All Whom I Have Loved

by Aharon Appelfeld

Overview

All Whom I Have Loved is the haunting story of a Jewish family in Eastern Europe in the 1930s as seen through the eyes of an unforgettable nine-year-old boy. The beloved only child of divorced parents, Paul watches helplessly as his family and his world dissolve around him. At first he lives with his mother—a secular, assimilated schoolteacher, whom he adores until she “betrays” him by marrying a gentile. He’s 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 a life of stability and meaning. The earthy peasant girl who briefly takes care of him, the pull he feels toward the Jews praying in the local synagogue, and his fascination with Eastern Orthodox church rituals give him only 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, and his own fate as an orphaned Jewish child alone in Europe in 1938, are rendered by Aharon Appelfeld 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780805211252
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/10/2015
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.19(w) x 8.02(h) x 0.72(d)

About the Author

AHARON APPELFELD is the author of more than forty works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Iron Tracks, Until the Dawn's Light (both winners of the National Jewish Book Award), The Story of a Life (winner of the Prix Médicis Étranger), and Badenheim 1939. Other honors he has received include the Giovanni Boccaccio Literary Prize, the Nelly Sachs Prize, the Israel Prize, the Bialik Prize, and the MLA Commonwealth Award. Blooms of Darkness won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2012 and was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013. Born in Czernowitz, Bukovina (now part of Ukraine), in 1932, he died in Israel in 2018.

Editorial Reviews

"A riveting if ominous tale . . . In it, the unmistakable voice of a master is recognizable from its opening phrase. —California Literary Review

"The urgent moral relevance of Appelfeld's profound novels is one of the scandals of our age . . . It is a mark of his humane genius that he has made a great art out of so profound a silence." —Los Angeles Times

"Poetic in his instincts, Appelfeld has an artfully spare writing style, pregnant in its imagery, intentionally coy in its resonance." —Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

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 fiance 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.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

This haunting and mesmerizing story from internationally acclaimed Israeli writer Appelfeld is narrated by nine-year-old Paul Rosenfeld, who lives with his mother, a secular, assimilated Jew in the pre-World War II Ukrainian village of Czernowitz (where Appelfeld was born in 1932). The sights and sounds of the village are so vivid and the scenery, people, and life of the townsfolk described so viscerally that the book is truly a tribute to the all-encompassing power of Appelfeld's memory. Paul is able to discern what his schoolteacher mother is thinking and feeling and what his alcoholic father's moods will be. Early on, Paul has his mother's attention fully; they swim together and take long walks, and she makes him his favorite dishes. But then she marries the gentile Andre, and Paul has to live with his father, once a noted artist and now referred to as a decadent Jew. The foreshadowing of the Holocaust, which will engulf all of European Jewry, is evident throughout. Highly recommended.
—Molly Abramowitz

Library Journal

The shadows of World War II and the Holocaust gather slowly and menacingly throughout this previously untranslated 1999 novel from the internationally celebrated Israeli author (The Iron Tracks, 1998, etc.). Ingenuous narrator Paul Rosenfeld is a six-year-old boy living in the Ukraine in the 1930s, sometimes with his mother, Henia (a schoolteacher), sometimes with his father, Arthur, a gifted painter from whom Henia is divorced. Concentrated in the spare declarative sentences that are the author's trademark, the novel deftly renders Paul's growing awareness of both his mother's need for more love than he can give her (provided now by the new husband, whom Paul bitterly resents) and the anger intensifying in his father, who is forced to abandon painting and teach high-school art, and is simultaneously appalled and energized by evidence of growing anti-Semitic prejudice. Unfortunately, the story is heavily weighted with foreshadowings that come in the form of Paul's perceptions and disturbing dreams. The sounds of livestock being slaughtered, for example, produce a vision of "blood flowing in the sky and pouring into the horizon." They are affecting moments, but they reveal too nakedly the author's heavy hand. Appelfeld succeeds, however, in charting Arthur's increasing despair, as an exhibition offers the chance to create once again-until the climate of repression awakens the violence that will consume him, just as the perilous temper of the times has claimed Henia, leaving Paul to face the future they have all feared: alone. Artful and troubling. Still, Appelfeld has written many better books than this one.

Kirkus Reviews