Badenheim 1939
Aharon Appelfeld
(Author)
Dalya Bilu
(Translator)
Description
A small masterpiece of world literature, set in Europe months before the Nazis began their rise.
It is spring 1939. And Badenheim, a resort town vaguely in the orbit of Vienna, is preparing for its summer season. The vacationers arrive as they always have, a sampling of Jewish middle-class life: the impresario Dr. Pappenheim, his musicians, and their conductor; the bubbly Frau Tsauberblit; the historian, Dr. Fussholdt, and his much younger wife; the "readers," twins with a passion for Rilke; a child prodigy; a commercial traveler; a rabbi. The list of guests grows longer as the summer goes on. Receiving them in the town are the residents: the pharmacist and his worried wife, the hotelier and his large staff, the pastry shop owner and his irritable baker, Sally and Gertie (two prostitutes), and, mysteriously, the bland inspectors from the "Sanitation Department." Finally, the vacationers, whose numbers have now increased by the forced crowding-in of other Jews hardly on vacation, become de facto prisoners in their familiar resort; their "vacation" begins to take on the lineaments of undefined disaster. Author, and Holocaust survivor, Aharon Appelfeld created a world in Badenheim 1939 that has only gained power for readers since its publication in 1980. Philip Roth called Appelfeld "a displaced writer of displaced fiction who has made of displacement and disorientation a subject uniquely his own."Product Details
Price
$15.95
$14.83
Publisher
Verba Mundi
Publish Date
May 01, 2009
Pages
144
Dimensions
5.6 X 8.8 X 0.5 inches | 0.45 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781567923919
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Become an affiliateAbout the Author
Aharon Appelfeld is the author of more than forty works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Iron Tracks (winner of the National Jewish Book Award) and Until the Dawn's Light (winner of the National Jewish Book Award). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received honorary degrees from the Jewish Theological Seminary, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and Yeshiva University.
Gabriela Avigur-Rotem was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1946 and came to Israel in 1950. She holds a degree in Hebrew and English literature. She has taught literature at high school and directed writing workshops at Haifa and Ben Gurion Universities. She works as an editor at Haifa University Publishing House. Her novels include "Mozart Was Not a Jew", "Heatwave and Crazy Birds", and "Ancient Red".
Reviews
"The sorcery of Badenheim 1939 lies in the success with which the author has concocted a narrative involving rather ordinary characters and made their experienced profoundly symbolic yet never hollow."--Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times
"As real as Kafka's unnamed Prague . . . imbued with a Watteau-like melancholy."--Gabriel Annan, New York Review of Books "Magical . . . gliding from a kind of romantic realism into universal allegory."--Peter Prescott, Newsweek "The writing flows seamlessly . . . a small masterpiece."--Irving Howe, New York Times Book Review