To the Land of the Cattails

At 17, Toni left her native Bukovina, "the land of the cattails," running off with a man to live in Vienna, where she shed her Jewishness. Now, at 34, she and her teenage son, Rudi, return home to try to locate her long-lost parents and reclaim her heritage for her half-Jewish son. However, the year is 1938 and, although Appelfeld never explicitly mentions Nazism or even anti-Semitism, it is clear that Toni and Rudi are en route to destruction. Delayed on their journey by the pleasures they find at the hotels where they stay--and young Rudi's explorations of alcohol and sex--they finally arrive at the village. Toni is immediately taken away along with the other villagers, and Rudi embraces his mother's religion just before it is clear that he too will be a victim. As he does in all his fiction, Appelfeld writes vividly and with passion about the fate of the Jews, and about what he sees as their fatalistic inability to confront the facts in the face of annihilation.


Genre: Literary Fiction

"Among us, the writer-survivors, Aharon Appelfeld's voice has a unique, unmistakable tone. Eloquent through reticence." - Primo Levi