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Katerina

A Novel

Author Aharon Appelfeld
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Paperback
$16.00 US
Knopf | Schocken
On sale Feb 07, 2006 | 224 Pages | 978-0-8052-1198-6
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  • Humanities & Social Sciences > English > Comparative Literature > Literature of the Holocaust
  • Humanities & Social Sciences > English > Comparative Literature: Russia and Eastern Europe > Eastern Europe
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  • About
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Fleeing an abusive home and trying to purge herself of self-destructive behaviors, Katerina, a teenage Ukranian peasant, is taken in by a Jewish family and becomes their housekeeper. Adopting their customs and rituals, feeling the warmth of family life for the first time, she is traumatized when the parents are murdered in separate pogroms and the children are taken away by relatives. She finds work with a series of other Jewish families, all of whom are subjected to relentless persecution by their neighbors, and she incorporates their observances into her own Christian life. But when the beloved child she has had with her Jewish lover is murdered by a jealous peasant, Katerina kills the murderer and is sent to prison. Released from prison in the chaos following the end of World War II, a now elderly Katerina is devastated to find a world emptied of its Jews and not at all sorry to see them gone. Ever the outsider, she realizes that she herself has survived so as to bear witness to the fact that these people had ever existed at all.

In his signature spare and haunting prose, Aharon Appelfeld contrasts unfathomable hatred with the unqualified and redemptive love of the Righteous Gentile and of a God who is never far from those who truly seek Him.


"In telling this story through Katerina's eyes, Appelfeld is able to portray anti-Semitism from the perspective of the non-Jew, while recording the freshness of the outrage as felt by a sympathetic gentile who is not in any way prepared for, let alone inured to, bearing the brunt of bigotry. Without taking the reader inside the living nightmare of the death camps, without showing a single scene of mass destruction, Appelfeld brilliantly recreates the climate of suspicion, fear, and deep-dyed prejudice that made these monstrous events possible." —Christian Science Monitor

"Appelfeld reimagines the place of his own origins through a perspective that in its generosity of feeling recalls Tolstoy and Chekhov." —Judith Grossman, New York Times Book Review

"Read this book. . . . Think what a gift of lyric language and style, of emotion purified by pain this is." —Anne Roiphe, Los Angeles Times

"Katerina is a fable, almost dreamlike in mood and language. Appelfeld draws the reader entirely into his world and makes that world seem utterly real; he works a kind of magic." —Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post
1
 
My name is Katerina, and I will soon be eighty years old. After Easter I returned to my native village and to my father’s farm, small and dilapidated, with no building left intact except this hut where I’m living. But it has one single window, open wide, and it allows in the breadth of the world. My eyes, in truth, have grown weaker, but the desire to see still throbs within them. At noon, when the light is most powerful, open space expands before me as far as the banks of the Prut, whose water is blue this season, vibrant with splendor.
 
I left this place behind more than sixty years ago—but it hasn’t changed much. The vegetation, that green eternity which envelops these hills, stands tall. If my eyes do not deceive me, it’s even greener. A few trees from my distant childhood still stand straight and sprout leaves, not to mention that enchanting, wavelike movement of these hills. Everything in its place, except for the people. They’ve all left and gone away.
 
In the early morning hours, I remove the heavy veils that obscure the many years and examine them, with silent observation, face to face, as they say in Scripture.
 
The summer nights in this season are long and splendid, and not only are the oaks reflected in the lake, but the simple reeds also draw vigor from that clear water. I always loved that modest lake, but I especially loved it during the brilliant summer nights, when the line between heaven and earth is erased and the whole cosmos is suffused with heavenly light. The years in a foreign land distanced me from these marvels, and they were obliterated from my memory, but not, apparently, from my heart. Not I know that light is what drew me back. Such purity, oh Lord! Sometimes I wish to stretch out my hand and touch the breezes that meet me on my way, because in this season they are soft as silk.
 
It's hard to sleep on these brilliant summer nights. Sometimes it seems to me that it’s a sin to sleep in this brilliance. I understand now what it says in the Holy Scriptures: “He who stretches out the heaven like a thin curtain.” The word curtain always sounded strange and distant. Now I can see the thin curtain.
 
Walking is very hard for me. Without the broad window, which is open wide, without it taking me out and bringing me in, I would be locked up in here like in prison, but this opening, by its grace, brings me out easily, and I wander over the meadows as in my youth. Late at night, when the light dims on the horizon, I return to my cage, my hunger sated and my thirst slaked, and I shut my eyes. When I close my eyes I encounter other faces, faces I haven’t seen before.
 
On Sundays I pull myself together and go down to the chapel. The distance from my hut to the chapel isn’t great, a quarter of an hour’s walk. In my youth I used to cover the distance in a single bound. Then all my life was a single puff of breeze, but today, though every step is painful, that walk is still very important to me. These stones awaken my memory from before memory, and I see not only my departed mother but everyone who ever passed over these paths, knelt, wept, and prayed. For some reason it now seems that they all used to wear fur coats. Maybe because of a nameless peasant, who came here secretly, prayed, and afterward took his life with his own hand. He shouts pierced my temples.
 
The chapel building is old and rickety yet lovely in its simplicity. The wooden buttresses that my father installed still protect it. My father wasn’t scrupulous about keeping our religion, but he saw it as his duty not to neglect this small sanctuary. I remember, as though in a twilight, the beams he carried on his shoulders, thick staves, and the way he pounded them into the earth with a huge wooden mallet. My father seemed like a giant to me then, and his work was the work of giants. Those beams, though they’ve rotted, are still rooted in their place. Inanimate objects live a long life; only man is snatched away untimely.
 
Whoever thought I would come back here? I had erased this first bosom from my memory like an animal, but a person’s memory is stronger than he is. What the will doesn’t do is done by necessity, and necessity ultimately becomes will. I’m not sorry I returned. Apparently, it was ordained.
 
I sit on a low bench in a chapel for an hour or two. The silence here is massive, perhaps because of the valley that surrounds the place. As a girl I used to run after cows and goats on these trails. How blind and marvelous my life was then. I was like one of the animals I drove, strong like them and just as mute. Of those years no outward trace remains, just me, the years crammed into me, and my old age. Old age brings a person closer to himself and to the dead. The beloved dead bring us close to God.
Copyright © 2006 by Aharon Appelfeld. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
© Frederic Brenner

AHARON APPELFELD is the author of more than forty works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Iron Tracks, Until the Dawn's Light (both winners of the National Jewish Book Award), The Story of a Life (winner of the Prix Médicis Étranger), and Badenheim 1939. Other honors he has received include the Giovanni Boccaccio Literary Prize, the Nelly Sachs Prize, the Israel Prize, the Bialik Prize, and the MLA Commonwealth Award. Blooms of Darkness won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2012 and was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013. Born in Czernowitz, Bukovina (now part of Ukraine), in 1932, Appelefeld died in Israel in 2018.

View titles by Aharon Appelfeld
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About

Fleeing an abusive home and trying to purge herself of self-destructive behaviors, Katerina, a teenage Ukranian peasant, is taken in by a Jewish family and becomes their housekeeper. Adopting their customs and rituals, feeling the warmth of family life for the first time, she is traumatized when the parents are murdered in separate pogroms and the children are taken away by relatives. She finds work with a series of other Jewish families, all of whom are subjected to relentless persecution by their neighbors, and she incorporates their observances into her own Christian life. But when the beloved child she has had with her Jewish lover is murdered by a jealous peasant, Katerina kills the murderer and is sent to prison. Released from prison in the chaos following the end of World War II, a now elderly Katerina is devastated to find a world emptied of its Jews and not at all sorry to see them gone. Ever the outsider, she realizes that she herself has survived so as to bear witness to the fact that these people had ever existed at all.

In his signature spare and haunting prose, Aharon Appelfeld contrasts unfathomable hatred with the unqualified and redemptive love of the Righteous Gentile and of a God who is never far from those who truly seek Him.


"In telling this story through Katerina's eyes, Appelfeld is able to portray anti-Semitism from the perspective of the non-Jew, while recording the freshness of the outrage as felt by a sympathetic gentile who is not in any way prepared for, let alone inured to, bearing the brunt of bigotry. Without taking the reader inside the living nightmare of the death camps, without showing a single scene of mass destruction, Appelfeld brilliantly recreates the climate of suspicion, fear, and deep-dyed prejudice that made these monstrous events possible." —Christian Science Monitor

"Appelfeld reimagines the place of his own origins through a perspective that in its generosity of feeling recalls Tolstoy and Chekhov." —Judith Grossman, New York Times Book Review

"Read this book. . . . Think what a gift of lyric language and style, of emotion purified by pain this is." —Anne Roiphe, Los Angeles Times

"Katerina is a fable, almost dreamlike in mood and language. Appelfeld draws the reader entirely into his world and makes that world seem utterly real; he works a kind of magic." —Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post

Excerpt

1
 
My name is Katerina, and I will soon be eighty years old. After Easter I returned to my native village and to my father’s farm, small and dilapidated, with no building left intact except this hut where I’m living. But it has one single window, open wide, and it allows in the breadth of the world. My eyes, in truth, have grown weaker, but the desire to see still throbs within them. At noon, when the light is most powerful, open space expands before me as far as the banks of the Prut, whose water is blue this season, vibrant with splendor.
 
I left this place behind more than sixty years ago—but it hasn’t changed much. The vegetation, that green eternity which envelops these hills, stands tall. If my eyes do not deceive me, it’s even greener. A few trees from my distant childhood still stand straight and sprout leaves, not to mention that enchanting, wavelike movement of these hills. Everything in its place, except for the people. They’ve all left and gone away.
 
In the early morning hours, I remove the heavy veils that obscure the many years and examine them, with silent observation, face to face, as they say in Scripture.
 
The summer nights in this season are long and splendid, and not only are the oaks reflected in the lake, but the simple reeds also draw vigor from that clear water. I always loved that modest lake, but I especially loved it during the brilliant summer nights, when the line between heaven and earth is erased and the whole cosmos is suffused with heavenly light. The years in a foreign land distanced me from these marvels, and they were obliterated from my memory, but not, apparently, from my heart. Not I know that light is what drew me back. Such purity, oh Lord! Sometimes I wish to stretch out my hand and touch the breezes that meet me on my way, because in this season they are soft as silk.
 
It's hard to sleep on these brilliant summer nights. Sometimes it seems to me that it’s a sin to sleep in this brilliance. I understand now what it says in the Holy Scriptures: “He who stretches out the heaven like a thin curtain.” The word curtain always sounded strange and distant. Now I can see the thin curtain.
 
Walking is very hard for me. Without the broad window, which is open wide, without it taking me out and bringing me in, I would be locked up in here like in prison, but this opening, by its grace, brings me out easily, and I wander over the meadows as in my youth. Late at night, when the light dims on the horizon, I return to my cage, my hunger sated and my thirst slaked, and I shut my eyes. When I close my eyes I encounter other faces, faces I haven’t seen before.
 
On Sundays I pull myself together and go down to the chapel. The distance from my hut to the chapel isn’t great, a quarter of an hour’s walk. In my youth I used to cover the distance in a single bound. Then all my life was a single puff of breeze, but today, though every step is painful, that walk is still very important to me. These stones awaken my memory from before memory, and I see not only my departed mother but everyone who ever passed over these paths, knelt, wept, and prayed. For some reason it now seems that they all used to wear fur coats. Maybe because of a nameless peasant, who came here secretly, prayed, and afterward took his life with his own hand. He shouts pierced my temples.
 
The chapel building is old and rickety yet lovely in its simplicity. The wooden buttresses that my father installed still protect it. My father wasn’t scrupulous about keeping our religion, but he saw it as his duty not to neglect this small sanctuary. I remember, as though in a twilight, the beams he carried on his shoulders, thick staves, and the way he pounded them into the earth with a huge wooden mallet. My father seemed like a giant to me then, and his work was the work of giants. Those beams, though they’ve rotted, are still rooted in their place. Inanimate objects live a long life; only man is snatched away untimely.
 
Whoever thought I would come back here? I had erased this first bosom from my memory like an animal, but a person’s memory is stronger than he is. What the will doesn’t do is done by necessity, and necessity ultimately becomes will. I’m not sorry I returned. Apparently, it was ordained.
 
I sit on a low bench in a chapel for an hour or two. The silence here is massive, perhaps because of the valley that surrounds the place. As a girl I used to run after cows and goats on these trails. How blind and marvelous my life was then. I was like one of the animals I drove, strong like them and just as mute. Of those years no outward trace remains, just me, the years crammed into me, and my old age. Old age brings a person closer to himself and to the dead. The beloved dead bring us close to God.
Copyright © 2006 by Aharon Appelfeld. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Author

© Frederic Brenner

AHARON APPELFELD is the author of more than forty works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Iron Tracks, Until the Dawn's Light (both winners of the National Jewish Book Award), The Story of a Life (winner of the Prix Médicis Étranger), and Badenheim 1939. Other honors he has received include the Giovanni Boccaccio Literary Prize, the Nelly Sachs Prize, the Israel Prize, the Bialik Prize, and the MLA Commonwealth Award. Blooms of Darkness won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2012 and was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013. Born in Czernowitz, Bukovina (now part of Ukraine), in 1932, Appelefeld died in Israel in 2018.

View titles by Aharon Appelfeld

Additional formats

  • Katerina
    Katerina
    A Novel
    Aharon Appelfeld
    978-0-307-48670-7
    Ebook
    Schocken
    Sep 23, 2009
  • Katerina
    Katerina
    A Novel
    Aharon Appelfeld
    978-0-307-48670-7
    Ebook
    Schocken
    Sep 23, 2009

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    $23.95 US
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    $14.00 US
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    Schocken
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    $15.00 US
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    Schocken
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    $15.00 US
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