All Whom I Have Loved: A Novel [Hardcover]

Israeli novelist Appelfeld (The Story of a Life; The Iron Tracks) sets this pre-Holocaust novel in 1938 Czernowitz, Ukraine, where narrator Paul Rosenfeld, a nine-year-old Jewish boy, watches his family and community fall apart. Paul, whose isolation is exacerbated by his exemption from school because of his asthma, watches as, in short order, his parents divorce, his adored nanny is killed by her jealous fiancé and his schoolteacher mother abandons him (first when she marries a colleague and converts to Christianity, and later when she contracts typhus and dies). Paul is left in the care of his father, a depressed, alcoholic painter who hardly speaks except to rail against the anti-Semitic art critics who have labeled his art "decadent" and thwarted his career. Paul daydreams about an idyllic country vacation he once took with his mother and finds himself drawn to the Orthodox Jews he meets. Meanwhile, strangers hurl anti-Semitic insults and World War II looms. Though Appelfeld's bewildered child narrator is a pleasure to follow, he stumbles into gratingly precious territory on occasion. For all its morbidity, the story is seductive and, ultimately, devastating. (Feb.)
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Growing up in Bucharest, Czernowitz, and various small places in Eastern Europe in the 1930s, Paul Rosenfeld, nine, cares little about his Jewish identity; in fact he despises "the bearded Jews" who pray in the synagogue next door, and local anti-Semitism barely registers. His life is focused on family turmoil after his beloved mother remarries and he must live with his gifted artist father, who veers between alcoholism and bouts of feverish work. The child's naive first-person narrative is sometimes excruciatingly detailed and slow--this would work better as a short story. But the translation from the Hebrew is eloquent, and well-known Israeli writer Appelfeld gets perfectly the way politics seems very unimportant and distant compared with the anguish of a mother dying of typhus and a father struggling for recognition. For the reader, who knows that the Holocaust will wipe out Paul's world, there is bitter irony in the drama of daily struggle. Hazel Rochman
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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

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.

Aharon Appelfeld is the author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Badenheim 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.