurks the seed of an almost unimagineably horrible tale, which Appelfeld manages to recount in completely nonjudgmental strokes. Ultimately, it's clear why Appelfeld has been called a "worthy successor to Kafka...
Remarkably, Appelfeld has succeeded in creating a novel without a single like-able character. Karl's selfishness, his sexual attraction to his former nanny, his willingness to do anything for his promotion; all of these characteristics repel us from him, but Appelfeld never tells us any redeeming qualities Karl might have had. We cannot even sympathize with Gloria as a possible victim of Karl's desires. Appelfeld never tells us if Gloria returns Karl's love, and in the end she comes off as being simply weak. Strangely, Gloria possesses an almost robotic tendency to observe the Jewish traditions...
...issues raised by every page scream for resolutions, some which are long in coming, some which never come. What is the nature of a person's religion? Is it possible that religious identity can define your entire being? Can you escape from your past? Call them heavy, but Appelfeld merely suggests these questions without hammering them into our consciousness, enabling us to swallow them all in measured doses without feeling stifled. His prose is invariably elegant and devoid of strong emotion, compelling us to distance ourselves from the situation at hand...
...feel sorry for the characters in spite of their monstrously tragic lives. Rather than the passionate emotion one would expect in a story of conversion and cultural abandonment, The Conversion leaves the reader unaffected, apathetic in spite of the moral importance of the issues at hand. In a way, Appelfeld is teaching by example. By convincing the reader that conversion is no more than an economic transaction, and humanity characterized by little more than greed and self-interest, he shows the ease with which we can be seduced. It is simple to see how our lack of feeling towards...
...Ivan the Terrible, the notorious Nazi guard at Treblinka. Roth attends the trial in the beginning to find Pipik, but he gets so caught up in the idea of mistaken identity that he begins to go out of sheer interest. Roth jumbles in more characters--the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld (who actually exists); his cousin Apter, a slow-witted artist and Holocaust survivor (who doesn't): George Ziad, an old graduate school friend who is now a militant Palistinian living on the West bank; Jinx Possesski, Pipik's Polish nurse and girlfriend (who is a recovering anti-Semite enrolled...