- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Schocken; Reprint edition (Feb 7 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0805211985
- ISBN-13: 978-0805211986
- Product Dimensions: 17.3 x 1.5 x 20.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 227 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,763,244 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
With piercing clarity, Israeli novelist Appelfeld tells the profoundly moving story of Katerina, a Polish housekeeper who works for a succession of Jewish families in the years before WW II. Raised in a culture permeated with virulent anti-Semitism, she must constantly try to overcome the prejudice instilled by her bitter mother, who beat her, and her callous father, who attempted to rape her. One by one, Jewish people who are good to Katerina die: an employer murdered by thugs on Passover; a moody, perfectionistic female pianist. Then her own baby, whom she has raised as a Jew, is snatched from her arms and killed. For knifing her son's murderer, Katerina spends more than 40 years in prison. Other inmates cheer as freight trains take Jews to concentration camps. Released from prison, Katerina lives in a hut on her deceased family's deserted farm and, at age 79, narrates her life story, lamenting that "there are no more victims in the world, only murderers." A theme that might be didactic in the hands of a lesser novelist is here conveyed with moving, unpreachy simplicity. This masterful novel is a powerful study of the poison of prejudice, a poignant meditation on life's horrors, beauty and God's inscrutable ways. Appelfeld imbues every scene with deep humanity in a riveting tale of universal appeal.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Library Journal
Whether anticipating the Holocaust or assessing its consequences, Appelfeld's novels read like fables: dreamy, almost otherworldly in tone, they nevertheless deliver sharp moral lessons. In his most recent work, Katerina abandons her backward village and is eventually taken in as a servant by a Jewish family. This wayward gentile girl learns to love the Jews and their customs even as they face obliteration throughout Europe. When a peasant from her village kills the child she has had with a Jewish lover, Katerina counterattacks--and becomes Katerina the murderer. Released from prison at war's end, she concludes that "there are no longer any Jews left . . . but a little of them is buried in my memory." In fact, the importance of memory is stressed throughout this unsettling novel, which contrasts Jewish rootedness in an ongoing spirituality with the free-floating vacuousness that allows gentiles mindlessly to hate Jews. Appelfeld's misty prose at times seems unmoored, but he gracefully delivers the little details that make evil what it is. This is recommended for all literary collections. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/91.
- Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
- Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful and Horrifying,
By
This review is from: Katerina (Paperback)
In my opinion, this is Appelfeld's best novel.
4.0 out of 5 stars
New Look At Terror,
This review is from: Katerina (Paperback)
"Katerina" by Aaron Appelfeld is an original look at The Holocaust. This is a piece of history, an event that has been written about countless times, but this writer's perspective is unique. The book is a historical novel; however the circumstances he describes could have, and probably did happen in very similar form.The protagonist Katerina is not a Jew, she is not raised to respect Jews, and her surroundings are that of anti Semitism. However events lead to her working for a Jewish Family, and as the years pass she learns to understand their culture and their religious beliefs. As her knowledge grows so does her respect for them and with it a steady degrading of the hatred for anti-Semitism she can no longer justify. A horrifying act of cruelty to which she reasonably responds leads to her imprisonment. And it is in this prison setting the Author creates for her decades of fear and loathing of those she came from and their hatred of Jews for which she feels such contempt. Her one consistent visitor is her Lawyer, again a Jew. She is kept in this prison where the trains that carry the Holocaust's victims pass by each day. She lives with people who happily celebrate the genocide while clothing themselves in the victim's clothes and other personal effects that were confiscated. After half of her life is passed in prison the War ends and the prisoners walk free. Even her freedom is tainted, as she is forced to endure the celebratory attitude of her fellow prisoners that all the Jews are gone, the killers of Christ have themselves been killed. So even when she returns to her village that she left behind 63 years in her past she does so knowing the people she adopted as equals have been decimated, and people that never knew her then, now know her as the murderess, the legend she has become. The Author portrays a scene of this very old woman coming upon what was a Temple, and the effect of the writing is as galvanizing as any thing you may read. This is a book that is unlike others books about the Genocide of WWII, all the horror is there, but it is left more to your mind's eye than placed before you in all its historical butchery. The emotional trauma this woman endures during the War combined with the balance of her suffering in life, is of a magnitude that is awesome both in its scope and depth of despair.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Insight into anti-Semitism as well as life as a peasant,
By A Customer
This review is from: Katerina (Paperback)
Katerina is a Ruthenian peasant woman (a Gentile), forced to work for a Jew. Over time, she becomes fascinated with the Jews. The story takes place in the Ukraine, before the Holocaust. Interesting insight into anti-Semitism as well as life as a peasant.
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