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The Retreat
The year is 1937. On a remote hilltop some distance from Vienna stands a hotel called The Retreat. Founded by a man who is determined to cleanse himself and his guests of all "Jewish traits," it is a resort of assimilation, with daily activities that include lessons in how to look, talk, act--in short, how to pass--as a gentile. But with Hitler on the march, the possibilities of both assimilation and retreat are quickly fading for the hotel's patrons, men and women who are necessarily--and horrifically--blind to their fate. Mordant, shrewd, and elegantly written, The Retreat is a moving story of people forbidden to retreat from themselves, by the writer whom Irving Howe called "one of the best novelists alive."
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
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About the author
Aharon Appelfeld
66 books200 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 - 17 of 17 reviews
November 26, 2019
3 1/2 stars but rounded to 4 because of its novel and poignant concept.
January 3, 2022
There's definitely something here. I guess I kept thinking about the residents lack of purpose and how it drove many of them to despair either in the form of death or insomnia caused by overwhelming nightmares.
This excerpt pretty much sums up their lack of purpose at the retreat:
'It's not bad here. What do people do?' she surprised Lotte by asking.
'Nothing in particular.'
'They don't work?'
'No.'
'What do they do, then?'
'Nothing.'
Their lack of purpose, however, is most apparent when they are finally reinvigorated with a mission, which I really only noticed on three occasions: all of the residents embarking on a search party for a lost resident, Betty working in the kitchen, and Herbert going down to the village to pawn items. Soooo there's something here about abandoning one's purpose in a fleeting desire for assimilation, but the whole premise of assimilation seemed to be a past dream rather than a present reality.
Honestly, the whole book felt rather dull, and I can't say I'd recommend it. I only picked it up because I wanted a second book at Half Priced Books a couple of months ago, but I guess I should have just stuck with the one book ..
This excerpt pretty much sums up their lack of purpose at the retreat:
'It's not bad here. What do people do?' she surprised Lotte by asking.
'Nothing in particular.'
'They don't work?'
'No.'
'What do they do, then?'
'Nothing.'
Their lack of purpose, however, is most apparent when they are finally reinvigorated with a mission, which I really only noticed on three occasions: all of the residents embarking on a search party for a lost resident, Betty working in the kitchen, and Herbert going down to the village to pawn items. Soooo there's something here about abandoning one's purpose in a fleeting desire for assimilation, but the whole premise of assimilation seemed to be a past dream rather than a present reality.
Honestly, the whole book felt rather dull, and I can't say I'd recommend it. I only picked it up because I wanted a second book at Half Priced Books a couple of months ago, but I guess I should have just stuck with the one book ..
August 2, 2021
*2.5 stars
June 16, 2024
Aharon Appelfeld, The Retreat. Dalya Bilu, translator. Quartett Encounters, 1984.
I recently read Appelfeld’s For Every Sin, which takes place after the liberation of the camps. Like Badenheim 1938, The Retreat is set before deportations began. For Every Sin focuses on a single character, Theo; likewise, the main character of The Retreat is Lotte Schloss. Theo is trying to piece together his identity–his humanity, really–after the trauma of surviving three years in the camps. Lotte and the other inhabitants of a mountain retreat struggle with Jewish identity, which they have worn lightly or hardly acknowledged but has become a trap in the present moment of the novel.
The novel begins with Lotte’s daughter, Julia, taking her mother to a Jewish spa hotel in the Austrian mountains for a period of rest and recovery: think of Hans Castorp from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain but without the tuberculosis. Lotte is an actress who was let go by a regional theater troupe and has not been able to find any other work, theatrical or otherwise. She is well-educated (humanities), independent, extroverted, eccentric, and a divorcé. She identifies as an actress but doesn’t self-identify as Jewish. She has sought help from friends and family but has been rebuffed, including by her daughter’s husband. There is friction between mother and daughter, but the daughter is concerned enough to find her mother this hideaway of last resort. In the coach to the retreat, the driver tells the mother she does not look Jewish, while the mother thinks her daughter looks too Jewish, which alarms her. As anti-semitism peaked before the war, Jews lost their jobs, businesses, and property as they did their best to assimilate or erase traces of their Jewishness. Julia, the daughter, has married a nice, bland non-Jewish, Austrian farmer and started a family.
The retreat is called the Institute of Advanced Studies, and it reminds Lotte of the seedy hotels where her family vacationed when she was a child and where she spent too much time in her peripatetic theater career, but it is less a hotel or school than it is a sanitarium. The retreat is full of people at the end of their tether, who have no place else to turn. Lotte meet a violinist, who has lost his orchestral job and says that he is there on a grant to improve his playing and his strength, not admitting to the reality that he lost his job because he’s Jewish. Another complains that he cannot administer his business in the local village while he lives at the retreat, but he does not admit that his business is in ruins because the locals stopped paying him and creditors hounded him. Like Lotte, others at the retreat hesitantly and awkwardly identify as Jewish, not simply because of the looming threat of anti-semitism but because their lives did not revolve around their Jewishness.
In For Every Sin, as Theo walks he remembers the past (his childhood, mother, and father) which he uses to reconstitute his identity. In The Retreat, Lotte walks in the abundant nature around the sanitarium, and she, too, thinks about her past, but only as a way to understand how she has ended up so isolated. She had a bibliophile father whose wife hated him because he spent too much money on books and could not satisfy her wanderlust and need for nice vacations. The mother loved Lotte and supported her eccentricities, education, theater career ambitions, a pregnancy and abortion. She supported her daughter’s independence. Lotte graduated from the theater academy after her mother dies but gets only minor, poorly paid roles in theater productions. She marries Manfred, a boring man (not cultured, creative) and gives birth to her daughter, Julia, whom the father takes cares of, so Lotte can pursue her career. She separates from Manfred because he is boring, and her career fizzles, so she goes to stay with her daughter, who has married a boring middle class Austrian who finds his mother-in-law too independent and, thus, offensive. Lotte burns through family and friends–or perhaps the hostile, paternalistic anti-semitic country burns through Lotte–and she ends up at the sanatorium. Whereas Theo begins to build an identity after the liberation of the camps, in the lead up to the horrors of WWII all that Lotte can do in her walks in the woods is come to grips with her own emptiness. Timing is everything.
The retreat was created by Balaban, a wealthy Jewish farmer and businessman, as a rehabilitation center for fellow Jews who are down on their luck; Balaban would provide them with a healthy life. The sanitarium is really a reeducation camp, a way of remaking the inmates and erasing their Jewishness, physical, professional, and spiritual. They would transform themselves from what is perceived as “useless” or parasitic professions, like actress or shopkeeper, to become upright laborers who might, for example, work hard on a farm. But such education and exercise are too late, because, with just a few exceptions, all the inmates have been abandoned. There is no one and nowhere for them to return to once they are rehabilitated. The reason for the sanitarium was to bring the patients back to health, cure them of their weaknesses––through exercise, nature, elocution lessons, etc.--which would allow them to return rehabilitated to the plains (the non-Jewish world). Instead, the residents just sit around and play poker..Just as they have been abandoned, there is no better symbol than poker for how they have capitulated and abandoned themselves to whatever fate is coming their way.
Eventually, everything falls apart. The villagers turn against Balaban and ruin him. The most posh of the inmates, Isadora, commit suicide, leaving instructions that she be given no Jewish rites, that her family notified not be notified, and that she be buried in the forest. The retreat afforded her no hope, and nether does the larger world. Even the hopeful and robust of the residents, Lang, who maintains a health regimen long after everyone else has given up and taken up poker, he is found drunk in the mud in village, having given in to despair. Balaban gets sick and eventually dies, and residents are left to shift for themselves. The residents have to sell their clothing and other possessions in the village to buy food, but those who go into the village are beaten, so even that minimal commerce ends. After a year, Lotte’s daughter Julia visits but only to leave a few things (jam, etc.) and then departs. Lotte’s attempts to initiate discussion fail, because Julia just wants to leave. It is af is she knows that her mother and everyone else at the sanitarium are doomed, which they are.
Appelfeld ends the novel before the residents are rounded up and deported, but he doesn’t need to do more than leave us with the overwhelming hopelessness of the retreat. As effective as The Retreat is, I think that For Every Sin is the better realized work, because in the latter Appelfeld develops a much more focused and through character study of Theo than he does of Lotte in The Retreat. After being set up as the main character,, Lotte is often sidelined for the sake of other characters, whose arcs are not as well developed. As a result, when the focus returns to Lotte in the end, it lacks punch, and the horrific loss that it foretells seems duller than Theo’s collapse at the end of For Every Sin.
I recently read Appelfeld’s For Every Sin, which takes place after the liberation of the camps. Like Badenheim 1938, The Retreat is set before deportations began. For Every Sin focuses on a single character, Theo; likewise, the main character of The Retreat is Lotte Schloss. Theo is trying to piece together his identity–his humanity, really–after the trauma of surviving three years in the camps. Lotte and the other inhabitants of a mountain retreat struggle with Jewish identity, which they have worn lightly or hardly acknowledged but has become a trap in the present moment of the novel.
The novel begins with Lotte’s daughter, Julia, taking her mother to a Jewish spa hotel in the Austrian mountains for a period of rest and recovery: think of Hans Castorp from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain but without the tuberculosis. Lotte is an actress who was let go by a regional theater troupe and has not been able to find any other work, theatrical or otherwise. She is well-educated (humanities), independent, extroverted, eccentric, and a divorcé. She identifies as an actress but doesn’t self-identify as Jewish. She has sought help from friends and family but has been rebuffed, including by her daughter’s husband. There is friction between mother and daughter, but the daughter is concerned enough to find her mother this hideaway of last resort. In the coach to the retreat, the driver tells the mother she does not look Jewish, while the mother thinks her daughter looks too Jewish, which alarms her. As anti-semitism peaked before the war, Jews lost their jobs, businesses, and property as they did their best to assimilate or erase traces of their Jewishness. Julia, the daughter, has married a nice, bland non-Jewish, Austrian farmer and started a family.
The retreat is called the Institute of Advanced Studies, and it reminds Lotte of the seedy hotels where her family vacationed when she was a child and where she spent too much time in her peripatetic theater career, but it is less a hotel or school than it is a sanitarium. The retreat is full of people at the end of their tether, who have no place else to turn. Lotte meet a violinist, who has lost his orchestral job and says that he is there on a grant to improve his playing and his strength, not admitting to the reality that he lost his job because he’s Jewish. Another complains that he cannot administer his business in the local village while he lives at the retreat, but he does not admit that his business is in ruins because the locals stopped paying him and creditors hounded him. Like Lotte, others at the retreat hesitantly and awkwardly identify as Jewish, not simply because of the looming threat of anti-semitism but because their lives did not revolve around their Jewishness.
In For Every Sin, as Theo walks he remembers the past (his childhood, mother, and father) which he uses to reconstitute his identity. In The Retreat, Lotte walks in the abundant nature around the sanitarium, and she, too, thinks about her past, but only as a way to understand how she has ended up so isolated. She had a bibliophile father whose wife hated him because he spent too much money on books and could not satisfy her wanderlust and need for nice vacations. The mother loved Lotte and supported her eccentricities, education, theater career ambitions, a pregnancy and abortion. She supported her daughter’s independence. Lotte graduated from the theater academy after her mother dies but gets only minor, poorly paid roles in theater productions. She marries Manfred, a boring man (not cultured, creative) and gives birth to her daughter, Julia, whom the father takes cares of, so Lotte can pursue her career. She separates from Manfred because he is boring, and her career fizzles, so she goes to stay with her daughter, who has married a boring middle class Austrian who finds his mother-in-law too independent and, thus, offensive. Lotte burns through family and friends–or perhaps the hostile, paternalistic anti-semitic country burns through Lotte–and she ends up at the sanatorium. Whereas Theo begins to build an identity after the liberation of the camps, in the lead up to the horrors of WWII all that Lotte can do in her walks in the woods is come to grips with her own emptiness. Timing is everything.
The retreat was created by Balaban, a wealthy Jewish farmer and businessman, as a rehabilitation center for fellow Jews who are down on their luck; Balaban would provide them with a healthy life. The sanitarium is really a reeducation camp, a way of remaking the inmates and erasing their Jewishness, physical, professional, and spiritual. They would transform themselves from what is perceived as “useless” or parasitic professions, like actress or shopkeeper, to become upright laborers who might, for example, work hard on a farm. But such education and exercise are too late, because, with just a few exceptions, all the inmates have been abandoned. There is no one and nowhere for them to return to once they are rehabilitated. The reason for the sanitarium was to bring the patients back to health, cure them of their weaknesses––through exercise, nature, elocution lessons, etc.--which would allow them to return rehabilitated to the plains (the non-Jewish world). Instead, the residents just sit around and play poker..Just as they have been abandoned, there is no better symbol than poker for how they have capitulated and abandoned themselves to whatever fate is coming their way.
Eventually, everything falls apart. The villagers turn against Balaban and ruin him. The most posh of the inmates, Isadora, commit suicide, leaving instructions that she be given no Jewish rites, that her family notified not be notified, and that she be buried in the forest. The retreat afforded her no hope, and nether does the larger world. Even the hopeful and robust of the residents, Lang, who maintains a health regimen long after everyone else has given up and taken up poker, he is found drunk in the mud in village, having given in to despair. Balaban gets sick and eventually dies, and residents are left to shift for themselves. The residents have to sell their clothing and other possessions in the village to buy food, but those who go into the village are beaten, so even that minimal commerce ends. After a year, Lotte’s daughter Julia visits but only to leave a few things (jam, etc.) and then departs. Lotte’s attempts to initiate discussion fail, because Julia just wants to leave. It is af is she knows that her mother and everyone else at the sanitarium are doomed, which they are.
Appelfeld ends the novel before the residents are rounded up and deported, but he doesn’t need to do more than leave us with the overwhelming hopelessness of the retreat. As effective as The Retreat is, I think that For Every Sin is the better realized work, because in the latter Appelfeld develops a much more focused and through character study of Theo than he does of Lotte in The Retreat. After being set up as the main character,, Lotte is often sidelined for the sake of other characters, whose arcs are not as well developed. As a result, when the focus returns to Lotte in the end, it lacks punch, and the horrific loss that it foretells seems duller than Theo’s collapse at the end of For Every Sin.
December 16, 2017
As is the case with the other books of Appelfeld's that I have read I found this one to be a fascinating, albeit minimalist, portrayal of the inner workings of men and women struggling to deal with their Jewishness. He places his characters in a mountaintop residence seeking sanctuary from the burgeoning anti-Semitism of late 1930's Austria. A few of them are striving to remake themselves into Gentiles by altering their speech, ways of interacting with others, even their bodily physique. They are doing this all in hopes that they will be able to return to 'the plain' below, ie mainstream society, as more 'normal' everyday people indistinguishable from others.
Others have been sent there by their young adult children who have converted to Christianity and/or have married a Christian. These folks are baffled about and hurt by their exile with little intention, let alone hope, of ever giving up their ethnic and cultural heritage. A few have reservations, if not more serious concerns, about how their adult offspring will fare as Jews living down below. Most, however, are in denial about what the reader knows, with the benefit of historical records, will ultimately be the fate of these Jews still trying to assimilate into a society that refuses to tolerate them.
As with his other books Appelfeld writes in a sparse prose and develops these characters with a minimum of historical description. Usually he provides just enough via brief descriptive phrases or clauses here and there to give the reader a sense of their prior lives. Sometimes, however, I wish he had provided a little more in this regard so as to flesh them out more fully.
One sign for me that I have liked a book is that I find myself caring about at least one, if not more, of the characters. When I do, I usually wish the author would bring their existence to some kind of closure.
His seemingly simple prose and the brevity of the book, at less than 175, pages make for a 'fast read.' The issues he portrays, however, do not mean it is an easy one. I recommend it highly. Maybe even with a 4.5 rating. But with a caution that it will leave you troubled.
Others have been sent there by their young adult children who have converted to Christianity and/or have married a Christian. These folks are baffled about and hurt by their exile with little intention, let alone hope, of ever giving up their ethnic and cultural heritage. A few have reservations, if not more serious concerns, about how their adult offspring will fare as Jews living down below. Most, however, are in denial about what the reader knows, with the benefit of historical records, will ultimately be the fate of these Jews still trying to assimilate into a society that refuses to tolerate them.
As with his other books Appelfeld writes in a sparse prose and develops these characters with a minimum of historical description. Usually he provides just enough via brief descriptive phrases or clauses here and there to give the reader a sense of their prior lives. Sometimes, however, I wish he had provided a little more in this regard so as to flesh them out more fully.
One sign for me that I have liked a book is that I find myself caring about at least one, if not more, of the characters. When I do, I usually wish the author would bring their existence to some kind of closure.
His seemingly simple prose and the brevity of the book, at less than 175, pages make for a 'fast read.' The issues he portrays, however, do not mean it is an easy one. I recommend it highly. Maybe even with a 4.5 rating. But with a caution that it will leave you troubled.
March 31, 2019
Short fable of sorts about being Jewish in Europe before the Holocaust, set in an inn of sorts whose founder tries to help the Jewish residents assimilate by erasing markers of Jewishness. As the story progresses, the inn, and its increasing weirdness and insularity, starts to prefigure a concentration camp: for both, the aim is to stamp out Jewish traits, and both sets of inmates are oddly resigned to their fate.
July 23, 2023
Only bought this when barnes and noble was having their moving sale. Only picked it up in hopes of a quick read to get me back on track for my reading goals. It took me ten days... and I still had to skim to even get to the end. What an elitist piece of bullshit. No point. Horribly written. Would NOT recommend.
June 14, 2020
This short novel is very intense and disturbing. It delves into the mindset of Austrian Jews just prior to WWII, and is hard to understand from the modern viewpoint. But worth the read.
July 10, 2025
A simple read, nothing dramatic nor too small. A great filler in between larger books, I feel a sense of relief not needing to read so deeply into the simple words written on the pages
November 19, 2015
Obviously, bloody depressing....
but I can't help read this in light of Israel 2015.
I just read Roth's Operation Shylock, so Palestine, and specifically Ramallah, are on the brain.
It's very easy to imagine this story being written today from a Palestinian perspective: a group of desperate Palestinians retreat in a futile attempt to erase their off-putting 'Palestinian-ness', while surrounded by increasing external hostility, Which is doubly depressing.
but I can't help read this in light of Israel 2015.
I just read Roth's Operation Shylock, so Palestine, and specifically Ramallah, are on the brain.
It's very easy to imagine this story being written today from a Palestinian perspective: a group of desperate Palestinians retreat in a futile attempt to erase their off-putting 'Palestinian-ness', while surrounded by increasing external hostility, Which is doubly depressing.
Read
July 28, 2011"Only now did the mother understand what she had done. She wanted to get up and write her a long letter, beg her pardon, promise her that from now on she would take care to behave properly. But she did not get up. She was too tired."
March 22, 2023
melancholy pulse of simple, troubled elegance.
March 1, 2014
Beautiful. Powerful. My first Appelfeld and now I want to read them all.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews