Until the Dawn's Light
A Novel (National Jewish Book Award)
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
***NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD WINNER (2012)***
From the award-winning, internationally acclaimed writer (“One of the best novelists alive” —Irving Howe): a Jewish woman marries a gentile laborer in turn-of-the-century Austria, with disastrous results.
A high school honor student bound for university and a career as a mathematician, Blanca lives with her parents in a small town in Austria in the early years of the twentieth century. At school one day she meets Adolf, who comes from a family of peasant laborers. Tall and sturdy, plainspoken and uncomplicated, Adolf is unlike anyone Blanca has ever met. And Adolf is awestruck by beautiful, brilliant Blanca–even though she is Jewish. When Blanca is asked by school administrators to tutor Adolf, the inevitable happens: they fall in love. And when Adolf asks her to marry him, Blanca abandons her plans to attend university, converts to Christianity, and leaves her family, her friends, and her old life behind.
Almost immediately, things begin to go horribly wrong. Told in a series of flashbacks as Blanca and her son flee from their town with the police in hot pursuit, the tragic story of Blanca’s life with Adolf recalls a time and place that are no more but that powerfully reverberate in collective memory.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tense, occasionally heavy-handed, but ultimately compelling, the latest from Appelfeld (Blooms of Darkness) depicts the world of early 20th-century Austrian Jews, many of whom have abandoned their ancestral traditions and converted to Christianity. Tragic heroine Blanca will remind readers of Hardy's luckless Tess, for Blanca's essential decency and self-sacrificing attempts to do right end, fatefully and inexorably, in suffering. Through a journal she keeps for her four-year-old son, Otto, Blanca presents her story of unremitting, inexplicable misery. After the Jewish Blanca marries her gentile, ominously named high school classmate Adolf following a whirlwind (but remarkably unromantic) courtship, her life becomes unbearable. Blanca feels herself "enslaved," trapped in a marriage to an abusive, bombastically anti-Semitic man. Though she feels hopeless after her mother's death and her father's tragic disappearance, the birth of her son renews Blanca's strength and drives her to an act that will send her and Otto fleeing. As she tries to outrun her past, Blanca faithfully records her own history and surveys the loss of faith among Austrian Jews; with this, the story of one woman's misfortune takes on the magnitude of history.
