Around and Over and About Bridgeport
DAVIS, HOPE HALE
Growing Up in Bukovina Katerina By Aharon Appelfeld Translated by Jeffrey Green Random House. 212 pp. $18.00. Reviewed by Elie Wiesel Winner, 1986 Nobel Peace Prize; author, "Souls on Fire," "A...
...Katerina was in prison because she killed a man who, in trying to rape her, had murdered her son in front of her eyes...
...How can we not love her...
...I sometimes seem to know or recognize some of his characters who are seeking forgiveness or happiness...
...There are no longer any Jews," cried one old woman prison inmate...
...She tells of growing up somewhere in Bukovina, in a village where Jews and Christians led a normal life: It was "normal" for the Christians to persecute the Jews...
...In our house, we called her Maria...
...Thanks to her, humanity as Aharon Appelfeld knew it is not irrevocably dishonored...
...But Katerina was an exception??a unique case...
...He knows how to evoke with admirable simplicity the loneliness of someone who has suddenly suffered a great loss, anti-Semitic hatred that is inherited or mob inspired, as well as the power of memory in a noble and courageous woman who is the victim of an unjust and cruel fate...
...I remember her...
...The changing colors of their world are familiar to me...
...He ranks among Israel's foremost writers...
...Having spent a long time with Jews, she learned to bring them back to life in her memory...
...Naturally, there is also the fact that he has a real storytelling gift...
...It is Katerina who speaks...
...There she became even more attached to the Jewish people than before...
...At last they are burning...
...Above all, she loved the head of the family, Benjamin, without, of course, letting him know...
...Get up everybody and go home...
...How explain, how comprehend such hatred on their part toward men, women and children with whom they had been in contact or had known...
...Like Katerina she made sure that our food was strictly kosher...
...Translated from the French by Norman Jacobs...
...Like Katerina she spoke Yiddish fluently...
...Brave Katerina...
...If so, what are we to think of the religion that served as its inspiration or motivation...
...The reader will not find it surprising that she comes to think she is the only Jewess left on earth...
...Death to the peddlers," they sang as if they were reciting a litany...
...It is impossible not to feel this way when we learn from her that even in prison old women rejoiced as trains passed by carrying Jews to their death...
...The Jews were thus not only the victims of their enemies, but also the victims of their victims...
...Listening to Katerina, we are at times filled with despair for society, and even more for human nature...
...Is that why I have liked everything Appelfeld has written, from his first novel to this one, his ninth...
...They saw this as the hand of God taking revenge for the blood of Christ...
...She loved him infinitely more after his murder...
...And it was "normal" for the Jews, vagabond peddlers or beggars, to try to gain acceptance, to put faith in dangerous old illusions while attempting to live between two pogroms with their murderers...
...All the Jews whom Katerina loved are killed by hate-filled fanatics: in the name of Christ on the one hand, and to grab their possessions on the other...
...Was it only ancestral religious hatred...
...It was as though they were in prison because of the Jews and not because of their own crimes...
...Freed from prison Katerina moved into the ruins of Jewish houses...
...Her own people made her suffer a thousand deaths because she loved the Jews...
...Many murders take place in this novel...
...Hired by a Jewish family as a servant, she set about learning Yiddish and Jewish rituals and loved the family with a profound and disinterested affection...
...Death to the Jews...
...Condemned to forced labor for life, she spent 40 years in prison...
...Like Katerina she was ready to risk her life to save the Jewish family she regarded as her own...
...author, "Souls on Fire," "A Beggar in Jerusalem," "The Forgotten" Aharon Appelfeld's fictional universe is close to mine...
...This is a passionate and overwhelming book that you cannot read without being moved...
Vol. 75 • December 1992 • No. 16
