All Whom I Have Loved

Name: All Whom I Have Loved
ISBN: 9780307481320

A Novel

Aharon Appelfeld

The haunting story of a Jewish family in Eastern Europe in the 1930s that prefigures the fate of the Jews during World War II.

At the center is nine-year-old Paul Rosenfeld, the beloved only child of divorced parents, through whose eyes we view a dissolving, increasingly chaotic world. Initially, Paul lives with his mother–a secular, assimilated schoolteacher, who he adores until she “betrays” him by marrying the gentile André. He is 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 stability and meaning in a world that is collapsing around him, but his love for the earthy peasant girl who briefly takes care of him, the strange pull he feels towards the Jews praying in the synagogue near his home, and the fascination with which he observes Eastern Orthodox church rituals merely give him 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–his mother, deserted by her new husband and dying of typhus; his father, gunned down while trying to stop the robbery of a Jewish-owned shop–and his own fate as an orphaned Jewish child alone in Europe in 1938 are rendered 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.

About the Author

Aharon Appelfeld (1932–2018) was one of Israel's most celebrated novelists and a leading voice in Holocaust literature.

Born in Czernowitz, Bukovina (then part of Romania, now Ukraine), Appelfeld was eight when the Nazis invaded. His mother was murdered, and he was deported with his father to a labor camp in Transnistria. He escaped and spent years surviving alone in the forests and villages of Ukraine, then served with the Soviet army before making his way to Palestine in 1946. There he learned Hebrew, a language he would adopt as his literary medium, and later studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Appelfeld published more than forty books, including novels, story collections, essays, and a memoir. His spare, restrained prose rarely depicts the Holocaust directly. Instead, he explores the world on its edge: the assimilated European Jewish life that preceded catastrophe, and the dislocation of survivors afterward. Among his best-known works are Badenheim 1939, The Iron Tracks, Tzili: The Story of a Life, The Story of a Life (his memoir), and Blooms of Darkness.

His honors include the Israel Prize (2004), the Prix Médicis étranger, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Nelly Sachs Prize, among others. He taught literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and was a longtime resident of Mevaseret Zion, near Jerusalem.

Appelfeld's work has been translated into dozens of languages. He is remembered for giving quiet, humane expression to experiences that many considered beyond the reach of words.