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Article: Aharon Appelfeld. Katerina.(Brief article)(Book review)
- Article from:
- The Review of Contemporary Fiction
- Article date:
- March 22, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 Review of Contemporary Fiction. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Aharon Appelfeld. Katerina. Trans. Jeffrey M. Green. Schocken Books, 2006. 212 pp. Paper: $13.00.
The Holocaust looms about Aharon Appelfeld's fiction. For forty years, Appelfeld, himself deported to the camps when he was only eight, has confronted its forbidding obscenity, but indirectly--tales of family members whose relatives did not survive, of those whose idyllic days dwindle away even as the catastrophe relentlessly approaches, or of those haunted by their fortunate survival. In Katerina, a Christian farmgirl flees an abusive father in late 1880s Ukraine. She becomes a housekeeper for a Jewish family and comes to appreciate the rich traditions of the Jewish ...