Status Updates From A Table for One: Under the ...

My mother tongue was German. My grandparents spoke Yiddish. We lived among Ruthenian peasants and so we spoke Ruthenian. The government was Romanian, so we spoke Romanian. The intelligentsia often spoke French, so we spoke French. After the war I was with the Russians and I learned to speak Russian.

Usually there's silence in a café, but sometimes a wave of speech will surge up, flooding the listener with painful things that have been mostly kept down, things buried deep in the soul for many years that have at last
found an opening and emerged in words.

For people who have read Appelfeld's books and want insight into how his writing style developed, his influences, etc. He offers glimpses into his personality as well as the early years in Jerusalem, specifically the survivors' mentality and how they were viewed in Israeli society. Appelfeld's loving depictions of several neighborhoods are perfect: You don't need an airline ticket to be transported there.