April 24, 2023
Appelfeld (To the Edge of Sorrow), who died in 2018, offers an engrossing tale of a Jewish man’s return to his ancestral village. Yaakov Fein has prospered since he turned his late parents’ Tel Aviv textile business into a women’s fashion shop, but he is struggling with an unhappy marriage and an empty nest. He’s long wanted to visit Szydowce, Poland, the farming village where his parents were born and his grandparents and other Jews were murdered during WWII, and decides to finally make the trip. There, he’s captivated by the green pastures and the swirling river, and by Magda, a beautiful farmer who knew his grandparents and tells him about his family. But the visit turns sour after he picks up on antisemitism from some locals, and the mayor attempts to extort him after he offers to buy the Jewish cemetery’s broken tombstones. Appelfeld structures the narrative in dreamed conversations between Yaakov and his deceased mother, which offer an account of what his parents couldn’t tell him when they were alive: that as a young married couple during WWII, they hid in cellars, a cowshed, and in the forest, and his grandparents were burned alive in their synagogue. The dreams are vivid and economically written, and the unsettling, unresolved ending adds heft. This powerful, bittersweet performance does not disappoint.
