Word: appelfeld
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Like water running over stone, the novels of Aharon Appelfeld slowly make a deep impression. Badenheim 1939 (1980), The Age of Wonders (1982), To the Land of the Cattails (1986) are imperceptibly abrasive, patient and stubborn in their scourings. Appelfeld's recurring subject is daily life just before and after Hitler's war against the Jews. The central crimes of the period need no enhancement, having been passed directly into the stream of conscience by the unadorned testimony of the survivors...
...Appelfeld is one himself. Born in 1932 in a part of Rumania that now belongs to the Soviet Union, he was sent, with his father, to a labor camp in the Ukraine. The eight-year-old boy escaped and, during three years reminiscent of Jerzy Kosinki's The Painted Bird, roamed the countryside in the guise of a shepherd. He lived mainly alone and in silence, fearing what the peasants might do to him if they learned that he was a fugitive Jew. After the war, he made his way to a displaced-persons camp in Italy...
...Aharon Appelfeld...
What Israeli Novelist Aharon Appelfeld relates in this brief, matter-of-fact story, more parable than novel, is the dissolution of life at the imagined spa. In volume after volume the author has been obsessed with the time of clouded horror just before the Holocaust. Two previous novels, Badenheim 1939 and The Age of Wonders, take place in prewar Austria. Tzili: The Story of a Life is a fictional account partly based on Appelfeld's escape from a concentration camp at the age of nine and his three years of hiding from the Nazis in the Ukrainian countryside...
...afflicted by a foreboding of doom. The book ends flatly, without the customary distant rumbling of a world's end and with no sense of cautionary exhortation by the author. Any such message-that tribalistic savagery is mankind's eternal, bone-bred evil, perhaps-would be excessive. Appelfeld simply and affectingly bears witness, and in the end, his sole, muted voice is more effective than a choir and louder than a roar...