All Whom I Have Loved - Hardcover

Appelfeld, Aron

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805241779 ISBN 13: 9780805241778

Publisher: Schocken Books, 2007

Synopsis

The haunting story of a Jewish family in Eastern Europe in the 1930s that prefigures the fate of the Jews during World War II.

At the center is nine-year-old Paul Rosenfeld, the beloved only child of divorced parents, through whose eyes we view a dissolving, increasingly chaotic world. Initially, Paul lives with his mother–a secular, assimilated schoolteacher, who he adores until she “betrays” him by marrying the gentile André. He is 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 stability and meaning in a world that is collapsing around him, but his love for the earthy peasant girl who briefly takes care of him, the strange pull he feels towards the Jews praying in the synagogue near his home, and the fascination with which he observes Eastern Orthodox church rituals merely give him 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–his mother, deserted by her new husband and dying of typhus; his father, gunned down while trying to stop the robbery of a Jewish-owned shop–and his own fate as an orphaned Jewish child alone in Europe in 1938 are rendered 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

"Praise for Aharon Appelfeld:

Badenheim 1939
""The writing flows seamlessly . . . [This is] a small masterpiece."
--"The New York Times Book Review

Tzili
"""Tzili"'s steadiness of vision and quiet acceptance of life reduced to an absolute minimum give it a sense of buoyancy the more moving for being apparently effortless."
--"The New York Review of Books

To the Land of the Cattails
""Among us, the writers-survivors, Appelfeld's voice has a unique, unmistakeable tone . . . I am struck with awe and admiration."
--Primo Levi

"The Iron Tracks
""This tale of reparation and retaliation is art at its highest."
--"The Washington Post

The Conversion
""A work of subtle power, at once a historical novel and a moral parable."
--"The Boston Globe"
"From the Hardcover edition."

"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 twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, includingBadenheim 1939, Tzili, The Iron Tracks (winner of the National Jewish Book Award),The Conversion, and The Story of a Life (winner of the Prix Médicis Étranger). Other honors he has received include the Israel Prize, the Bialik Prize, the MLA Commonwealth Award, and the Nelly Sachs Prize. Born in Czernowitz, Bukovina (now part of the Ukraine), in 1932, he lives in Israel.

About this edition

• Publisher: Schocken Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0805241779
• ISBN 13: 9780805241778
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 246