Determined to visit her homeland in 1938, a Jewish woman and her son travel into Eastern Europe where their surroundings become more and more foreboding

To the Land of the Cattails (Perennial Fiction Library)

Literature & Fiction

Appelfeld, Aron

History & Criticism

Perennial / HarperCollins

The eighth of Aharon Appelfeld's brilliantly original novels to be published in English, The Healer is a remarkable story about faith and faithlessness among European Jews on the eve of World War II. Felix Katz is a Viennese businessman whose life is choked by suppressed rage and intolerance for those who have faith. When conventional methods fail to cure his daughter's emotional illness, Felix in desperation agrees to travel with his family to the Carpathian Mountains in search of a famous healer. Months later, after being snowbound in a rural Jewish village that sustains itself on faith, Felix returns to a Vienna plagued by the disease of anti-Semitism. The Healer wonderfully combines elements of fable with the complex sensibility of a great modernist writer sensitive to the overbearing moral issues of our time.

Healer

Quartet Books

A Jewish writer under the pressures of pre-World War II Austrian anti-Semitism falls to pieces in a narration provided by his son, who returns to his father's town thirty years later

The Age of Wonders

Contemporary

Texas Bookman

For Every Sin (Quartet Encounters) (Quartet Encounters S.)

The Immortal Bartfuss

Unto the Soul

Philip Roth has said that Aharon Appelfeld is "a dislocated writer, a deported writer, a dispossessed and uprooted writer . . . a displaced writer of displaced fiction, who has made of displacement and disorientation a subject uniquely his own." In Beyond Despair, the first collection of essays by the celebrated Israeli novelist, Appelfeld locates the roots of his displacement. "Who and what is a Jew?" asks Appelfeld, who belongs to the generation whose youth was lost in the Holocaust. In search of an answer, he examines the emotional and psychic aftereffects of the Holocaust. For his generation, assimilation was no longer a goal - it had become a heritage and a way of life. As a consequence, through the Holocaust the Jews were confronted with the disintegration of their belief systems; the near-extinction of the Jewish people inflicted not only physical and emotional pain but also spiritual suffering. The inability to express the horrors of the Holocaust, combined with guilt feelings of the survivors, led to silence. Appelfeld explores the role of art in redeeming pain from darkness, and the conflicting desires to speak out and to keep silent. He forcefully argues that the Jewish people need a spiritual vision. In his conversation with Philip Roth, Appelfeld sheds light on his work and talks with candor about his life, influences, and concerns.

Beyond Despair: Three Lectures and a Conversation With Philip Roth

Fromm Intl

To the Land of the Cattails (Curley Large Print Books) (English and Hebrew Edition)

John Curley & Assoc

A TABLE FOR ONE is set in the intimate Jerusalem cafes of the 1950s and 1960s, where the scent of the fresh roasted coffee and cigarette smoke wafted in with the elan of a lost European culture. Appelfeld found that it was only in a cafe - and only in a Jerusalem cafe - that he could write his novels, shaping meaning and wholeness out of the fragments of his painful past. A TABLE FOR ONE is an interchange between one artist and another, father and son, about their city, Jerusalem. It brings together an unknown side of Aharon Appelfeld's writing, with the subtle, haunting paintings of his son, Meir Appelfeld, who studied fine art at the Royal Academy of Art, London, and exhibits widely.

A Table For One: Under The Light Of Jerusalem

Biographies & Memoirs

Appelfeld, Meir

Halter, Aloma

Arts & Literature

Toby Pr

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 downwards, Mariana reaches out for consolation to the adoring boy who is on the cusp of manhood.

Blooms of Darkness

Genre Fiction

Alma Publishing Company

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