Poland, a Green Land
A Novel
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- USD 10.99
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- USD 10.99
Descripción editorial
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.
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Appelfeld (To the Edge of Sorrow), who died in 2018, offers an engrossing tale of a Jewish man's return to his ancestral village. Yaakov Fein has prospered since he turned his late parents' Tel Aviv textile business into a women's fashion shop, but he is struggling with an unhappy marriage and an empty nest. He's long wanted to visit Szydowce, Poland, the farming village where his parents were born and his grandparents and other Jews were murdered during WWII, and decides to finally make the trip. There, he's captivated by the green pastures and the swirling river, and by Magda, a beautiful farmer who knew his grandparents and tells him about his family. But the visit turns sour after he picks up on antisemitism from some locals, and the mayor attempts to extort him after he offers to buy the Jewish cemetery's broken tombstones. Appelfeld structures the narrative in dreamed conversations between Yaakov and his deceased mother, which offer an account of what his parents couldn't tell him when they were alive: that as a young married couple during WWII, they hid in cellars, a cowshed, and in the forest, and his grandparents were burned alive in their synagogue. The dreams are vivid and economically written, and the unsettling, unresolved ending adds heft. This powerful, bittersweet performance does not disappoint.