To the Land of the Cattails

"[T]he quiet pathos of this futile journey from the Germanic to the Slavic sphere powerfully realizes the awful helplessness of a European Jewry trapped among enemies, the enmity itself directed against the mere fact of Jewish identity, however empty of content that identity might be. Descriptive detail is kept to the barest minimum, and this stringent economy reinforces the generalizing effect of the narrative, making us feel that the experience reported is not just that of Toni and Rudi but of all those teeming fugitives lost in a continent inexorably bent on their destruction....What saves this style from flatness, what in fact endows it with a kind of oneiric power, is a repeated movement of lyric perception, usually carried out through succinct metaphors or similes. (Jeffrey Green's translation, despite a tendency to excessive literalism, generally manages to catch the quiet effectiveness of this lyricism.)"Appelfeld, Aharon is the author of 'To the Land of the Cattails', published 1994 under ISBN 9780802133595 and ISBN 0802133592.