The Healer

by Aharon Appelfeld

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.

Genres: Fiction

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

AHARON APPELFELD is the author of more than forty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Until the Dawn's Light and The Iron Tracks (both winners of the National Jewish Book Award) and The Story of a Life (winner of the Prix Médicis Étranger). Other honors he has received include the Giovanni Bocaccio Literary Prize, the Nelly Sachs Prize, the Israel Prize, the Bialik Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the MLA Commonwealth Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received honorary degrees from the Jewish Theological Seminary, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and Yeshiva University.

Reviews

[Jim Fonseca · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Jewish couple in Austria the 1930’s are unreligious. Their parents were not very religious either, but they at least celebrated the high holy days. But this couple has no interest in religion. In fact, the father seems to find very religious Jews somewhat of an embarrassment. Then their teenaged daughter develops an illness that sounds a lot like what we call today manic depression. After making the rounds of Vienna’s finest doctors the mother seeks out a “spiritual healer,” an old rabbi in a tiny rural village where her ancestors came from. The father is opposed but goes along with the plan as a last resort and to humor his wife. Basically the healer’s cure is for the mother and daughter to start learning Hebrew and together to read holy scripts aloud. The father, a harried businessman, always looking at his watch and worrying about the business back home, thinks this is all foolishness. He functions on directness, clarity, logic.

During the six month stay in the forlorn village, the nascent rift between husband and wife grows into all-out derision of each other – they avoid each other and hardly converse except for daily necessities. To the further chagrin of the father, their other child, a teenaged son, is failing school despite tutoring and is only interested in sports, girls and drinking. With a sick daughter, a wayward son and a wife he hardly knows anymore, the father falls into full-blown despair. He and the son leave the mother and daughter in the village and go back to Vienna. It’s unclear whether the daughter is getting better or not – she has good days and bad days as before. On their several-day carriage and railroad trip back they see signs of things to come. They watch two Jewish peddlers abused by a mob. They hear anti-Semitic comments from restaurant workers. The father himself has a close call with guards boarding his train “looking for Jews.” Things are even worse when they arrive home. The author leaves us to draw our own moral from this story. The book is translated from the Hebrew.

[Frieda Vizel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange story that develops almost in a fog of descriptive terms. A lot of what's happening in this book is the sudden expression of emotions in characters - a gripping rage, a sudden stubbornness, a bleak darkness - that isn't followed with much happening. In the story a family travels to a religious Jewish healer in the mountains in search of a cure for their daughter struggling with "mood problems". But this is not a story about their daughter's illness and treatment, but about how the family deals with faith and lack of faith in times of struggle. It feels like it's an extended effort to get into the question of faith vis a vis Jewish assimilated Jews (this family was from Vienna) following the holocaust. The author himself, I believe, is a holocaust survivor.

The best part of this book is that the word coffee is mentioned almost more times than I think of coffee a day!

[Francesco · Rating 4 out of 5]

It describes intimately an aspect of life of a secular Jewish family torn between the husband
clining to certainties and comforts of the status quo reached in life, and the wife's search for help and healing for a malaise of the mind and soul in a spiritual, religious dimension, putting her trust in a healer that draws her and her daughter back to their ancerstal faith, whilst the son follows his father's sense of materialism. In the backdrop the description of the vestiges of Jewish life in the rural communities and the signs of increased anti-semitism in Vienna.
It is a rather sad but intimate story, quite unique in its approach to these themes in a slow paced narrative, of a few months detachment from the setlled life in the city to a suspended state in a remote location by dint of desperation, trust and subordination. This allows the two main characters to evolve and resolve to proceed with their own different resolutions.
We are mainly shown what the force of the husband's will and his thoughts; we cannot peek into the wife's mind and ascertain which if any improvements are taking place in her new found faith and dedication, her following of the healer's admonitions. The daughter's condition is hinted in scanty descriptions that seem to indicate a stage of deep breakdown and mental illness, with moments of apparent recovery and wellbeing; she condescends to her mother's wishes, drawing her closer to her and making her share her faith.
Aahron realised the important connection of a Jew's roots to Judaism in more than a traditional sense; the family's life unbearable pressures of excellence in performance within and without oneself against a social and spiritual vacuum contrast with the lifeline offered by the healer's simple advice in the mountains to find remedy in the written word of the scriptures, in discovering the faith. It imposes a reliance on his guidance and a requirement to pursue knowledge rooted in the divine, a fusion bringing a hope of healing but also derision and distrust to the doubtful husband, who cannot abandon so much, and temper his own ego, to seek the perception of an eternal wisdom that could be at his diposal.
I am left with images and feelings that feel very real; whilst trasnposed from an era now gone they have echoes in anybody's spirtual life in his/her own search for truth and goodness.

[Vince · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would love to read an analysis of this novel by a family therapist. This is a highly dysfunctional family. There’s the “presenting patient,” the daughter (Helga) with vague, undiagnosed “mental problems.” Then, there’s the younger son (Karl) who is virtually ignored by the mother (Henrietta) and often criticized in the beginning of the novel by the father (Felix). He is the family’s convenient scapegoat, who has “failed out” of school and spends his days chasing women and playing games of chance. Finally, there are the mother and workaholic father who spend most of the novel ignoring and belittling one another. Ironically, both spouses find surrogate “spouses”: the mother finds an alternative partner in the healer and “converts” to his version of devout Judaism with absolute faith in a loving and faithful God; the husband finds affection and diversion in the young housekeeper Sophie.

In the final pages of the novel, which takes place in 1935, the focus shifts from one family’s dysfunction and despair to the broader social and political dysfunction and despair of German Jews, religious as well as secular. When the father Felix and his son Karl return home after a six-month hiatus in the Carpathian Mountains with their family (the mother and daughter stay behind in the mountains, presumably for good), they find the housekeeper has virtually expropriated their house, their furniture and possessions, even hanging Catholic icons on the walls and wearing Henrietta’s clothes. This last resonating scene is a tragic foreshadowing of the beginning of the Nazi regime’s persecution, extortion and theft of German Jewry, in 1935-36 and beyond.

A powerful book!

[Ainslye Gilligan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the strangest book I have ever read. The writing is amazing! The author has a way of describing people, places, events, feelings, thoughts, etc... in a unique and poetic way. However, the story reminded me of the Seinfeld show because like the Seinfeld Show this story is about nothing. Unlike the Seinfeld Show their is no humor at all and no likable characters. While reading this book I felt that I never got out of that beginning of the story stage. As I was getting to those last 10-15 pages I got the feeling there was going to be an interesting ending with a great twist and there is but you have to take the clues to the twist and use your imagination as to what is going to happen. The main character, Felix who overthinks everything, is presented with the clues to the ending with a twist and he ignores them, and maybe for good reason. So to sum up this dump of my feelings towards this book; I likes it and I didn't like it.

[☕Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ratings:

Writing 4
Story line 4
Characters 4
Emotional impact 3

Overall rating 3.75