Gratuit avec l'essai de 30 jours
-
Poland, a Green Land
- A Novel
- Narrateur(s): Gilli Messer
- Durée: 6 h et 11 min
Échec de l'ajout au panier.
Échec de l'ajout à la liste d'envies.
Échec de la suppression de la liste d’envies.
Échec du suivi du balado
Ne plus suivre le balado a échoué
Poland, a Green Land
Acheter pour 20,40$
Aucun mode de paiement valide enregistré.
Nous sommes désolés. Nous ne pouvons vendre ce titre avec ce mode de paiement
Description
A Tel Aviv shopkeeper visits his parents’ Polish birthplace in an attempt to come to terms with their complex legacy—and is completely unprepared for what he finds there.
Yaakov Fine’s practical wife and daughters are baffled by his decision to leave his flourishing dress shop for a ten-day trip to his family’s ancestral village in Poland. Struggling to emerge from a midlife depression, Yaakov is drawn to Szydowce, intrigued by the stories he'd heard as a child from his parents and their friends, who would wax nostalgic about their pastoral, verdant hometown in the decades before 1939. The horrific years that followed were relegated to the nightmares that shattered sleep and were not discussed during waking hours.
When he arrives in Krakow, Yaakov enjoys the charming sidewalk cafes and relaxed European atmosphere, so different from the hurly burly of Tel Aviv. And his landlady in Szydowce—beautiful, sensual Magda, with a tragic past of her own—enchants him with her recollections of his family. But when Yaakov attempts to purchase from the townspeople the desecrated tombstones that had been stolen from Szydowce’s plowed-under Jewish cemetery, a very different Poland emerges, one that shatters Yaakov’s idyllic view of the town and its people, and casts into sharp relief the tragic reality of Jewish life in Poland—past, present, and future.
In this novel of revelation and reconciliation, Aharon Appelfeld once again mines lived experience to create fiction of powerful, universal resonance.
Ce que les critiques en disent
“Appelfeld was one of the most revered Israeli writers of his generation . . . Interestingly, it was his affinity with the minimalist European masters of ‘intellectual displacement’—Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Albert Camus—that became his most notable literary trait. Poland, a Green Land is written with his characteristic economy of language and powerful imagery . . . With deep wisdom and sensitivity, it explores the tragic consequences of denying one’s inner truth. Appelfeld’s unique literary achievement is his ability to also include the perpetrators of the crimes against humanity and their descendants in this psychological link between past and present.” —Elena Lappin, The Washington Post
“More than any other writer in Hebrew (his adopted language), Aharon Appelfeld, a master of understatement who died in 2018, conjures the obscene horror of the Shoah, and he does so without graphic scenes of crematoria or even using the word ‘Nazi’ . . . In the spare prose of Stuart Schoffman’s translation, Yaakov Fine’s journey takes on the authority of a fable.” —Steven G. Kellman, Forward
“An enthralling novel suffused with quiet brilliance and subtle power . . . Appelfeld’s fluid, limpid, trick-free prose contains pockets of beauty, and he routinely captives with various tales and set-piece scenes . . . What starts out as a straightforward pilgrimage with the opportunity for fact finding and soul searching soon turns into a complex journey of self-discovery filled with dark revelations and painful home truths . . . Skillfully translated by Stuart Schoffman . . . this is a slow burn of a book, and it is all the better for it . . . it smolders with urgency and potency.” —Malcolm Forbes, The Washington Examiner