Word: badenheim
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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...
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...
...shards of this experience, Appelfeld, now a renowned Israeli novelist, has composed a tale of appalling symmetry. Among Appelfeld's many novels and stories of the Holocaust (Badenheim 1939, The Age of Wonders), Tzili best exemplifies Kafka's bitter aphorism, "The arrows fit exactly in the wounds they have made...
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