Word: appelfeld
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Roth the author goes to Israel, as planned, to conduct an interview with the (real) author Aharon Appelfeld. (This exchange was actually published by the New York Times in February 1988.) He also drops in on the trial of John Ivan Demjanjuk, the Cleveland autoworker accused of being the infamous Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka death camp . When he first catches sight of the man who either did or did not commit atrocious crimes, Roth muses, "So there he was. Or wasn...
Reflections on Hebrew Literature: Past and Present (in Hebrew)--by Aharon Appelfeld, novelist, and professor of modern Hebrew literature, Ben Gurion University. Sever Hall, room 206, 4 p.m. Tuesday...
Forty years later, Appelfeld is regarded as one of Israel's best novelists -- though not necessarily its most typical. Living in a nation whose people have aggressively reversed the role of outsider and helpless victim, he still writes what he describes as a literature of uprootedness. In his new novel, The Immortal Bartfuss, the concept of a Jewish homeland is not relevant. Bartfuss, the emotionally anesthetized protagonist, does not even have a proper home. He sleeps in a room apart from a wife he avoids and two daughters he scarcely knows. Bartfuss is some sort of underworld trader who keeps...
Good fiction can survive reductive quizzing, and The Immortal Bartfuss is more than passably good. Appelfeld quietly works the particulars and lets the generalizations take care of themselves. The half-light of early mornings and the battening darkness of late nights are the dominant tones of the book. Bartfuss's thoughts and feelings -- about his hateful wife, his distant + daughters, the treasure hidden in the basement -- have the cool clarity of the day's most private hours...
...Appelfeld's prose has the quality of light sleep, an uneasy alertness in which the past is like a fading dream ("Nothing was left of those dark days except twitches, remnants of nightmares, grimaces, and scraps of words") and the present a sudden, painful awareness: "In the next room Rosa and Bridget were still sleeping. The windows of the apartment were closed, and the heavy throbbing of their sleep could be felt even in the kitchen. Their forgotten existence awoke inside him for a moment and then passed away." Of such mortal moments is the immortal Bartfuss made and remembered...