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The Age of Wonders - SAVE 30%!

The Age of Wonders - SAVE 30%!

by Aharon Appelfeld
Translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu

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Product Details

Verba Mundi

Softcover
ISBN: 978-0-87923-798-1
Pages: 270
Size: 4.72" x 7.42"
Published: January 1990
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The secure world of a well-established and apparently perfectly assimilated Jewish writer living in an Austrian town before World War II, disintegrates under the force of political and social realities that daily sanctify the old and endemic Austrian anti-Semitism. We learn what we learn through Bruno, the thirteen-year-old son of the family, whose spare and uninflected account discloses the slow onset of disaster. His father, a successful Austrian intellectual, refuses the implications of what's happening and embraces the humiliating routines of Jewish self-hatred. To the vicious attacks on his writing and character, he adds his own voice until, with nothing left—not faith, not family, not dignity—he disappears. Thirty years later, the war long over, Bruno, at a low point in a childless marriage, responds to ambiguously positive inquiries about his father's work, and travels from his home in Jerusalem to the Austrian town of his childhood. What he encounters in that town, "now clean of Jews," enables him to face his own profound losses, and, in some measure, redeem the sins of his father.

A marvelous and disturbing book . . . an experience both painful and joyous. —Times Literary Supplement (London)

A beautifully composed and profoundly moving work of fiction. No one surpasses Aharon Appelfeld in portraying the crisis of European civilization both before and after the second World War . . . He's one of the best novelists alive. —Irving Howe

Aharon Appelfeld
Aharon Appelfeld was a novelist who resided in Israel but wrote little about life there. He focused instead on the world that surrounded his childhood—Jewish life in Europe before, during, and after World War II. Much of this work focuses on the search for a mother figure, which perhaps reflects his losing his own mother at a young age. He was also separated from his father during the Holocaust and only found him twenty years later. Appelfield's sparse, metaphorical fiction evokes rather than outright describes these tragic events and the horrors of the Holocaust.

Dalya Bilu is the translator of A.B. Yehoshua, Aharon Appelfeld, and many others. She has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Israel Culture and Education Ministry Prize for Translation, and the Jewish Book Council Award for Hebrew-English Translation. She lives in Jerusalem.