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POLAND, A GREEN LAND

A powerful and timely addition to Appelfeld's great body of work.

On a visit to the Polish village where his late parents were born and his grandparents perished in the Holocaust, Tel Aviv shop owner Yaakov Fein finds love with a gentile farmer and hate in the form of festering antisemitism.

No physical evidence remains of the Jewish families who lived in tiny Szydowce, but Yaakov, whose coldly distant wife opposes the trip, hopes that merely by being there he will learn things that were kept from him by his parents. They survived the Nazis by hiding in the forest (as did young Appelfeld). Magda, the kindly farmer who takes Yaakov in and quickly becomes the love of his life, provides valuable memories, having worked in his grandparents’ house. His encounters with other villagers are unsettling. They claim they don't know anything about the wartime massacre of Szydowce’s Jews, who were locked inside a synagogue and burned alive. Their hatred of Jews surfaces after Yaakov discovers that after the massacre, tombstones from the Jewish cemetery were broken up and used as cornerstones for the town square. His attempts to acquire the stones, including his grandfather's, are met with derision by the manipulative mayor, who sets an exorbitant price for them and rips Yaakov for turning it down. “There are people for whom money is God,” he says. “They can't be changed. Even God himself can't change them.” Appelfeld (1932-2018), who didn't often make explicit references to the Holocaust in his fiction and uses that word only once here, attains raw emotion with his account of the horrific violence. The book, in which Yaakov’s dreams play an important role, has a fuzzy, dreamlike quality itself, leading to a more detached ending than in masterpieces such as The Age of Wonders (1981) and The Conversion (1992). But this 2005 work, being published in English for the first time, still haunts.

A powerful and timely addition to Appelfeld's great body of work.

Pub Date: June 20, 2023

ISBN: 9780805243611

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Schocken

Review Posted Online: April 10, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023

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THE GOD OF THE WOODS

"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.

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Many years after her older brother, Bear, went missing, Barbara Van Laar vanishes from the same sleepaway camp he did, leading to dark, bitter truths about her wealthy family.

One morning in 1975 at Camp Emerson—an Adirondacks summer camp owned by her family—it's discovered that 13-year-old Barbara isn't in her bed. A problem case whose unhappily married parents disdain her goth appearance and "stormy" temperament, Barbara is secretly known by one bunkmate to have slipped out every night after bedtime. But no one has a clue where's she permanently disappeared to, firing speculation that she was taken by a local serial killer known as Slitter. As Jacob Sluiter, he was convicted of 11 murders in the 1960s and recently broke out of prison. He's the one, people say, who should have been prosecuted for Bear's abduction, not a gardener who was framed. Leave it to the young and unproven assistant investigator, Judy Luptack, to press forward in uncovering the truth, unswayed by her bullying father and male colleagues who question whether women are "cut out for this work." An unsavory group portrait of the Van Laars emerges in which the children's father cruelly abuses their submissive mother, who is so traumatized by the loss of Bear—and the possible role she played in it—that she has no love left for her daughter. Picking up on the themes of families in search of themselves she explored in Long Bright River (2020), Moore draws sympathy to characters who have been subjected to spousal, parental, psychological, and physical abuse. As rich in background detail and secondary mysteries as it is, this ever-expansive, intricate, emotionally engaging novel never seems overplotted. Every piece falls skillfully into place and every character, major and minor, leaves an imprint.

"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.

Pub Date: July 2, 2024

ISBN: 9780593418918

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: April 13, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024

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THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND

A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.

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A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.

Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.

A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.

Pub Date: April 20, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Library of America

Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021

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