The Retreat: A novel - Softcover

Aron Appelfeld

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805210962 ISBN 13: 9780805210965

Publisher: Random House Inc, 1998

Synopsis

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."

About this title

About the Author:

AHARON APPELFELD is the author of more than forty works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Iron Tracks, Until the Dawn's Light (both winners of the National Jewish Book Award), The Story of a Life (winner of the Prix Médicis Étranger), and Badenheim 1939. Other honors he has received include the Giovanni Boccaccio Literary Prize, the Nelly Sachs Prize, the Israel Prize, the Bialik Prize, and the MLA Commonwealth Award. Blooms of Darkness won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2012 and was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013. Born in Czernowitz, Bukovina (now part of Ukraine), in 1932, he died in Israel in 2018.

Synopsis:

In a novel about the Holocaust, a hotel called "The Retreat" teaches its Jewish patrons how to look, talk, and act like Gentiles, but as the Nazi danger marches closer, the opportunities for assimilation and retreat quickly fade.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0805210962
• ISBN 13: 9780805210965
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176