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Title: The Iron Tracks : A novel by Aharon Appelfeld ISBN: 0-8052-1099-7 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 16 February, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: From one of the world's greatest novelists
Comment: Aharon Appelfeld is one of the world's greatest living novelists, and this novel demonstrates his many virtues. Like his previous works "The Age of Wonders" and "The Immortal Bartfuss" it is short, it concentrates on Holocaust survivors, and its style is sparse, elliptical. Erwin Siegelbaum is in late middle age and has spent decades riding the trains in Austria. He makes his living by finding Jewish memorobillia in the now Judenrein countryside and buying them from gentiles who cannot recognize their value. It is a depressing business, since the Austrian countryside is drab, ugly, and ungenerous, even without the vicious anti-Semitism that Siegelbaum encounters. One converted Jew wishes that it could be wiped away like Sodom and Gommorah, and Siegelbaum at the end of the novel wishes that he could burn one town down to the ground. At the same time he is searching for vengeance against the Nazi officer who murdered his parents.
The legitimacy of this quest is not questioned by Siegelbaum, but by the end it is clear that it is not a sufficient or adequate solution to Siegelbaum's miserable, loveless life. What, after all is it like to avenge one parents, not in the abstract, but one's own actual parents? As in his earlier novels, there is the inevitable sickening ambiguity. His parents, Communist organizers, were not cruel to him, and they made considerable sacrifices for their cause. But they were often naive about the Ruthenians they tried to organize, they attacked Jewish capitalists, and were of course compromised by the Stalinist nature of the party. Erwin's father shortchanged his education, because he saw a normal education as an evil bourgeois plot (a view, given the nature of authoritarian Europe in the 1930s, that is not entirely inaccurate). His mother is burdened by a world-weariness that drains life from her before her death in a camp. After the war Siegelbaum encounters his parent's former Communist comrades and in his wandering he experiences the dissolution and decay of their ideals. If he is trapped by the past, others cannot be bothered to remember it (he encounters a quarter-Jew who is surprised to find out that the Old Testament did not mention Jesus.)
And so Siegelbaum rides the trains, bribing the waiter to switch the radio to the classical music station. Zionism or Orthodoxy do not bring him comfort and solace("Religious Jews frighten me"); his connection to Judaism that forced upon him by history and inertia: "My memory is a powerful machine that stores and constantly discharges lost years and faces. In the past I believed that travel would blunt my memory; I was wrong. Over the years, I must admit, it has only grown stronger. Were it not for my memory, my life would be different--better I assume." Recently however "A glass of cognac, for instance, separates me from my memory for a while. I feel relief as if after a terrible toothache."
Siegelbaum's connections to women are brief: "Love for a station or two is love without pretense and soon forgotten. Any contact beyond that pollutes the emotions and threatens to leave behind recriminations. Women, I regret to say, don't understand this. They do themselves a disservice, and me too, of course." This passage perfectly captures a certain variation of masculine bad faith. There are many other finely observed passages, whose absence of metaphor or stylistic eccentricity more sharply reveal Appelfeld's psychological acuity: "At night, before going to sleep, [my mother] would read me poems by Heine. I doubt that I understood anything. But the sounds flowed softly into my ears. I would be cut loose from the waking world and slip into deep sleep. Even in difficult times, when she grew morose, swallowing drink after drink, she would pick up a book and read, like someone preparing for better times." There is the disconcerting atmosphere of the small town of Gruendorf: "There seems to be no air like Gruendorf's, and during my first stays here I didn't even realize why. But now I know: it is the subtle fragrance that rises from the poppies. An odorless smell, a smell that has no obvious sign, but that directly works on the nervous system. In the past I used to flee from the place immediately, but I soon learned that flight was no use." But perhaps the supreme value of Appelfeld's message in his not his observation, but his restatement in a uniquely subtle and unmeretricious way of a vital truth. Sacrifice may be a sign of virtue, but suffering does not make one a better person. In few other authors work is it made clear that being a victim is not enough, one has still suffered but is not redeemed thereby. "If I had a different life, it wouldn't be happy. As in all my clear and drawn-out nightmares. I saw the sea of darkness, and I knew that my deeds had neither dedication nor beauty. I had done everything out of compulsion, clumsily, and always too late."
Rating: 5
Summary: Bizarre, disturbing, compelling--a unique voice.
Comment: Bizarre, disturbing, compelling--a unique voice.
Bismark once noted that "war is diplomacy by other means" but Applefeld would phrase that a bit differently, I believe. Something like "Peace is war on smaller scale", perhaps.
Intrinsically, this book is about the underlying and ancient hatreds and grievances that have dogged central Europe for more than a century and were in essence not changed a whit by the war itself.
Erwin Siegelbaum's parents were killed in the Holocaust, a fate he himself barely managed to avoid. Erwin's makes his living traveling throughout central Europe visiting local fairs and markets looking for unrecognized treasures of Jewish iconography, which he buy's on the cheap and resells to rich Jewish collectors at a premium. This keeps him constantly on the road pursuing his real occupation-looking for the man who he believes is responsible for his parent's deaths so as to extract revenge.
The book is full of irony-Erwin exploits his religion and his fellow Jews for his living to pursue an avocation not altogether consistent with his religion's message of tolerance and forgiveness. He is constantly mistaken for a non-Jew and subjected to rabid anti-Semitic rants of his other passengers whom he also tries to exploit to fine his nemesis. And so on.
Applefeld is an Israeli citizen who writes in Hebrew. Even translated, the pace and mannerisms of the translation yield a sense of authenticity and Old World feel to the text. His prose is concise and spare-yet emotional and evocative at the same time. It all adds up to a very unique and original writing voice.
This is not a happy book-it is stressful, haunting and depressing. It is also insightful and compelling reading. You will finish exhausted and emotionally drained. If that's your cup of tea, then this is your novel.
Rating: 5
Summary: Authentic
Comment: I have read three books about the Holocaust in the last several days, 2 that are exceptional, and one that was exploitative trash. The interesting aspect is that the two works that were so emotionally effective, works that left this reader feeling the weight and oppressive horror that is genocide were both novels. They were novels by an extraordinary writer and a survivor of the camps, Mr. Aharon Appelfeld. I do not know the numbers, but I would venture to guess that the non-fiction book which is commented on somewhere on my personal page, will outsell this work 100 to one, or maybe even a higher ratio. The non-fiction work is either the appendage to a lawsuit, or the bacillus that spawned it, either way its type of history is cheap opportunism. The fact the book is full of histrionics, incompetent business documentation, and shrill sound bytes, ensures it will sell. The issue it covers is valid; it's the Author's methods I take issue with.
"The Iron Tracks", is a terribly disturbing look at one man's life to avenge the death of his parents. It is a journey he set out on alone, and one he sees through to its conclusion, again on his own. Like his main character that also survived the camps the Author writes this book because serious subjects, horrifying subjects need to be documented repeatedly. And for those who ask how many books are enough, the answer is there will never be enough, enough of this type. As to the other I refer to the answer is in its specific case, one is too many. Releasing a book within 24 hours of a lawsuit against the company the book is about is the vilest sort of marketing there is, for remember this is about the murder of millions. This is not a topic that requires marketing, Madison Avenue manipulation, and greed to drive it. The horror of Genocide is absolute the evil is absolute. To speak or write of it brings the full weight to bear no enhancements are needed.
Erwin rides the same trains endlessly for decades in search of the man and his demise that he believes will end his decades of suffering and wandering. He constantly meets with other veterans of the war who believe that the Genocide was not only correct and justified, but also actually accomplished. He traces his self described oval with his annual stops, and how the oval is chipped away at as his sharing he is a Jew is freely confided with those who have welcomed him for decades, but now turn their backs without hesitation. In his decades long hunt he also retrieves the lost objects of Judaism, be they rare illuminated Haggadah, a mezuza, or a kiddush cup.
This is only the second work I have read by Mr. Appelfeld, but based on this and, "Katerina"; I intend to continue through his published works. The subject matter he has spent his career as a writer sharing with the world's readers is the type that appropriately leaves a reader emotionally exhausted, bearing a sense of futility, and trying to summon the question why, once again.
Read both Authors' work and decide for yourself.
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Title: The Conversion : A novel by Aharon Appelfeld ISBN: 0805210989 Publisher: Schocken Books Pub. Date: 14 December, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Badenheim 1939 by Aharon Appelfeld, Dalya Bilu ISBN: 0879237996 Publisher: David R Godine Pub. Date: April, 1998 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick ISBN: 0679729267 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 29 August, 1990 List Price(USD): $9.00 |
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Title: Sepharad by Margaret Sayers Peden, Antonio Munoz Molina ISBN: 0151009015 Publisher: Harcourt Pub. Date: 08 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
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Title: Fateless by Imre Kertesz, Christopher Wilson, Katharina Wilson ISBN: 0810110490 Publisher: Hydra Books Pub. Date: 21 October, 1996 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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