The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping

A young holocaust survivor tries to create a new life in the newly established state of Israel.

Erwin doesn’t remember much about his journey across Europe when the war ended because he spent most of it asleep, carried by other survivors as they emerged from their hiding places or were liberated from the camps and made their way to Naples, where they filled refugee camps and wondered what was to become of them. Erwin becomes part of a group of boys being rigorously trained both physically and mentally by an emissary from Palestine for life in their new home. When he and his fellow clandestine immigrants are released by British authorities from their detention camp near Haifa, they are assigned to a kibbutz, where they learn how to tend the land and speak their new language. But a part of Erwin clings to the past—to memories of his parents, his mother tongue, the Ukrainian city where he was born—and he knows that despite what he is being told, who he was is just as important as who he is becoming.

When he is wounded in an engagement with snipers, Erwin spends months trying to regain the use of his legs. As he exercises his body, he exercises his mind as well, copying passages from the Bible in his newly acquired Hebrew and working up the courage to create his own texts in this language both old and new, hoping to succeed as a writer where his beloved, tormented father had failed. With the support of his friends and the encouragement of his mother (who visits him in his dreams), Erwin takes his first tentative steps with his crutches—and with his pen. Once again, Aharon Appelfeld mines personal experience to create dazzling, masterly fiction with a universal resonance.

“As its title suggests, there is a dazed, dreamlike quality to the prose of this bildungsroman, in which a masterly English translation by Jeffrey M. Green manages to retain the direct, concrete quality of the original Hebrew as well as its austere poetry. This is particularly valuable in a novel whose subject is, in part, language and how it forms us, what it lets us see and what it obscures.” —Geraldine Brooks, The New York Times Book Review

"Powerful and hallucinatory. . . . Haunted by loss, illuminated by hope, and richly textured with tradition, Appelfeld's narrative probes questions of history and identity, vocation and meaning in language that's deceptively simple—as luminous and lingering as poetry." —Christian Century

"By constantly recasting the stories he has created over a long career, Appelfeld creates a literary way of bringing his pre-Holocaust past into his Israeli present. There is no longer a need to return to Bukovina in Ukraine. There is a creative way of bringing Bukovina to the cafe in Beit Ticho in Jerusalem, where the venerable and venerated Appelfeld comes to sit and write." —Hadassah magazine

“Gently tragic, intensely moving, and filled with metaphor. . . . Careful reading showcases the author’s exquisite poetic style, drawing us into Erwin’s painful experiences and his determination to form an identity that both encompasses his roots and honors what (and who) has been lost.” —Booklist, starred review

“Appelfeld’s novel delineates the process of becoming a writer, with details incorporated from his experience as a Holocaust survivor and refugee. . . . Throughout, he focuses not on historical events or moral judgments but on the formation of a writer, one much like himself, able to transform memory into transcendent prose.” —Publishers Weekly, starred and boxed review

“Appelfeld once again delivers with a novel of great sensitivity, finely attuned to the difficulties of responding to post-Holocaust living. . . . His style is never flashy, but the plainness of his writing gives these events both starkness and power.” —Kirkus Reviews