Badenheim 1939

Name: Badenheim 1939
ISBN: 9781567928808

Aharon Appelfeld and Dalya Bilu, Translator

A small masterpiece of world literature, set in Europe months before the Nazis began their rise.

It is spring 1939. And Badenheim, a resort town vaguely in the orbit of Vienna, is preparing for its summer season. The vacationers arrive as they always have, a sampling of Jewish middle-class life: the impresario Dr. Pappenheim, his musicians, and their conductor; the bubbly Frau Tsauberblit; the historian, Dr. Fussholdt, and his much younger wife; the "readers," twins with a passion for Rilke; a child prodigy; a commercial traveler; a rabbi.

The list of guests grows longer as the summer goes on. Receiving them in the town are the residents: the pharmacist and his worried wife, the hotelier and his large staff, the pastry shop owner and his irritable baker, Sally and Gertie (two prostitutes), and, mysteriously, the bland inspectors from the "Sanitation Department."

Finally, the vacationers, whose numbers have now increased by the forced crowding-in of other Jews hardly on vacation, become de facto prisoners in their familiar resort; their "vacation" begins to take on the lineaments of undefined disaster.

Author, and Holocaust survivor, Aharon Appelfeld created a world in Badenheim 1939 that has only gained power for readers since its publication in 1980. Philip Roth called Appelfeld "a displaced writer of displaced fiction who has made of displacement and disorientation a subject uniquely his own."

"The greatest novel of the Holocaust"—The Guardian

"The sorcery of Badenheim 1939 lies in the success with which the author has concocted a narrative involving rather ordinary characters and made their experiences profoundly symbolic yet never hollow." —The New York Times

"As real as Kafka's unnamed Prague . . . imbued with a Watteau-like melancholy." —New York Review of Books

"Magical . . . gliding from a kind of romantic realism into universal allegory." —Newsweek

"The writing flows seamlessly . . . a small masterpiece." —New York Times Book Review

About the Authors

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.