All Whom I Have Loved - Softcover

Appelfeld, Aharon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080521125X ISBN 13: 9780805211252

Publisher: Schocken Books Inc, 2015

Synopsis

All Whom I Have Loved is the haunting story of a Jewish family in Eastern Europe in the 1930s as seen through the eyes of an unforgettable nine-year-old boy. The beloved only child of divorced parents, Paul watches helplessly as his family and his world dissolve around him. At first he lives with his mother--a secular, assimilated schoolteacher, whom he adores until she "betrays" him by marrying a gentile. He's then sent to live with his father--once an admired avant-garde artist, but now reviled by the critics as a "decadent Jew," who drowns his anger, pain, and humiliation in drink. Paul searches in vain for a life of stability and meaning. The earthy peasant girl who briefly takes care of him, the pull he feels toward the Jews praying in the local synagogue, and his fascination with Eastern Orthodox church rituals give him only tantalizing glimpses into worlds of which he can never be a part.

The fates that Paul's parents will meet with Paul as terrified witness, and his own fate as an orphaned Jewish child alone in Europe in 1938, are rendered by Aharon Appelfeld with extraordinary subtlety and power, as they foreshadow, in the heart-wrenching story of three individuals, the cataclysm that is about to engulf all of European Jewry.

About this title

Review:

"A riveting if ominous tale . . . In it, the unmistakable voice of a master is recognizable from its opening phrase. --California Literary Review

"The urgent moral relevance of Appelfeld's profound novels is one of the scandals of our age . . . It is a mark of his humane genius that he has made a great art out of so profound a silence." --Los Angeles Times

"Poetic in his instincts, Appelfeld has an artfully spare writing style, pregnant in its imagery, intentionally coy in its resonance." --Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Schocken Books Inc
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 080521125X
• ISBN 13: 9780805211252
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256