Katerina (Penguin Modern Classics)

The teenage Katerina flees her abusive home in a poor, Christian village in the 1880s, finding work and shelter in the home of a Jewish family, and in the warmth of their family life and beauty of their Jewish rituals she begins to know safety for the first time. Their life is brutally disrupted when a pogrom is wrought upon the family, and Katerina finds herself alone again. Decades later, having suffered and retaliated for that suffering, she looks out of the window of her prison cell and sees the trains carrying Jews across Europe.

Released from prison into the chaos following the end of World War II, a now elderly Katerina is devastated to find a world that has been emptied of its Jews and that is not at all sorry to see them gone. Ever the outsider, Katerina realizes that she has survived only to bear witness to the fact that they had ever existed at all.

A rare glimpse into Jewish and gentile life in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century, Katerina explores the long origins of the Holocaust, alongside darkness and light, cruelty and mercy.

About the Author

Born in Czernowitz, Bukovina, Aharon Appelfeld (1932–2018) authored more than 45 acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction and received many international awards including the MLA Commonwealth Award, the Independent Foreign Fiction prize, the prix Médicis étranger, the Israel prize, and the Nelly Sachs prize.

About the Translator

Jeffrey M. Green earned a B.A. in French from Princeton, and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard. Upon moving to Israel, mastering Hebrew, and giving up on a traditional academic career, he became a translator from Hebrew (and, occasionally, French). He has translated more than a dozen novels by the late Aharon Appelfeld, as well as works by other major Israeli writers. He has also translated many academic books, mainly in the field of Jewish history.

Reviews

"Full of beauty and pain… a chilling allegory that attains a satisfying force" —John Self, Observer

"Read this book... Think what a gift of lyric language and style, of emotion purified by pain this is" —Anne Roiphe, Los Angeles Times

"Appelfeld reimagines the place of his own origins through a perspective that in its generosity of feeling recalls Tolstoy and Chekhov" —Judith Grossman, The New York Times Book Review

"An astounding achievement, among the best pages Appelfeld has ever written... intense, disturbing." ―Kirkus Reviews

"With piercing clarity, Israeli novelist Appelfeld tells the profoundly moving story of Katerina, a Polish housekeeper who works for a succession of Jewish families in the years before WWII... A theme that might be didactic in the hands of a lesser novelist is here conveyed with moving, unpreachy simplicity. This masterful novel is a powerful study of the poison of prejudice, a poignant meditation on life's horrors, beauty and God's inscrutable ways. Appelfeld imbues every scene with deep humanity in a riveting tale of universal appeal." ―Publisher's Weekly

Dimensions: 13 x 1.1 x 19.8 cm