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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