AHARON APPELFELD is the author of more than forty works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Iron Tracks, Until the Dawn's Light (both winners of the National Jewish Book Award), The Story of a Life (winner of the Prix Médicis Étranger), and Badenheim 1939. Other honors he has received include the Giovanni Boccaccio Literary Prize, the Nelly Sachs Prize, the Israel Prize, the Bialik Prize, and the MLA Commonwealth Award. Blooms of Darkness won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2012 and was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013. Born in Czernowitz, Bukovina (now part of Ukraine), in 1932, he died in Israel in 2018.
“Read this book . . . Think what a gift of lyric language and
style, of emotion purified by pain this is.” —Anne Roiphe, Los
Angeles Times
“Appelfeld reimagines the place of his own origins through a
perspective that in its generosity of feeling recalls Tolstoy and
Chekhov.” —Judith Grossman, The New York Times Book Review
"Read this book . . . Think what a gift of lyric language and
style, of emotion purified by pain this is." -Anne Roiphe,
Los Angeles Times
"Appelfeld reimagines the place of his own origins through a
perspective that in its generosity of feeling recalls Tolstoy and
Chekhov." -Judith Grossman, The New York Times Book
Review
Whether anticipating the Holocaust or assessing its consequences, Appelfeld's novels read like fables: dreamy, almost otherworldly in tone, they nevertheless deliver sharp moral lessons. In his most recent work, Katerina abandons her backward village and is eventually taken in as a servant by a Jewish family. This wayward gentile girl learns to love the Jews and their customs even as they face obliteration throughout Europe. When a peasant from her village kills the child she has had with a Jewish lover, Katerina counterattacks--and becomes Katerina the murderer. Released from prison at war's end, she concludes that ``there are no longer any Jews left . . . but a little of them is buried in my memory.'' In fact, the importance of memory is stressed throughout this unsettling novel, which contrasts Jewish rootedness in an ongoing spirituality with the free-floating vacuousness that allows gentiles mindlessly to hate Jews. Appelfeld's misty prose at times seems unmoored, but he gracefully delivers the little details that make evil what it is. This is recommended for all literary collections. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/91.-- Barbara Hoffert, ``Library Journal''
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