MARCH 12 • 2020 | 45
A
haron Appelfeld’
s new
novel, To the End of
Sorrow, was written in
Hebrew in 2012 and published
in January by Schocken Books
in an English translation by
Stuart Schoffman.
It takes place during World
War II, in a part of
Romania that is now
Ukraine.
Our narrator is a
17-year-old Jewish
boy named Edmund,
who has escaped the
camps and is now
a Jewish soldier in
the resistance effort.
Appelfeld himself
grew up around the same time
and in the same region. His
mother and grandmother were
murdered by the Romanian
army when he was 9, and he
and his father were sent on a
forced march to a labor camp.
Appelfeld escaped the camp
and wound up disguising his
identity and working as a shep-
herd for Ukranian peasants for
three years. Twenty years later,
he was reunited with his father,
whom he thought had been
killed during the war.
On the surface, To the End of
Sorrow is about war, Judaism,
suffering and daily life. Yet, in
an original way, none of the
plot elements corresponding
to these themes — long slogs
through swamplands, debates
about religion, daily life matters
like eating, cooking,
dreaming and bury-
ing the dead — are
represented through
literary realism.
Instead, there is a
kind of spiritual real-
ism, in which round-
ness of character and
texture of history take
a backseat to parable,
myth and folktale.
In that sense, Appelfeld —
who died in 2018 at the age of
85 — has been rightly com-
pared to Franz Kafka.
With 85 short chapters that
work in many ways as stand-
alone pieces, To the End of
Sorrow can justly be read as an
allegory of the spiritual jour-
ney. The novel might be appre-
ciated one or two chapters a
time, to drink, in an unhurried
way, its intensely imaginative
climate.
ANDREW FIELD CONTRIBUTING WRITER
SCHOCKEN BOOKS
A Survivor’s Story
into a Spiritual Journey
Arts&Life
books/review
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS/JWH
Aharon
Appelfeld
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