Aharon Appelfeld’s novel’s based on recollections of Ukrainian women who looked after him in early childhood, before he was dispatched to a concentration camp aged nine. A year later, after he escaped, it was women like these who helped him survive. Narrated by Katerina who’s in her eighties, it opens in Ukraine in the late 1940s. Released from prison after forty years, Katerina lives alone in a small village, in a dilapidated hut that once belonged to her father. She spends her time reflecting on her past. Katerina grew up in the late 19th century, conditions were harsh, poverty was widespread but everyone around her was united in their hatred of local Jewish communities. Jewish merchants were useful for goods they brought to the village but even more attractive as scapegoats and prey: regularly subjected to outbursts of devastating violence, slaughtered during brutal pogroms. But looking for work brought Katerina into direct contact with the Jews, living in their homes, caring for their children. She gradually learnt their customs and language. Katerina’s attachment to Jewish culture unexpectedly shaped her life. Now Jewish people seem to have vanished from her world, transported on the trains Katerina heard from her prison cell. So, Katerina vows to keep them alive through her memories. Katerina’s an arresting figure, although she sometimes reads more as a vehicle for Appelfeld’s recreation of the lost histories of his family and families like them. Appelfeld’s prose style often felt awkward and forced, ultimately making this more convincing as a portrait of a time, a place and a culture than it was as a story.

Written from the POV of a Christian girl who flees her abusive home, we witness the hatred, pogrom and systemic violence and discrimination towards Jewish people in today’s Ukraine before the WWI and Holocaust.
Katerina is a strong narrator and character, the book is not long (is this maybe a better fit for a longer short story to avoid repetition; to be honest, I am not entirely sure), the themes are important and less explored. and the prose and the plot are 3-3.5 stars.

Unusual, original and deeply unsettling, this short novel by Aharon Appelfeld is quite remarkable in its power and ability to disturb. When we first meet her, Katerina, the eponymous protagonist, is living in a hut on her deceased family’s farm in the Ukraine, just after WWII. She has recently been released from prison, but it is only later that we discover what her crime was. As she looks out of the window, she reflects back over her 80 years, starting from her childhood in an abusive Ruthenian family in the 1880s and her escape from them. She finds refuge, work and solace in a family of Jews, which begins a complex and complicated relationship with Judaism. Traditionally the Ruthenians have been fiercely anti-Semitic, but as Katerina gets to know the Jewish community she finds herself more and more attracted to their values and way of life. Having always felt an outsider in her own community she seems to find acceptance and a sense of belonging amongst Jews as she gradually overcomes her own fears and prejudices. She never converts, however, and clings to her own Catholic religion to the end, but her sympathies lie always with the Jews, and she is devastated to discover when she is finally released from prison that the Jews have all disappeared. In fact she saw the transports from the prison fields where she worked and was witness to the glee of the other Gentile prisoners at the fate awaiting the deportees in the camps. She is horrified that the prisoners are given the clothes of the Jewish community to wear as she thinks back to the kindness she had always received from the people she worked for. Narrated from her point of view and in her own voice, the book is an emotional read, as the horrors of the Holocaust are seen through the eyes of an uneducated peasant woman. Not that all the Jews she meets are saintly – the book remains nuanced and balanced – but the cheers of the prisoners as they watch the trains will continue to haunt me, and Katerina’s story will long stay with me.

This book is unlike anything I have read before. It’s the first Hebrew-in-translation novel I’ve read, and I’m not sure the extent to which it’s typical of Hebrew fiction from the late 20th century.

In it, the author tells the story of the 1940s pogrom from the perspective of a gentile woman who doesn’t feel at home with her own people, finds peace and familial feeling for a while working in Jewish households and then, after being sent to prison for a terrible crime (which we are left to decide for ourselves whether or not she was justified to commit), she bears a remote witness to the Holocaust. Working in the prison fields she sees trainload after trainload of Jewish people being sent to the death camps and smells the sickening smoke from the camp nearby. Prisoners are given Jewish clothes to wear.

After serving her sentence, she is amazed to return to her home village and experience life in which a significant number of the local area’s inhabitants are gone- have been exterminated.

What makes the novel so affecting is not just the awful things that happen to Katerina, but her stolid acceptance of them. There is a fatalism she embodies. And a submission to the strange period of history she is living through.

Three word review: completely different worldview.

I have heard of Appelfeld but this was my first time reading his writing and I was enraptured from the start. It is a fairly short read but is relentless. It is gritty and violent but this never strays into being gratuitous or unnecessary. It is an extremely timely and important read that has been really well translated.