The Age of Wonders by Aharon Appelfeld

First published:Tor-ha-pela’ot, 1978 (English translation, 1981)

Type of work: Social morality

Time of work: 1938-1969

Locale: Provincial Austria

Principal Characters:

• The Son (Bruno), the book’s central observer, who is twelve years old in 1938
• The Mother, who tries to keep the family together
• The Father, a famous Austrian writer who abandons his wife and son
• Theresa, a psychotic aunt who converts to Christianity
• Stark, a family friend who converts to a pious Judaism
• Brum, a former family friend who renounces Judaism and becomes an anti-Semite
• Louise, a family servant who becomes a prostitute

The Novel

Book 1, the longer of the novel’s two parts, begins in 1938 on a train carrying a twelve-year-old boy, who serves as narrator and central consciousness, and his mother back to their hometown in provincial Austria. They had been vacationing in an unnamed retreat, quiet, little-known, beautifully located on a lovely riverbank. Mother and son were expelled from this apparent Eden. Aboard the train, the boy recalls, “the feeling that we were doomed seeped through me like a thick liquid.”

Suddenly, the express train makes an unscheduled stop at a sawmill, far from any station. Politely yet ominously, “all foreign passengers and all Austrian passengers who were not Christians by birth” are requested to register with the “security forces.” Why? The only official explanation is evasive: “Due to the special circumstances.” Evidently, the Anschluss of March, 1938, has engulfed Austria within Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Yet Aharon Appelfeld refrains here, as in his other fiction, from direct allusion to historic events. All the boy can be sure of is that “nothing would be the same again.”

He finds his parents and their friends arguing obsessively about the nature and destiny of Jews and Judaism as anti-Semitic stresses, both upon and within them, increase. The boy’s father is a famous Austrian writer, called, in Kafkaesque fashion, “A.,” who is an intimate of such distinguished authors as Stefan Zweig and Arthur Schnitzler. The father’s lofty reputation is venomously attacked in a sequence of journalistic articles calling his characters neither urban nor rural Austrians but, instead, “Jews who...were now useless, corrupt, perverted; parasites living off the healthy Austrian tradition.” The critic himself turns out to be Jewish; unexpectedly, he dies soon.

The father thereupon adopts the same line of scurrilous anti-Semitism. He denounces the Jewish bourgeoisie as grossly materialistic; he claims that Jewish entrepreneurs should be wiped off the earth. He tries to become more Austrian than the Gentiles, flourishes his assimilationist views, and frantically curses the Jews who are “infesting Austria like rats, infesting the whole world, to tell the truth.” The father drifts into madness as he writes pamphlets excoriating the Jewish petite bourgeoisie. Eventually he abandons his wife and son, fleeing to a Gentile, aristocratic mistress in Vienna. The son is expelled from school; later, mother and son are rounded up for a final journey on a “cattle train hurtling south.”

Book 2 is subtitled, “Many Years Later When Everything Was Over.” About thirty years have passed. The novel now shifts to the third person, with Bruno, the now-adult son, returning to his native town. His parents perished in the Holocaust. He has returned to his birthplace to confront its shame and affirm his identity. For several weeks he wanders in and out of the town’s inns, streets, taverns, restaurants. He encounters several living relics from his boyhood. Some are partly Jewish, such as the singer Brunhilda. Louise, formerly a pretty maid who worked for Bruno’s parents and was one of his uncle’s mistresses, is now a worn-out, flabby, embittered old woman, who stereotypes Jews in a curiously positive fashion: “No Jew would take a pitchfork to a woman’s thighs. Jews love women.”

Most significant is Bruno’s encounter with a former Jewish bachelor, Brum, who married his Gentile housekeeper, became a cattle farmer, wholly denied his Judaism, and survived the war. At first, the crippled, embittered Brum refuses Bruno’s attempts at recognition. A short while later, he spews out hatred at Bruno. After several weeks, he tells him to leave town: “My hatred for Jews knows no bounds.” Bruno hits him but finds that the blow does not reduce his despair. The next day he leaves, “empty of thought or feeling.”

The Characters

Bruno as a boy and his parents and relatives are upper-class, cultivated Central European Jews who regard themselves as comfortably assimilated, with their Judaism only a marginal quirk in their characters. Traditional, religious Eastern Jews are exotic and barbaric specimens to them.

History soon smashes their illusions. Bruno, in the first book, is a sensitive, silent, but increasingly anguished observer of a society that degrades as well as disintegrates. In book 2, he is the age his father is in book 1 and has his own failed marriage—for unspecified reasons. He finds himself a stranger in his birthplace, revisiting a childhood traumatized by circumstances that cannot be expunged.

Bruno’s mother is tender, weak, charitable, conventional, ineffectual. When the town’s rabbi, following official orders, sends registered letters to all members of the Jewish community to come to his temple on a specified day, the mother asks, “What have I to do with them?” Once inside, she brandishes her umbrella at hostile neighbors and hisses, “Shopkeepers!”

The father is a prototype of the European artist as disdainful intellectual. Despising his fellow Jews, he regards himself as an Austrian luminary, with German his native tongue and Hebrew foreign to him. “Haven’t I brought honor to Austria?” he asks jeering Gentile riders in a train compartment. When a distant relative in South America invites the family to resettle there, since Jews are not overtly hated in his land, the father feels insulted that he should be asked to go into business—no respect for the artistic life there, he rages, only for money, property, and survival above all! He tries to survive in his way by abandoning not only his family but also his heritage. His failure as husband, father, and Jew is accompanied by the growing acuity of Bruno’s desolate awareness.

Critical Context

Aharon Appelfeld is himself a survivor of the Holocaust whose doom haunts his fiction. Born in Czernowitz, Bukovina (then Romanian, now within the Soviet Union), he was eight when the invading Germans sent him to a labor camp in 1940. His mother was killed; his father died in the camp; in 1941, the boy managed to escape into the inhospitable countryside, working as a shepherd and farm laborer for three years, hiding his identity from hunters of Jews, growing up without a proper adolescence. After the armistice, he made his way to Italy with a small tide of refugees, and from there emigrated to Palestine in 1946. Though he knew no Hebrew before the age of fourteen, he writes exclusively in his adopted language. His published works in Israel include six collections of stories, eight novels, and one book of essays.

Neither The Age of Wonders nor Appelfeld’s other fiction directly alludes to the Holocaust’s monstrous reality of deaths almost beyond reckoning. The horrors to come or just ended are a baleful flickering on the horizon of his muted, compressed, austerely understated perspective. His artistic strategy is to produce fiction whose structure, imagery, tone, and voice all meditate somberly on the precarious course of contemporary Judaism. He struggles unblinkingly with the culture of self-rejection to which all too many Jews succumbed in Central and Western Europe. In his flat, controlled, lucidly neutral prose, never thundering or moralizing, he presents scenes that pass a scorching judgment on the spiritual and psychological meanness of Jewish assimilation to and humiliation before a dominant Gentile society.

Like Gustave Flaubert, he flays his Bouvards and Pecuchets for their banal and narcotized acceptance of irrational hatreds. Like Marcel Proust, he depicts bizarre social snobbery and status-scoring, evasiveness, betrayal, and scapegoating. Like Franz Kafka, he ponders whether being Jewish is an incurable affliction. Appelfeld’s art lacks the intensity, range, and imaginative power of these masters, but he shares with them the honesty of refusing to accept any easy solutions to basic problems of cultural separation and misunderstanding.

The Age of Wonders has its share of aesthetic flaws: The shift in point of view, from the first person in book 1 to the third person in book 2, is needlessly confusing; the number of minor characters is too profuse for a short novel; and the second part, amounting to an extended coda, is too long and dimly focused. Nevertheless, this novel is a noble achievement expressing eloquent grief at man’s capacity for cruelty and victimization. Appelfeld bears tragic witness to a chapter in human history for which no explanations can adequately account.

Sources for Further Study

Agee, Joel. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVI (December 27, 1981), pp. 1, 20.

Alvarez, A. Review in The New York Review of Books. XXIX (February 4, 1982), pp. 33-34.

Booklist. LXXVIII, January 1, 1982, p. 585.

Lewis, Stephen. Art out of Agony, 1984.

Library Journal. CVI, December 15, 1981, p. 2405.

Prescott, P.S. Review in Newsweek. CXCVIII (December 14, 1981), p. 108.

Publishers Weekly. CCXX, November 6, 1981, p. 69.

Saturday Review. VIII, November, 1981, p. 77.

Time. CXVIII, December 28, 1981, p. 69.

Village Voice Literary Supplement. December, 1981, p. 18.