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For Every Sin
In For Every Sin, Aharon Appelfeld, recounts the moving and unforgettable story of Theo, a young Holocaust survivor struggling to come to terms with his experience. A student when he was first imprisoned, Theo is a young man who has lost his family and friends and wants nothing more than to return to his home. In a desperate attempt to escape the pain of the camps, he sets out to walk across Europe, determined to remain alone until he has regained his strength. In the nightmarish world he enters, haunted by images from his past and continually reunited with fellow survivors, he is forced to come face to face with his own demons and the human condition from which he cannot escape.
176 pages, Paperback
First published December 31, 1989
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About the author
Aharon Appelfeld
65 books199 followersAHARON 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.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
November 25, 2018
A story of a man walking home after being freed from the concentration camps. It reminds me of the long trip home in The Reawakening by Primo Levi. In this book the main character decides to walk the 500 miles home that will take him months. He deliberately avoids other refugees traveling in large groups and in twos and threes because their closeness reminds him of being in the camps.
The main character is Jewish by ancestry but did not attend synagogue and had no formal schooling in his religion. His fondest memories as a little boy were walks with his mother in rural areas where she enjoyed stopping in Christian chapels to look at art or to listen to music at services. This is significant because when the main character does encounter other refugees, he shocks them by telling them he intends to convert to Christianity when he gets “home.” He even comes to prefer talking in German to Yiddish. One of the refugees tells him that is like committing suicide. Of course we know there is no “home” left after his family and other villagers were all taken to the camps.
The treat of coffee and cigarettes after years without them! “Years without cigarettes destroyed the image of humanity within us…Without cigarettes there is no point to life…” (Camus and Sartre would be pleased.)
So it’s a story of his struggle to recover the humanity he lost in the camps and a catalog of the ways that life in the camps damaged people’s psyche. He finds himself filled with rage directed at no one in particular. He doesn’t trust anyone. He doesn’t want to hear anyone’s horror stories. When he does encounter a happy refugee, he thinks “It was hard for me to bear their happiness, their satisfaction.”
As he travels he reflects on his childhood and his parents’ mismatched marriage. His father was unassuming, distant, intellectual. “Books interest him more than people” his mother said. She was manic-depressive. She was disorganized, impractical, flighty, obsessed with classical music and eventually mentally ill to the point of periodic institutionalization.
The author uses a plot device of having the main character meet refugees who remind him of a relative or someone back in the village, so he gives us their stories.
A short book; well-written and it kept my attention. The book is translated from the Hebrew, which the author did not learn until he was a teenager. It’s partly autobiographical. Here’s a sketch of his early life I edited from Wikipedia:
Appelfeld was born in a region of Romania, now in Ukraine. In 1941, when he was nine years old, the Romanian Army retook his hometown after a year of Soviet occupation and his mother was murdered. Appelfeld was deported with his father to a forced labor camp in Romanian-controlled Transnistria. He escaped and hid for three years before joining the Soviet army as a cook. After World War II, Appelfeld spent several months in a displaced persons camp in Italy before emigrating to Palestine in 1946 where he was reunited with his father.
Inmates of Ebensee concentration camp after their liberation by American troops on May 6, 1945 from telegraph.co.uk
Photo of the author from culturebox.francetvinfo.fr
The main character is Jewish by ancestry but did not attend synagogue and had no formal schooling in his religion. His fondest memories as a little boy were walks with his mother in rural areas where she enjoyed stopping in Christian chapels to look at art or to listen to music at services. This is significant because when the main character does encounter other refugees, he shocks them by telling them he intends to convert to Christianity when he gets “home.” He even comes to prefer talking in German to Yiddish. One of the refugees tells him that is like committing suicide. Of course we know there is no “home” left after his family and other villagers were all taken to the camps.
The treat of coffee and cigarettes after years without them! “Years without cigarettes destroyed the image of humanity within us…Without cigarettes there is no point to life…” (Camus and Sartre would be pleased.)
So it’s a story of his struggle to recover the humanity he lost in the camps and a catalog of the ways that life in the camps damaged people’s psyche. He finds himself filled with rage directed at no one in particular. He doesn’t trust anyone. He doesn’t want to hear anyone’s horror stories. When he does encounter a happy refugee, he thinks “It was hard for me to bear their happiness, their satisfaction.”
As he travels he reflects on his childhood and his parents’ mismatched marriage. His father was unassuming, distant, intellectual. “Books interest him more than people” his mother said. She was manic-depressive. She was disorganized, impractical, flighty, obsessed with classical music and eventually mentally ill to the point of periodic institutionalization.
The author uses a plot device of having the main character meet refugees who remind him of a relative or someone back in the village, so he gives us their stories.
A short book; well-written and it kept my attention. The book is translated from the Hebrew, which the author did not learn until he was a teenager. It’s partly autobiographical. Here’s a sketch of his early life I edited from Wikipedia:
Appelfeld was born in a region of Romania, now in Ukraine. In 1941, when he was nine years old, the Romanian Army retook his hometown after a year of Soviet occupation and his mother was murdered. Appelfeld was deported with his father to a forced labor camp in Romanian-controlled Transnistria. He escaped and hid for three years before joining the Soviet army as a cook. After World War II, Appelfeld spent several months in a displaced persons camp in Italy before emigrating to Palestine in 1946 where he was reunited with his father.
Inmates of Ebensee concentration camp after their liberation by American troops on May 6, 1945 from telegraph.co.uk
Photo of the author from culturebox.francetvinfo.fr
January 13, 2023
For Every Sin is the story of 17-year-old Theo, an Austrian Jew who has recently been liberated from a concentration camp. He is in a state of shock and wishes only to go back to his once charming hometown near Vienna. He sets out of foot and during his journey, he tries to process what has happened to him. Along the way we realize that he suffers from a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. He hates Eastern European Jews and Yiddish, and loves “refined” things like German and Christianity, despite what those cultures have done to him. This all traces back to his conflicted family history. He tries to avoid other refugees who wander in a Becket like-landscape, but he is continually drawn back to them. They slow his progress, and he finally realizes he cannot escape them. Their fate is his fate. This is a profound, philosophical, and heartbreaking book about humanity’s faults and our need to remain connected to each other.
June 12, 2024
In a recent interview in the New York Times, while commenting on the importance of other Modernist writers, Salman Rushdie claims that we live in a world that synchs with Kafka, that Kafka more effectively foretold what was coming more accurately than writers like Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner. Although Rushdie’s claim reflects most immediately his own beleaguered reality–the 2022 stabbing and his recovery from it–as I read "For Every Sin" I couldn’t but help think that his insight resonates broadly through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and that "For Every Sin" is a proof point for that Kafkaesque world.
Appelfeld is Roumanian by birth, was imprisoned in a forced labor camp, survived, and emigrated to British-Mandate Palestine in 1946, which would become Israel in 1948. Like other European emigrés of his generation–for example the poet Yehuda Amichai– Appelfeld learned Hebrew in order to embark on his literary career and became one of the foundational figures of modern Israeli literature; his publishing career lasted from 1962 to 2013. In "For Every Sin" and the one other Appelfeld book I’ve read, "Badenheim 1938," he writes not about contemporary Israel but the Holocaust and the people and places most immediately affected by it. With these books, I feel like Appelfeld is writing prefaces for what would become modern Israeli literature.
"For Every Sin" takes place right after the liberation of the camps and the end of the war. The single main character is Theo, a young man from Baden Bei Wien, Austria who had completed a year of college before being deported to the camps. He was an only child, and both of his parents were killed in the camps; the few other relatives he mentioned also died in the camps; so Theo is alone in the world, just like almost everyone else he encounters in the novel.
At the beginning and throughout much of the novel, Theo has one aim: to return home to Baden Bei Wien. He wants to go there by the straightest path possible, and he wants to put as much distance as he can between himself and the camp as well as between himself and the other refugees. He wants to be alone, and he wants to avoid contact with anyone–that is, other refugees–who would remind him of his experience, their collective experiences really, of the camps. Theo wants to recover his humanity or make for himself a new humanity after an experience that dissolved his and everyone else’s humanity in the camps. The novel begins with Theo and the other refugees awkwardly rediscovering how to interact with one another again as humans rather than enslaved, condemned laborers. It could be said that the plot is about Theo’s recovery of his humanity, which he initially believes that he can do simply by returning home, returning to his past self, and re-enrolling in college. In so doing, he can reclaim the agency that was taken from him and claim some power in the world. In other words, Theo is trying to move beyond the Kafkaesque existence of the camps, where he had no agency and little or no understanding of the forces that shaped his life: he is like Gregor Samsa or Joseph K. The problem here, though, is that, as Appelfeld narrates the story, it is very difficult to escape a Kafkaesque existence, even for someone as determined as Theo is.
As he walks, Theo notices both the ugliness, burnt out vehicles, and the beauty of the landscape. Theo’s reawakened sensitivity to beauty develops throughout the novel. As he puts distance between himself and others, Theo finds an abandoned guard cabin, which is neat and well-appointed. He rests, eats, drinks coffee, showers, burns his ragged clothes, and puts on brand new clothes that he finds in a closet and which fit him. He soaks up the beauty, the sun, and is reborn into his humanity. The liberators or the defeated/retreating German troops leave behind food stuffs, coffee, and cigarettes, which are important components of this book. Theo and the other refugees do not starve, and they have ready access to a simple luxury, cigarettes. Food stuffs, coffee, and cigarettes become the building blocks the characters use to revive a sense of their civilized selves.
They also regularly block Theo’s forward momentum, returning him to the other refugees, forcing him to interact, act as hospitable host or accept other’s hospitality.
Theo settles in the guard house for awhile with its supplies (canned sardines, rusks, coffee, cigarettes) and orderliness. A woman, Mina, shows up. She too is heading home to Baden Bei Wien. She too is coming out of the deep freeze of the camps and beginning to feel her humanity again. They do not communicate well. Their language and gestures are abrupt and almost offensive, but as things begin to soften between them they share food. Mina, though, sleeps all the time, as if she is sleeping out the trauma of the camps. She worries Theo, who wants to head out again, but he feels the need to care for her. She has two suppurating wounds on her thighs, which provokes both fear and sympathy from Theo. He does give into his desire to walk on, but then he gets worried and returns to the house, only to find that she has left. This kind of truncated, incomplete interaction marks the book.
Concerned for Mina, Theo searches for her, only to encounter others. He notes the good breeding of a woman and assures her that she can finish her high school education, but he speaks to her in a way that offends her, and she walks away. He watched two men beat a collaborator with boards; they don’t beat him hard, and he remains sitting in the mud, even after they move off. Theo’s attempt to encourage him to move on just produces more self-pity. Again, Theo’s interactions with others are awkward and often fail, after which he will return to his original intention of returning home. Sometimes, he returns to his journey, but just as often once he is amongst people he gets stuck.
When Theo walks, he remembers his childhood. As he recovers memory, he particularly thinks of his mother, for whom he felt a strong emotional bond. She was beautiful, suffered from schizophrenia, was in and out of a sanitarium, and drove the family into debt. But she was also a free spirit, who took Theo out of school to travel to other cities and go to churches where Bach and Mozart are played. Theo is wowed by her beauty and quirky behavior. She has a creative spark that Theo cannot ignore. She provides him novel, exciting experiences, takes him into the wider world, teaches him about the beauty of music. She also wants to convert to Christianity, so that she can spend more time in churches, listening to beautiful music. Theo’s father ran a bookstore, was emotionally distant, and worked long hours to pay off his wife’s debts. He was not home much, and in the camp Theo’s memory erased his father while idolizing his mother, the spark of humanity(beauty, art) that helped Theo survive the destitute life of the camp.
Theo’s desire to return home is really a desire to return to his mother, even though he knows that she is dead. Still, his desire to return home sharpens, and he decides that he wants to return to convert to Christianity, to be able to attend church, which is the house of Bach and Mozart. His reason for moving forward sharpens: he would find his mother and their love of music by converting in Baden Bei Wien. ←Here is the key to Theo’s future, the shape of his humanity. Prior to the war and in an attempt to avoid Nazi persecution, Jews converted to Christianity, an understandable but ultimately failed strategy. After the war is over and the Nazis defeated, Theo still wants to convert, not to save his skin but to memorialize his mother.
Perhaps if Theo had continued walking and avoided interacting with any more refugees, he might have made it home to Baden Bei Wien, but he continues to find himself amongst refugees, accepting offers of coffee, food, and cigarettes. Theo ends up talking with a man who reminds him of his uncle, a businessman, who was one of the first in his family to die. This man has food, coffee, and cognac, all of which he freely offers Theo. In conversation, remembering his mother and her love of music, Theo says that he would convert to Christianity, which upsets the man because he feels Theo is betraying his people and his faith. The man grabs Theo, and Theo pushes the man, who falls, injures himself, and becomes unresponsive. This conflict, this momentary act of violence, dominates the rest of the book. Like the collaborators, Theo believes that he will be tried and punished; he believes that there is a column of pursuers who are coming to judge and punish him, a belief that may be no more than a projection of guilt on Theo’s part, especially since the supposed column does not confront him before the end of the novel.
As Theo walks on and encounters more refugees, he confesses his desire to convert and is criticized for it, although no one else assaults him. These interactions only provoke more memories of his mother. He thinks of her love of coffee, a drink that fosters elegance and civilization. He thinks of her desire for an afterlife, which is connected to her desire to convert and music, an afterlife full of Bach and Mozart. He remembers their impromptu trip to Salzburg during a dangerous winter storm without telling Theo’s father. One morning, Theo wakes up to a vision of his mother at home in the morning, a soothing vision of the beauty of the world. His imagination dominated by his mother, Theo dreams of a voice, a chorus of voices(music!), which ask him accusing questions about pushing the man and then tell him to beg forgiveness. Another manifestation of the mother’s desire for conversion, which somehow comforts Theo, and he moves on happily, as if redeemed.
If Theo simply moved forward on the power of his obsession with his mother, he might have reached Baden Bei Wien and converted, but he keeps encountering refugees that distract him from that obsession and disturb his conception of home. He encounters a woman who evaded the camps because she hid in barns, and no one turned her in. Theo wants to return home. She wants to continue living in barns, because for her the barns are home. Theo encounters a mother and daughter, with whom he tries to connect, but they only fear and reject him. He offers help, fire, food, hospitality, but they’ve had a bad experience with other refugees. The mother only has the daughter, and that is clearly all she wants. He talks with a man from Budapest who is heading home to Budapest. The man tells the story of his conversion and what little good it did (none), and he is amazed that Theo still wants to convert after the war is over. Theo tells the story of his mother and music. The man says that before the war he was a musician, but now wants to work with his hands, because it is as if music (Bach, Mozart) are now corrupt and cannot transcend the horrors of war. Theo encounter a woman on the road who feeds people; she has nothing else, and for her the road is now her home. Another woman who gives Theo coffee and sandwiches tells Theo, after he relates his mother/conversion story, that to convert to Christianity now is to commit suicide. She also questions Theo’s desire to return home, since all homes have been lost. For her, the refugees are “precious”: to be cared for above everything else.
In the end, Theo collapses. The attempt to differentiate himself from others, assert agency, fails. He gives in to ennui, and the journey is over. His memory of his mother is not strong enough to push him forward anymore. His mother would have been upset, but he is together with other people of like experience. They are together, and that is consolation enough. Theo does not achieve his nostalgic, sublimated ideal, but by finally settling with other refugees he also seems to avoid a barren Kafkaesque world. He makes a choice. It’s not his initial choice, but it is a choice nonetheless.
Appelfeld is Roumanian by birth, was imprisoned in a forced labor camp, survived, and emigrated to British-Mandate Palestine in 1946, which would become Israel in 1948. Like other European emigrés of his generation–for example the poet Yehuda Amichai– Appelfeld learned Hebrew in order to embark on his literary career and became one of the foundational figures of modern Israeli literature; his publishing career lasted from 1962 to 2013. In "For Every Sin" and the one other Appelfeld book I’ve read, "Badenheim 1938," he writes not about contemporary Israel but the Holocaust and the people and places most immediately affected by it. With these books, I feel like Appelfeld is writing prefaces for what would become modern Israeli literature.
"For Every Sin" takes place right after the liberation of the camps and the end of the war. The single main character is Theo, a young man from Baden Bei Wien, Austria who had completed a year of college before being deported to the camps. He was an only child, and both of his parents were killed in the camps; the few other relatives he mentioned also died in the camps; so Theo is alone in the world, just like almost everyone else he encounters in the novel.
At the beginning and throughout much of the novel, Theo has one aim: to return home to Baden Bei Wien. He wants to go there by the straightest path possible, and he wants to put as much distance as he can between himself and the camp as well as between himself and the other refugees. He wants to be alone, and he wants to avoid contact with anyone–that is, other refugees–who would remind him of his experience, their collective experiences really, of the camps. Theo wants to recover his humanity or make for himself a new humanity after an experience that dissolved his and everyone else’s humanity in the camps. The novel begins with Theo and the other refugees awkwardly rediscovering how to interact with one another again as humans rather than enslaved, condemned laborers. It could be said that the plot is about Theo’s recovery of his humanity, which he initially believes that he can do simply by returning home, returning to his past self, and re-enrolling in college. In so doing, he can reclaim the agency that was taken from him and claim some power in the world. In other words, Theo is trying to move beyond the Kafkaesque existence of the camps, where he had no agency and little or no understanding of the forces that shaped his life: he is like Gregor Samsa or Joseph K. The problem here, though, is that, as Appelfeld narrates the story, it is very difficult to escape a Kafkaesque existence, even for someone as determined as Theo is.
As he walks, Theo notices both the ugliness, burnt out vehicles, and the beauty of the landscape. Theo’s reawakened sensitivity to beauty develops throughout the novel. As he puts distance between himself and others, Theo finds an abandoned guard cabin, which is neat and well-appointed. He rests, eats, drinks coffee, showers, burns his ragged clothes, and puts on brand new clothes that he finds in a closet and which fit him. He soaks up the beauty, the sun, and is reborn into his humanity. The liberators or the defeated/retreating German troops leave behind food stuffs, coffee, and cigarettes, which are important components of this book. Theo and the other refugees do not starve, and they have ready access to a simple luxury, cigarettes. Food stuffs, coffee, and cigarettes become the building blocks the characters use to revive a sense of their civilized selves.
They also regularly block Theo’s forward momentum, returning him to the other refugees, forcing him to interact, act as hospitable host or accept other’s hospitality.
Theo settles in the guard house for awhile with its supplies (canned sardines, rusks, coffee, cigarettes) and orderliness. A woman, Mina, shows up. She too is heading home to Baden Bei Wien. She too is coming out of the deep freeze of the camps and beginning to feel her humanity again. They do not communicate well. Their language and gestures are abrupt and almost offensive, but as things begin to soften between them they share food. Mina, though, sleeps all the time, as if she is sleeping out the trauma of the camps. She worries Theo, who wants to head out again, but he feels the need to care for her. She has two suppurating wounds on her thighs, which provokes both fear and sympathy from Theo. He does give into his desire to walk on, but then he gets worried and returns to the house, only to find that she has left. This kind of truncated, incomplete interaction marks the book.
Concerned for Mina, Theo searches for her, only to encounter others. He notes the good breeding of a woman and assures her that she can finish her high school education, but he speaks to her in a way that offends her, and she walks away. He watched two men beat a collaborator with boards; they don’t beat him hard, and he remains sitting in the mud, even after they move off. Theo’s attempt to encourage him to move on just produces more self-pity. Again, Theo’s interactions with others are awkward and often fail, after which he will return to his original intention of returning home. Sometimes, he returns to his journey, but just as often once he is amongst people he gets stuck.
When Theo walks, he remembers his childhood. As he recovers memory, he particularly thinks of his mother, for whom he felt a strong emotional bond. She was beautiful, suffered from schizophrenia, was in and out of a sanitarium, and drove the family into debt. But she was also a free spirit, who took Theo out of school to travel to other cities and go to churches where Bach and Mozart are played. Theo is wowed by her beauty and quirky behavior. She has a creative spark that Theo cannot ignore. She provides him novel, exciting experiences, takes him into the wider world, teaches him about the beauty of music. She also wants to convert to Christianity, so that she can spend more time in churches, listening to beautiful music. Theo’s father ran a bookstore, was emotionally distant, and worked long hours to pay off his wife’s debts. He was not home much, and in the camp Theo’s memory erased his father while idolizing his mother, the spark of humanity(beauty, art) that helped Theo survive the destitute life of the camp.
Theo’s desire to return home is really a desire to return to his mother, even though he knows that she is dead. Still, his desire to return home sharpens, and he decides that he wants to return to convert to Christianity, to be able to attend church, which is the house of Bach and Mozart. His reason for moving forward sharpens: he would find his mother and their love of music by converting in Baden Bei Wien. ←Here is the key to Theo’s future, the shape of his humanity. Prior to the war and in an attempt to avoid Nazi persecution, Jews converted to Christianity, an understandable but ultimately failed strategy. After the war is over and the Nazis defeated, Theo still wants to convert, not to save his skin but to memorialize his mother.
Perhaps if Theo had continued walking and avoided interacting with any more refugees, he might have made it home to Baden Bei Wien, but he continues to find himself amongst refugees, accepting offers of coffee, food, and cigarettes. Theo ends up talking with a man who reminds him of his uncle, a businessman, who was one of the first in his family to die. This man has food, coffee, and cognac, all of which he freely offers Theo. In conversation, remembering his mother and her love of music, Theo says that he would convert to Christianity, which upsets the man because he feels Theo is betraying his people and his faith. The man grabs Theo, and Theo pushes the man, who falls, injures himself, and becomes unresponsive. This conflict, this momentary act of violence, dominates the rest of the book. Like the collaborators, Theo believes that he will be tried and punished; he believes that there is a column of pursuers who are coming to judge and punish him, a belief that may be no more than a projection of guilt on Theo’s part, especially since the supposed column does not confront him before the end of the novel.
As Theo walks on and encounters more refugees, he confesses his desire to convert and is criticized for it, although no one else assaults him. These interactions only provoke more memories of his mother. He thinks of her love of coffee, a drink that fosters elegance and civilization. He thinks of her desire for an afterlife, which is connected to her desire to convert and music, an afterlife full of Bach and Mozart. He remembers their impromptu trip to Salzburg during a dangerous winter storm without telling Theo’s father. One morning, Theo wakes up to a vision of his mother at home in the morning, a soothing vision of the beauty of the world. His imagination dominated by his mother, Theo dreams of a voice, a chorus of voices(music!), which ask him accusing questions about pushing the man and then tell him to beg forgiveness. Another manifestation of the mother’s desire for conversion, which somehow comforts Theo, and he moves on happily, as if redeemed.
If Theo simply moved forward on the power of his obsession with his mother, he might have reached Baden Bei Wien and converted, but he keeps encountering refugees that distract him from that obsession and disturb his conception of home. He encounters a woman who evaded the camps because she hid in barns, and no one turned her in. Theo wants to return home. She wants to continue living in barns, because for her the barns are home. Theo encounters a mother and daughter, with whom he tries to connect, but they only fear and reject him. He offers help, fire, food, hospitality, but they’ve had a bad experience with other refugees. The mother only has the daughter, and that is clearly all she wants. He talks with a man from Budapest who is heading home to Budapest. The man tells the story of his conversion and what little good it did (none), and he is amazed that Theo still wants to convert after the war is over. Theo tells the story of his mother and music. The man says that before the war he was a musician, but now wants to work with his hands, because it is as if music (Bach, Mozart) are now corrupt and cannot transcend the horrors of war. Theo encounter a woman on the road who feeds people; she has nothing else, and for her the road is now her home. Another woman who gives Theo coffee and sandwiches tells Theo, after he relates his mother/conversion story, that to convert to Christianity now is to commit suicide. She also questions Theo’s desire to return home, since all homes have been lost. For her, the refugees are “precious”: to be cared for above everything else.
In the end, Theo collapses. The attempt to differentiate himself from others, assert agency, fails. He gives in to ennui, and the journey is over. His memory of his mother is not strong enough to push him forward anymore. His mother would have been upset, but he is together with other people of like experience. They are together, and that is consolation enough. Theo does not achieve his nostalgic, sublimated ideal, but by finally settling with other refugees he also seems to avoid a barren Kafkaesque world. He makes a choice. It’s not his initial choice, but it is a choice nonetheless.
June 11, 2018
Hard to follow at times.
February 23, 2024
Appelfeld is an acquired taste. One must really slow down. The war is over. Survivors from a camp are called refugees. Theo cannot bear their company, the squabbling, the noise of the refugees. He goes off on his own, imagines it will take him two months to get home. His journey is the story. This is not a straightforward narrative--elements of allegory, some events happen so suddenly it must be magic.
March 21, 2022
what spoke to me most about this book is the thought of what happens next? now that the main character has been freed from this terrible living, all he wants is to go home. yet, he struggles with his own faith and people. it was a bit hard to follow at times but it had emphasis on regaining awareness and some kind of reinstated stability!
July 5, 2019
3,5 / 5 ⭐
November 27, 2020
A bleak, lonely and cold examination of traumatic fallout.
December 24, 2007
I realize that Appelfeld is supposed to be a top-tier writer, but his work always (this is his second book I've read, so take that with a grain of salt) feels a little detached to me. Is it symptomatic of Holocaust lit? Maybe. But it's still dry to read, even if it's dry in an interesting way.
August 29, 2012
of the appelfeld books i've read, this is my least favourite.
i don't recommend this one for pleasure reading.
for someone studying the holocaust, particularly representing the holocaust or a similar class, it could well function as assigned reading.
i don't recommend this one for pleasure reading.
for someone studying the holocaust, particularly representing the holocaust or a similar class, it could well function as assigned reading.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews