The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping
A Novel
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A young holocaust survivor tries to create a new life in the newly established state of Israel.
Erwin doesn’t remember much about his journey across Europe when the war ended because he spent most of it asleep, carried by other survivors as they emerged from their hiding places or were liberated from the camps and made their way to Naples, where they filled refugee camps and wondered what was to become of them. Erwin becomes part of a group of boys being rigorously trained both physically and mentally by an emissary from Palestine for life in their new home. When he and his fellow clandestine immigrants are released by British authorities from their detention camp near Haifa, they are assigned to a kibbutz, where they learn how to tend the land and speak their new language. But a part of Erwin clings to the past—to memories of his parents, his mother tongue, the Ukrainian city where he was born—and he knows that despite what he is being told, who he was is just as important as who he is becoming.
When he is wounded in an engagement with snipers, Erwin spends months trying to regain the use of his legs. As he exercises his body, he exercises his mind as well, copying passages from the Bible in his newly acquired Hebrew and working up the courage to create his own texts in this language both old and new, hoping to succeed as a writer where his beloved, tormented father had failed. With the support of his friends and the encouragement of his mother (who visits him in his dreams), Erwin takes his first tentative steps with his crutches—and with his pen. Once again, Aharon Appelfeld mines personal experience to create dazzling, masterly fiction with a universal resonance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Appelfeld's novel delineates the process of becoming a writer, with details incorporated from his experience as a Holocaust survivor and refugee. The title's sleeping man is 16-year-old Erwin from Czernowitz (formerly Romania, now Ukraine). Erwin has withdrawn into prolonged slumber after suffering deprivation and the loss of family during World War II. Fellow refugees carry him to Naples, where he joins a group of older boys exercising together, studying Hebrew, and learning to shoot they then take a boat to what will soon become Israel and continue their training there. Despite pressure to let go of the past, Erwin continues to retreat into dreams for visits home, including conversations with his mother and father. Erwin's group of trainees is eventually sent to a kibbutz to build retaining walls, tend orchards, and guard against infiltrators. Awake Erwin now goes by the Hebrew name Aharon, while the sleeping Erwin shares his hopes and concerns with his parents. Before reaching age 18, Erwin/Aharon is seriously injured in a military action intended to protect the kibbutz. Recovery comes slowly and painfully, but at last he begins to write, in Hebrew: just family names at first, then poetry, and finally stories in remembrance of things past. Erwin/Aharon's physical and spiritual journey reveals the effects of war and dislocation. It also highlights the consolation found in cultivating old connections and latent talents. Throughout, Appelfeld focuses not on historical events or moral judgments but on the formation of a writer, one much like himself, able to transform memory into transcendent prose.
