Aharon Appelfeld

A new novel from the award-winning, internationally acclaimed Israeli writer ("One of the greatest writers of the age"--The Guardian), a haunting, heartbreaking story of love and loss.The ghetto in which the Jews have been confined is being liquidated by the Nazis, and eleven-year-old Hugo is brought by his mother to the local brothel, where one of the prostitutes has agreed to hide him. Mariana is a bitterly unhappy woman who hates what she has done to her life, and night after night Hugo sits in her closet and listens uncomprehendingly as she rages at the Nazi soldiers who come and go. When she's not mired in self-loathing, Mariana is fiercely protective of the bewildered, painfully polite young boy. And Hugo becomes protective of Mariana, too, trying to make her laugh when she is depressed, soothing her physical and mental agony with cold compresses. As the memories of his family and friends grow dim, Hugo falls in love with Mariana. And as her life spirals downward, Mariana reaches out for consolation to the adoring boy who is on the cusp of manhood.The arrival of the Russian army sends the prostitutes fleeing. But Mariana is too well known, and she is arrested as a Nazi collaborator for having slept with the Germans. As the novel moves toward its heartrending conclusion, Aharon Appelfeld once again crafts out of the depths of unfathomable tragedy a renewal of life and a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.From the Hardcover edition.

A caravan of Jews wanders through Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century on a heartbreaking quest. Spiritual seekers and the elderly, widows and orphans, the sick and the dying, con artists and adventurers, victims of pogroms who have no place else to go, they are all on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but the journey is filled with unexpected detours and unanticipated disaster.

111 pages : 30 cm

271 Seiten 21 cm

La maman d'Adam le conduit dans la forêt en lui promettant de revenir le chercher le soir. Pendant la journée, le jeune garçon rencontre Thomas, lui aussi caché là par sa mère, tandis que les rafles de Juifs se succèdent dans le ghetto. Lorsque vient la nuit, leurs mères ne sont pas revenues. Les deux enfants s'organisent pour survivre à la faim, à la pluie, à la neige et au vent.

Translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M. Green.

The story of a Gentile housekeeper working in a series of Jewish households as anti-Semitism grows in Europe in the years before World War II.

Roman historique A la fin des années 30, la pension Zaltzer est devenue le rendez-vous estival d'un groupe de de célibataires Viennois. Pour la plupart Juifs, ils forment une petite communauté de jouisseurs qui passe son temps à jouer au poker, boire du cognac et se perdre en intrigues amoureuses. Cet été-là Rita est la première à arriver, accompagnée de son fils Yohann. Bientôt rejointe par Zoussi Rauver et son prétendant Van, puis par un alcoolique sympathique dont elle est vaguement éprise, Beno Starck, elle a hâte que tous les habitués envahissent la pension. Un orage éclate, le fleuve se gonfle et déverse sa boue dans la cour de l'auberge, Beno se noie. L'inquiétude monte, se glisse dans les âmes. Les conversations s'enflamment. Tous forment une ronde saisissante autour de la figure de Rita qui décide de fuir en Palestine. Dans ce roman s'affrontent deux visions de la vie, inconciliables, les uns prônant le culte de la liberté, les autres la fidélité aux anciens. Deux mondes, dont l'un est en train de sombrer?

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.From the Hardcover edition.

Set during the summer of the Ojibway occupation of Anicinabe Park in Kenora, The Retreat is a finely nuanced, deeply felt novel that tells the story of the complicated love between a white girl and a native boy, and of a family on the verge of splintering forever. It is also a story of the bond between two brothers who were separated in childhood, and whose lives and fates intertwine ten years later.