Aharon Appelfeld Boeken

Het is voorjaar 1939, een onrustige periode in Europa. Badenheim, een Oostenrijks vakantieoord, bereidt zich voor op het zomerseizoen en de bijbehorende vakantiegangers. De bezoekers zijn joods en de kleine drama's in het hotel maskeren een aanzwellende dreiging die zij niet onder ogen durven zien. Ze zijn zo bevangen door hun triviale, dagelijkse bezigheden dat ieder signaal van hun aanstaande noodlot aan hen voorbijgaat. Het zijn de laatste dagen in een wereld die kort daarna volledig ineen zal storten.

A new novel from an acclaimed Israeli writer presents a haunting tale of love and loss set against the backdrop of the Holocaust. In a ghetto being liquidated by the Nazis, eleven-year-old Hugo is taken by his mother to a local brothel for refuge. There, he encounters Mariana, a deeply unhappy prostitute who resents her life choices. Night after night, Hugo listens to her anguished rants against the Nazi soldiers. Despite her bitterness, Mariana becomes fiercely protective of the bewildered boy, while Hugo, in turn, tries to lift her spirits, offering comfort during her moments of despair. As memories of his family fade, Hugo develops a deep affection for Mariana, who, in her own turmoil, seeks solace in the boy on the brink of adulthood. When the Russian army arrives, the prostitutes flee, but Mariana, known to the Germans, is arrested as a collaborator. As the story unfolds towards its poignant conclusion, the author masterfully explores themes of tragedy, resilience, and the essence of humanity. **Winner of the 2012 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize**

Battling numbing cold, ever-present hunger, and German soldiers determined to hunt them down, four dozen resistance fighters--escapees from a nearby ghetto--hide in a Ukrainian forest, determined to survive the war, sabotage the German war effort, and rescue as many Jews as they can from the trains taking them to concentration camps. Their leader is relentless in his efforts to turn his ragtag band of men and boys into a disciplined force that accomplishes its goals without losing its moral compass. And so when they're not raiding peasants' homes for food and supplies, or training with the weapons taken from the soldiers they have ambushed and killed, the partisans read books of faith and philosophy that they have rescued from abandoned Jewish homes, and they draw strength from the women, the elderly, and the remarkably resilient orphaned children they are protecting. When they hear about the advances being made by the Soviet Army, the partisans prepare for what they know will be a furious attack on their compound by the retreating Germans. In the heartbreaking aftermath, the survivors emerge from the forest to bury their dead, care for their wounded, and grimly confront a world that is surprised by their existence--and profoundly unwelcoming

Aharon Appelfeld was the child of middle-class Jewish parents living in Romania at the outbreak of World War II. He witnessed the murder of his mother, lost his father, endured the ghetto and a two-month forced march to a camp, before he escaped. Living off the land in the forests of Ukraine for two years before making the long journey south to Italy and eventually Israel and freedom, Appelfeld finally found a home in which he could make a life for himself. Acclaimed writer Appelfeld’s extraordinary and painful memoir of his childhood and youth is a compelling account of a boy coming of age in a hostile world.

A Tel Aviv shopkeeper embarks on a journey to his parents' Polish birthplace, seeking to understand their complex legacy, but is unprepared for the realities he encounters. Yaakov Fine's practical wife and daughters are puzzled by his decision to leave his successful dress shop for a ten-day trip to Szydowce, his family's ancestral village. Struggling with midlife depression, he is drawn to the stories of his parents' idyllic hometown before 1939, while the horrors that followed remain unspoken. Upon arriving in Krakow, Yaakov enjoys the charming cafes and relaxed atmosphere, a stark contrast to Tel Aviv. His enchanting landlady, Magda, shares her family's tragic history, deepening his connection to the past. However, when he seeks to reclaim desecrated tombstones stolen from the Jewish cemetery, a starkly different Poland emerges, shattering his romanticized view of the town and its people. This confrontation reveals the tragic reality of Jewish life in Poland, both historically and in contemporary times. Through this journey of revelation and reconciliation, the narrative explores the complexities of memory and identity, resonating with powerful universal themes.

Set in an Austrian city before the Holocaust, the narrative follows Karl, a young civil servant whose recent conversion to Christianity is intended to secure a high government position. However, as he faces a political crisis, his past resurfaces, challenging his beliefs and forcing him to confront his identity. The story explores themes of faith, ambition, and the complexities of personal choices against a backdrop of societal upheaval.

The teenage Katerina flees her abusive home in a poor, Christian village in the 1880s, finding work and shelter in the home of a Jewish family, and in the warmth of their family life and beauty of their Jewish rituals she begins to know safety for the first time. Their life is brutally disrupted when a pogrom is wrought upon the family, and Katerina finds herself alone again. Decades later, having suffered and retaliated for that suffering, she looks out of the window of her prison cell and sees the trains carrying Jews across Europe. Released from prison into the chaos following the end of World War II, a now elderly Katerina is devastated to find a world that has been emptied of its Jews and that is not at all sorry to see them gone. Ever the outsider, Katerina realizes that she has survived only to bear witness to the fact that they had ever existed at all. A rare glimpse into Jewish and gentile life in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century, Katerina explores the long origins of the Holocaust, alongside darkness and light, cruelty and mercy.

In Philip Roth's intimate intellectual encounters with an international and diverse cast of writers, they explore the importance of region, politics and history in their work and trace the imaginative path by which a writer's highly individualized art is informed by the wider conditions of life. With Primo Levi, Roth discusses the stubborn core of rationality that helped the Italian chemist-writer survive the demented laboratory of Auschwitz. With Milan Kundera, he analyzes the mix of politics and sexuality that made him the most subversive writer in communist Czechoslovakia. With Edna O'Brien, he explores the circumstances that have forced generations of Irish writers into exile. Elsewhere Roth offers appreciative portraits of two friends--the writer Bernard Malamud and the painter Philip Guston--at the end of their careers, and gives us a masterful assessment of the work of Saul Bellow. Intimate, charming, and crackling with ideas about the interplay between imagination and the writer's historical situation, Shop Talk is a literary symposium of the highest level, presided over by America's foremost novelist.