Katerina by Aharon Appelfeld
"Katerina" is a novel by Aharon Appelfeld that explores the life of its titular character, Katerina, a 79-year-old woman who returns to her Ruthenian roots after many years of imprisonment during the Holocaust. The story is set in a region that has a complex history of anti-Semitism, having belonged to Romania, Moldavia, and Ukraine. Katerina, who is a Gentile, feels a profound connection to the Jewish community, largely due to her past, including her relationship with a Jewish man named Sammy and the tragic loss of her infant son, Benjamin, to an anti-Semitic thug named Karil.
Upon her return, Katerina finds her homeland nearly devoid of its Jewish population, having been ravaged by the Holocaust. Living in a dilapidated hut on her ancestral land, she grapples with her identity as a social outcast, seeking to honor her son's memory by ensuring he is circumcised in accordance with Jewish tradition. The narrative highlights Katerina's isolation from the horrific realities of the Holocaust, as her imprisonment sheltered her from the direct consequences of the genocide.
Appelfeld's writing does not explicitly detail the atrocities of the Holocaust but relies on the readers' knowledge and memory to evoke the gravity of the events. The novel juxtaposes Katerina's life in prison with the horrors that transpired outside, creating a poignant reflection on survival, identity, and loss amidst the backdrop of a devastated community.
Katerina by Aharon Appelfeld
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published:Katerinah, 1989 (English translation, 1992)
Type of work: Novel
The Work
Seventy-nine-year-old Katerina, imprisoned for many years during the Holocaust, has returned to her Ruthenian origins in a fiercely anti-Semitic territory that has belonged intermittently to Romania, Moldavia, and Ukraine. When Katerina returns following the Holocaust, Ruthenia has been purged of nearly all its former Jewish population. A Gentile, Katerina has been imprisoned for murdering Karil, a fiercely anti-Semitic hoodlum who murdered her infant son, Benjamin, years earlier.
A social outcast, Katerina feels a greater affinity to Jews than to Gentiles. Her murdered son was fathered by Sammy, a fifty-year-old Jewish alcoholic. Despite the anti-Semitism that causes people in Ruthenia to avoid any outward signs of being Jewish, Katerina seeks out a mohel, the Jewish dignitary who performs circumcisions as dictated by Mosaic law, to circumcise her son.
When Katerina goes back to Ruthenia after an absence of sixty-three years, she lives in a squalid hut on the property where she was born and where she lived during her early years. Katerina has been sheltered from the Holocaust by being imprisoned for the forty years that marked Adolf Hitler’s rise and eventual collapse.
The only suggestion of what has been happening during this period are the boxcars filled with Jews that rattle past Katerina’s prison on their way to concentration camps, the trains leading inevitably to places of doom. Some clothing and other items confiscated from the doomed Jews are eventually distributed to the prisoners, but the actual horrors of the Holocaust are never spelled out: Appelfeld depends upon the memories of his readers to supply the gruesome details of what happened to six million European Jews between 1939 and 1945.
In Katerina, Appelfeld creates parallel worlds, that of the prison where Katerina is incarcerated and that of the Holocaust from which she is removed by prison walls. Before Hitler’s rise to power, Katerina was employed by Jews to look after their children. These children taught her to read Hebrew and to speak Yiddish. When she was incarcerated for killing Karil, she was abruptly removed from the society in which the Holocaust took place.
Sources for Furter Study
Booklist. LXXXVIII, May 15, 1992, p. 1642.
Boston Globe. September 27, 1992, p. 40.
Chicago Tribune. September 2, 1992, V, p. 3.
The Christian Science Monitor. September 23, 1992, p. 13.
Kirkus Reviews. LX, June 1, 1992, p. 683.
Library Journal. CXVII, June 1, 1992, p. 172.
Los Angeles Times Book Review. September 27, 1992, p. 2.
The New York Review of Books. XXXIX, November 5, 1992, p. 18.
The New York Times Book Review. XCVII, September 27, 1992, p. 9.
Publishers Weekly. CCXXXIX, May 18, 1992, p. 59.