All Whom I Have Loved: A Novel

All Whom I Have Loved: A Novel

All Whom I Have Loved is the haunting story of a Jewish family in Eastern Europe in the 1930s as seen through the eyes of an unforgettable nine-year-old boy. The beloved only child of divorced parents, Paul watches helplessly as his family and his world dissolve around him. At first he lives with his mother—a secular, assimilated schoolteacher, whom he adores until she “betrays” him by marrying a gentile. He’s then sent to live with his father—once an admired avant-garde artist, but now reviled by the critics as a “decadent Jew,” who drowns his anger, pain, and humiliation in drink. Paul searches in vain for a life of stability and meaning. The earthy peasant girl who briefly takes care of him, the pull he feels toward the Jews praying in the local synagogue, and his fascination with Eastern Orthodox church rituals give him only tantalizing glimpses into worlds of which he can never be a part.   The fates that Paul’s parents will meet with Paul as terrified witness, and his own fate as an orphaned Jewish child alone in Europe in 1938, are rendered by Aharon Appelfeld with extraordinary subtlety and power, as they foreshadow, in the heart-wrenching story of three individuals, the cataclysm that is about to engulf all of European Jewry. "A riveting if ominous tale . . . In it, the unmistakable voice of a master is recognizable from its opening phrase. — California Literary Review "The urgent moral relevance of Appelfeld's profound novels is one of the scandals of our age . . . It is a mark of his humane genius that he has made a great art out of so profound a silence." — Los Angeles Times "Poetic in his instincts, Appelfeld has an artfully spare writing style, pregnant in its imagery, intentionally coy in its resonance." —Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review 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, he died in Israel in 2018. I My father and my mother—their life together was not happy. They did not quarrel and they did not blame each other, but the silence in the house was as hard as ice and could have been sliced along its length. Sometimes my father’s head would rise up, emerging out of this cold, as if he were about to shout. But this was just an illusion, for he did not raise his voice. I also learned not to disturb the silence, and I would sit on the floor playing dominos.   ###   Father works until late, and when he appears at the front door, I put on my coat and go with him. We walk around the streets for hours and eventually we drop anchor in a café. Father drinks a coffee and I, a hot chocolate. People sit differently in a café than at home. They talk loudly and their voices flow. Only Father does not change. Sometimes it seems that among people his silence is more intense. In the evening he brings me back to my house. I still remember how he would sit on the floor and play dominos with me, go into the kitchen and prepare himself a cup of tea, and light a cigarette. Now he no longer crosses the threshold.   “Why doesn’t Father come inside?” I ask Mother.   Mother shrugs and that’s her answer. It’s hard to know if she’s hurt or angry. She, too, has learned how to keep silent. But in the evening, before I close my eyes, words return to her, and she sits on my bed and reads or tells me things. Her voice is open, her face full of light. The words flow from her, and it feels good to be close to her.   ###   I turned nine, and Mother told me one day that Father would no longer be living with us but would come to visit me from time to time. I did not know what to ask and said nothing. Father is tall and lean, and even when he sits on the floor, he’s taller than I am. With his legs crossed, he leans back on his arms. I knew that from then on we would no longer be playing at home, just in the park. In the park Father’s silence is attentive; occasionally he’ll say a word or a sentence, but aside from that, nothing.   On days when it’s not raining, we walk along the river. Even here he hardly speaks. If I ask something, he’ll answer with a word or two. On the way, we come across wooden houses with thatched roofs, wells from which sturdy peasant women pull up overflowing buckets, stray animals, and many wooden crosses, but most exciting of all are the chapels. They are usually near tall trees, and you can spot them by their miniature forms, as if children had built them. We go into one wi