Appelfeld, Aharon
2 total works
The eighth of Aharon Appelfeld's brilliantly original novels to be published in English, The Healer is a remarkable story about faith and faithlessness among European Jews on the eve of World War II. Felix Katz is a Viennese businessman whose life is choked by suppressed rage and intolerance for those who have faith. When conventional methods fail to cure his daughter's emotional illness, Felix in desperation agrees to travel with his family to the Carpathian Mountains in search of a famous healer. Months later, after being snowbound in a rural Jewish village that sustains itself on faith, Felix returns to a Vienna plagued by the disease of anti-Semitism. The Healer wonderfully combines elements of fable with the complex sensibility of a great modernist writer sensitive to the overbearing moral issues of our time.
Set in contemporary Israel, The Immortal Bartfuss is perhaps the most profound and powerful portrait of a Holocaust survivor ever drawn. Using the techniques of omission and indirection perfected in such masterpieces as Badenheim 1939 and To the Land of the Cattails, Appelfeld tells the story of Bartfuss, enigmatically "the immortal" because of his experience in the camps. Now locked in a hopeless marriage, Bartfuss struggles to suppress the emotions and recollections he fears and despises, while trying to keep alive the poise, dignity, and compassion essential to a human being. The Immortal Bartfuss is an overwhelming and unforgettable study of a man reduced to his tragic limits.