Volume 29, Number 1 · February 4, 1982
Enemies Within
By Al Alvarez
The Age of Wonders
by Aharon Appelfeld, translated by Dalya Bilu
Godine, 270 pp., $12.95
Aharon Appelfeld was born in Czernovitz, Bukovina—the northernmost tip of Romania—in 1932. According to his biographical note, 'In the Nazi sweep east, his mother was killed and he was deported to the labor camp at Transnistria, from which he soon escaped. He was eight years old. For the next three years he wandered the forests. Some time in 1944 he was picked up by the Red Army, served in field kitchens in the Ukraine, and thence made his way to Italy. He reached Palestine in 1946.' In other words, he is a man without a childhood, like the hero of Kozinski's The Painted Bird. He had, instead, a particularly stern version of what is sometimes called 'a European education,' which has more to do with good and evil and survival than with the Latin and algebra his narrator sweats over while the world disintegrates around him.
Review, 2126 words
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