Aharon Appelfeld

The award-winning novelist recounts his miraculous survival of the Holocaust, from a forced march across the Ukraine to a labor camp at the age of seven, his escape from the camp, his life in hiding in the Ukranian forests, his negotiation of several displaced persons' camps, his 1946 arrival in Palestine and his struggle to build a new life on the fragments of his past. 12,500 first printing.

The Story of a Life

Theo Kornfeld a vingt ans lorsqu'il quitte le camp de concentration que ses gardiens viennent d'abandonner à l'approche des Russes. Il n'a qu'un seul but : retrouver la maison familiale. Errant sur les chemins, blessés au plus profond d'eux-mêmes, les déportés qu'il croise lui rappellent l'horreur à laquelle il a survécu, tandis que d'autres figures émergent de son passé. Celle de sa mère, Yetti, une femme à la beauté exceptionnelle, au caractère fantasque, qui aimait les églises, les monastères et l'oeuvre de Bach. Celle de Martin, un père trop discret que Theo va apprendre à mieux connaître. Des jours d'une stupéfiante clarté raconte son voyage à travers les paysages d'Europe centrale baignés de lumière. Chaque rencontre suscite en lui d'innombrables questions. Comment vivre après la catastrophe ? Comment concilier passé et présent, solitude et solidarité? Comment retrouver sa part d'humanité? Par-delà le fracas de l'Histoire, ce livre admirable est le récit d'une résurrection.

Des jours d'une stupéfiante clarté

Theo, a Holocaust survivor, just released from the camps, confronts the shattered world he inherits, meets fellow survivors, and faces his own demons as he walks home alone across Europe

For Every Sin

A novel

The Conversion

UNO DEGLI ULTIMI GRANDI TESTIMONI DELLA SHOAH SCRIVE IL ROMANZO DELLA RESISTENZA EBRAICA Ucraina, ultimo anno di guerra. Sfuggito per un soffio alla deportazione, Edmond a diciassette anni è entrato in una banda di partigiani ebrei capeggiata dal carismatico Kamil. Gli addestramenti quotidiani, la vita comunitaria, le incursioni per procurarsi viveri e armi lo hanno irrobustito nella mente e nel corpo, facendo del liceale di buona famiglia, scombussolato dai primi turbamenti amorosi, un uomo pronto a fronteggiare la morte e – quel che per certi versi sembra ancora più difficile – le proprie radici e i ricordi: la fede degli avi, il distacco dai genitori e la distanza emotiva, l’indifferenza nei loro confronti nell’ultimo periodo trascorso insieme, che ora gli appare imperdonabile. Stare con i partigiani di Kamil – fra i quali spiccano per la luminosa umanità il vicecomandante Felix, nonna Tsirel, la cuoca Tsila, il gigante Danzig, che si occupa con infinita tenerezza di un trovatello, e tanti altri – significa riscattarsi, riguadagnare uno scopo che renda la vita sopportabile e degna di essere vissuta: proteggere i più deboli, salvarli, votarsi a loro con dedizione assoluta, dissipare almeno un poco la tenebra in cui il mondo sembra immerso. Dopo essersi temprato nella terra dell’acqua, una regione paludosa perfetta per la guerriglia contro gli occupanti tedeschi, il gruppo intraprende infine la lunga ascesa verso la vetta, il luogo ideale per mettersi in sicurezza e realizzare l’obiettivo più ardito: far deragliare i treni destinati ai lager, in attesa di poter tornare a casa.

Il partigiano Edmond

Jeffrey Green

Philippe Dumas

Adam and Thomas

Nazmi Ağıl

roman

Badenheim 1939

Kylig vår

Geschichte eines Lebens

Adam & Thomas

A young holocaust survivor tries to create a new life in the newly established state of Israel. Erwin doesn't remember much about his journey across Europe when the war ended because he spent most of it asleep, carried by other survivors as they emerged from their hiding places or were liberated from the camps and made their way to Naples, where they filled refugee camps and wondered what was to become of them. Erwin becomes part of a group of boys being rigorously trained both physically and mentally by an emissary from Palestine for life in their new home. When he and his fellow clandestine immigrants are released by British authorities from their detention camp near Haifa, they are assigned to a kibbutz, where they learn how to tend the land and speak their new language. But a part of Erwin clings to the past--to memories of his parents, his mother tongue, the Ukrainian city where he was born--and he knows that despite what he is being told, who he was is just as important as who he is becoming. When he is wounded in an engagement with snipers, Erwin spends months trying to regain the use of his legs. As he exercises his body, he exercises his mind as well, copying passages from the Bible in his newly acquired Hebrew and working up the courage to create his own texts in this language both old and new, hoping to succeed as a writer where his beloved, tormented father had failed. With the support of his friends and the encouragement of his mother (who visits him in his dreams), Erwin takes his first tentative steps with his crutches--and with his pen. Once again, Aharon Appelfeld mines personal experience to create dazzling, masterly fiction with a universal resonance.

The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping

It is the spring of 1939 in the age of anxiety. In months Europe will be Hitler's. And Badenheim, a resort town vaguely in the orbit of Vienna, is preparing for its summer season. The vacationers arrive as they always have, a sampling of Jewish middleclass life: the impresario Dr. Pappenheim, his musicians, and their conductor; the gay Frau Tsauberblit; the historian Dr. Fussholdt and his much younger wife; the 'readers, ' twins whose passion for Rilke is featured on their program; a child prodigy; a commercial traveler; a rabbi. The list waxes as the summer wanes. To receive them in the town are the pharmacist and his worried wife, the hotelier and his large staff, the pastry shop owner and his irritable baker, Sally and Gertie (two quite respectable prostitutes), and, mysteriously, the bland inspectors from the "Sanitation Department." The story unfolds as matter-of-factly as a Chekhov play. The characters on stage are so deeply held by their defensive daily trivia that they manage to misconstrue every signal of their fate. Finally, de facto prisoners in their familiar resort, the vacationers, now increased by the forced crowding-in of other Jews hardly on vacation, take on the lineaments of undefined disaster. The text builds a sense of foreboding in which each human detail is so persuasive, so right in its fidelity to the terrible evasions of the time, that it leaves the reader transformed by what he and the author know must happen to Badenheim's people. Badenheim 1939 owes everything to its author's astonishing capacity to recreate the energies and confusions of innocent and uncomprehending victims who, always loyal to civility and social graces, fail to even dimly see thecruel terms of their imminent fate.

Badenheim Nineteen Thirty-nine

"Originally published in Israel as Ad khod hatñza'ar by Kinneret, Zmora-Bitan, Dvir Publishing House Ltd., Or Yehuda, in 2012"--Title page verso.

A Novel

To the Edge of Sorrow

The second and last children's book by the extraordinary Holocaust survivor and Hebrew-language author of the award-winning Adam & Thomas. A mystical and transcendent journey of two wanderers, an eleven-year-old boy and an old man to whom the boy has been entrusted by his father, a Jew, fleeing the ravages of the war by the late award winning author, Aharon Appelfeld. The old man is a former Ukranian commander, revered by the soldiers under his command, who has gone blind and chosen the life of a wanderer as his last spiritual adventure. The child, now disguised as a Ukranian non-Jew, learns from the old man how to fend for himself and how to care for others. In the tradition of The Alchemist, the travelers learn from each other and the boy grows stronger and wiser as the old man teaches him the art of survival and, through the stories he shares, the reasons for living. Long Summer Nights carries its magic not only in the words, but also in the silences between them.

Long Summer Nights

In spare, haunting, almost hallucinogenic prose, the internationally acclaimed, award-winning novelist shares with us–for the first time–the story of his own extraordinary survival and rebirth. Aharon Appelfeld’s childhood ended when he was seven years old. The Nazis occupied Czernowitz in 1941, penned the Jews into a ghetto, and, a few months later, sent whoever had not been shot or starved to death on a forced march across the Ukraine to a labor camp. As men, women, and children fall away around them, Aharon and his father (his mother was killed in the early days of the occupation) miraculously survive, and Aharon, even more miraculously, escapes from the camp shortly after he arrives there. The next few years of Aharon’s life are both harrowing and heartrending: he hides, alone, in the Ukrainian forests from peasants who are only too happy to turn Jewish children over to the Nazis; he has the presence of mind to pass himself off as an orphaned gentile when he emerges from the forest to seek work; and, at war’s end, he joins the stream of refugees as they cross Europe on their way to displaced persons’ camps that have been set up for the survivors. He observes the full range of personalities in the camps–exploitation exists side by side with compassion–until he manages to get on a ship bound for Palestine. Once there, Aharon attempts to build a new life while struggling to retain the barely remembered fragments of his old life (everyone urges him simply to forget what he had experienced), and he takes his first, tentative steps as a writer. As he begins to receive national attention, Aharon realizes his life’s calling: to bear witness to the unfathomable. In this unforgettable work of memory, Aharon Appelfeld offers personal glimpses into the experiences that resonate throughout his fiction.

«Questo romanzo ci offre il ritratto di un personaggio che ricorda "Lo straniero" di Camus, ma più estremo nella visione dell’alienazione, più audace nel processo creativo.» New York Times Book Review «Il racconto magistrale e sconvolgente di un sopravvissuto all’Olocausto.» Publishers Weekly Bartfuss è immortale. Nessuno, infatti, sarebbe riuscito come lui a sopravvivere con più di cinquanta pallottole in corpo. Evaso da un campo di sterminio, rifugiatosi nella foresta vicina, è stato contrabbandiere sulla costa italiana, da dove si è poi imbarcato per Israele. Oggi, a cinquantasette anni, vive a Giaffa insieme a una famiglia da cui si sente perseguitato. Si tiene isolato nella sua stanza per non rischiare di incontrare la moglie Rosa e le due figlie. Impaziente di lasciare quella casa, per lui covo di nemici, Bartfuss passa le giornate muovendosi tra la riva del mare e i bar della città, dove a ogni angolo incrocia i volti di chi come lui ha attraversato l’esperienza dei campi e gli anni in Italia. Ma Bartfuss è davvero immortale? Ormai vera e propria leggenda vivente, ma solo e lontano da tutti, inizia a provare un bisogno di comunicare, di condividere i ricordi che si scontra con la sua radicale ricerca di solitudine… Aharon Appelfeld ritrae in queste pagine una nuova figura di sopravvissuto alla Shoah, quella dell’antieroe che, nostalgico di un passato che è stato anche la sua tragedia, è ormai incapace di costruirsi una nuova esistenza.

L'immortale Bartfuss

The Story of a Life (Appelfeld, Aharon)

Tzili

Familienbild vor der Katastrophe: Aharon Appelfelds Roman über den letzten Sommer einer Kindheit August 1938: Am Ufer des Flusses Prut in Rumänien versammeln sich die Sommerfrischler, überwiegend säkularisierte Juden, darunter ein Schriftsteller, eine Wahrsagerin, eine früher mit einem Christen liierte Frau, die nun auf Männerschau ist. Auch der zehnjährige Erwin und seine Eltern sind hier, doch das Kind spürt, dass etwas anders ist: Hinter den Sommerfreuden, den Badeausflügen und Liebeleien geht die Welt, die alle kennen, zu Ende. Einige reisen früher ab, andere verdrängen die Nachrichten aus dem Westen. Spannungen bleiben nicht aus, auch nicht zwischen den Eltern, der Mutter, die Romane liest, an Gott glaubt und an das Gute, und dem Vater, dem Ingenieur, der alles rational und pessimistisch sieht. Als die Familie in die Stadt aufbricht, überfällt Erwin die Furcht. In der Schule wurde er geschlagen und als «Saujude» beschimpft – und er beginnt zu ahnen, dass an den unterschiedlichen Haltungen seiner Eltern noch viel mehr hängt: die Zukunft, das Überleben. Ein feinfühliger Roman, der seismographisch die Brutalität des heraufziehenden Krieges verzeichnet – und zugleich das Porträt einer bürgerlichen Welt vor der Katastrophe. Eines der persönlichsten Bücher von Aharon Appelfeld, direkt, ehrlich und doch auch kindlich-schön.

Meine Eltern

"Aharon Appelfeld is one of the subtlest, most unorthodox, and most exactingly perceptive novelists to make the memory of the Holocaust his abiding project." --Philip Gourevitch, The New Yorker A lonely older man and his devoted young caretaker transform each other’s lives in ways they could never have imagined. Ernst is a gruff seventy-year-old Red Army veteran from Ukraine who landed, almost by accident, in Israel after World War II. A retired investment adviser, he lives alone (his first wife and baby daughter were killed by the Nazis; he divorced his shrewish second wife) and spends his time laboring over his unpublished novels. Irena, in her mid-thirties, is the unmarried daughter of Holocaust survivors who has been taking care of Ernst since his surgery two years earlier; she arrives every morning promptly at eight and usually leaves every afternoon at three. Quiet and shy, Irena is in awe of Ernst’s intellect. And as the months pass, Ernst comes to depend on the gentle young woman who runs his house, listens to him read from his work, and occasionally offers a spirited commentary on it. But Ernst’s writing gives him no satisfaction, and he is haunted by his godless, Communist past. His health, already poor, begins to deteriorate even further; he becomes mired in depression and seems to lose the will to live. But this is something Irena will not allow. As she becomes an increasingly important part of his life—moving into his home, encouraging him in his work, easing his pain—Ernst not only regains his sense of self and discovers the path through which his writing can flow but he also discovers, to his amazement, that Irena is in love with him. And, even more astonishing, he realizes that he is in love with her, too.

Suddenly, Love

In turn of the century Eastern Europe, a brother and sister have been chosen to guard an ancient cemetery of Jewish martyrs situated on an isolated mountain. The endless snows protect them from the pogroms and plagues that rage in the world below, but that same protective blanket cuts them off from their people and tradition. Escape--from loneliness, from wavering piety, and from the burgeoning desire they feel for one another--becomes impossible. A parable for our times, by the writer whom Irving Howe called "one of the best novelists alive," Unto the Soul lays bare the deepest stirrings of religious feeling and despair within the human soul.

Aharon Appelfeld

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