Review by New York Times Review
THE ISRAELI NOVELIST Aharon Appelfeld has said he must hear "the music" of a novel before he can begin to write it. If that's so, then the music of "The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping" might be a lullaby rendered by eerie synthesizer - all high tones and haunting reverberations. As its title suggests, there is a dazed, dreamlike quality to the prose of this bildungsroman, in which a masterly English translation by Jeffrey M. Green manages to retain the direct, concrete quality of the original Hebrew as well as its austere poetry. This is particularly valuable in a novel whose subject is, in part, language and how it forms us, what it lets us see and what it obscures. Appelfeld is a prolific artist. This novel, published in the United States a few weeks before his 85th birthday, is among the most recent of his more than 40 works of fiction and nonfiction. The book opens just after the end of World War II as a boy named Erwin struggles out of an allconsuming somnolence to find himself in the blue glare of a seaside displacement camp in Naples. He is among Jewish refugees who tell him, in a repetitive incantation, that they have carried him from train to train, truck to truck, across a warscarred continent. Erwin soon develops a refrain of his own as he encounters a series of fellow refugees who resemble relatives or close family friends from his past. These fleeting moments of mistaken identity build toward the recognition that he is part of a tribe, related to this damaged band of drifting souls whose holocaust is not only of mass death but of failing memory, erased identity. As he drifts in and out of his new reality, often preferring to retreat to dreams of his prewar childhood, he is moved like a pawn by the power shifts of nation-building until he finds himself on a kibbutz, armed and shooting at an enemy who is never explicitly identified. The novel oscillates between admiration for and unsparing criticism of the ideologues in charge of the nation-building effort. The robust "new Jews" of Palestine sneer at the older refugees and seek to remake the youth in their own image, banishing mother tongues and given names. Erwin - required now to use the Hebrew name Aharon - laments the loss of the gift his parents bestowed on him: "I liked names in which you hear the parents' love." Barely trained for combat, he is gravely injured in an unsuccessful raid and plunged once again into unconsciousness, anesthetized by the painkillers required by the many bouts of surgery necessary to restore his ability to walk. All of Appelfeld's books draw in some way on his own extraordinary youth. Because he mines the painful bedrock of his life, it is worth knowing some of its most harrowing incidents, the ore from which he extracts the allusive, metaphorical poetry of his fiction. He was born Erwin Appelfeld in 1932 to a prosperous, assimilated German-speaking Jewish family in Bukovina, a territory of shifting borders between Romania and Ukraine. He was 9 years old when the Romanian Army retook the region from its Soviet occupiers in 1941, murdering his mother as he lay upstairs in bed, ill with mumps. He jumped out the window and escaped that attack, only to be rounded up and deported to a Nazi concentration camp. There he escaped again, rolling out under a fence and hiding in the forest before joining the Soviet Army as a cook. At the end of the war, he spent time in a displaced persons camp in Italy, then was recruited as a pioneer and brought to British Mandate Palestine. Appelfeld was 14 years old when he began to learn Hebrew, the language in which he would become a writer. "The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping" is much preoccupied with this process of binding oneself into a new language, with what is lost and what is gained in such a process. At a convalescent home, the wounded Aharon tries to fuse himself to Hebrew by copying passages from a Bible a rabbi had pressed into his hands when he lay, semiconscious, in the hospital. "I was glad that I understood most of the words. The Binding of Isaac: the story was dreadful but was told with restraint, in a few words, perhaps so that we could hear the silence between them. I felt a closeness to those measured sentences, and it didn't seem to be a story with a moral, because what was the moral? Rather, it was intended to seep into one's cells." It's not often a novelist turns over as many cards as Appelfeld does in this paragraph, describing his own process so aptly. Later in the chapter, the convalescent returns to the story of Abraham's test: "Where was the morality of obedience to an inhuman command? What could Abraham say to himself? I've succeeded. I've obeyed the command of God. I stifled the compassion within me. I have served as an example to future generations." This is the most tough-minded commentary on that familiar text I have ever encountered, a reading that might be possible only for a man who knows so intimately what stifled compassion looks like and what its consequences can entail. A band of drifting souls whose holocaust is not only of mass death but of erased identity. GERALDINE BROOKS'S novel "March" won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2006. Her most recent novel is "The Secret Chord."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 1, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Trapped in slumber after WWII, Erwin is carried away from his home in Eastern Europe on refugee shoulders. The journey is long, but he sleeps on, only rising to drink water. The sleeping boy's dreams allow him to speak with his family, who seem alive, hoping to reunite with him. Not until Erwin awakens in Italy does he try to understand his shockingly changed life. He joins a group of young Jewish men training for a new life in Palestine. Readers experience Erwin's gradual transformation into a soldier and farmer on a kibbutz: he changes his name, speaks only Hebrew, carries a gun. But still he needs to sleep and dream until a crisis fully awakens him. The story is gently tragic, intensely moving, and filled with metaphor. Careful reading showcases the author's exquisite poetic style, drawing us into Erwin's painful experiences and his determination to form an identity that encompasses his roots and honors what (and who) has been lost. Appelfeld is the Israeli author of more than 40 books, many of which have earned prestigious prizes. Another Holocaust survivor's search for identity is featured in Stewart O'Nan's City of Secrets (2016), and ghostly voices also speak in Eli Wiesel's Beggar in Jersusalem (1970).--Baker, Jen Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Appelfeld's novel delineates the process of becoming a writer, with details incorporated from his experience as a Holocaust survivor and refugee. The title's sleeping man is 16-year-old Erwin from Czernowitz (formerly Romania, now Ukraine). Erwin has withdrawn into prolonged slumber after suffering deprivation and the loss of family during World War II. Fellow refugees carry him to Naples, where he joins a group of older boys exercising together, studying Hebrew, and learning to shoot-they then take a boat to what will soon become Israel and continue their training there. Despite pressure to let go of the past, Erwin continues to retreat into dreams for visits home, including conversations with his mother and father. Erwin's group of trainees is eventually sent to a kibbutz to build retaining walls, tend orchards, and guard against infiltrators. Awake Erwin now goes by the Hebrew name Aharon, while the sleeping Erwin shares his hopes and concerns with his parents. Before reaching age 18, Erwin/Aharon is seriously injured in a military action intended to protect the kibbutz. Recovery comes slowly and painfully, but at last he begins to write, in Hebrew: just family names at first, then poetry, and finally stories in remembrance of things past. Erwin/Aharon's physical and spiritual journey reveals the effects of war and dislocation. It also highlights the consolation found in cultivating old connections and latent talents. Throughout, Appelfeld focuses not on historical events or moral judgments but on the formation of a writer, one much like himself, able to transform memory into transcendent prose. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
A survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, Appelfeld has built a body of work that examines the tragedy of the Holocaust and its effects on the Jewish experience. His newest work tells the story of a young survivor who travels from a refugee camp to a kibbutz in Haifa, Israel, to begin a new life. (LJ 1/17) © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Prolific author Appelfeld once again delivers with a novel of great sensitivity, finely attuned to the difficulties of responding to post-Holocaust living.The sleeping man of the title is the narrator, Erwin (later renamed Aharon), who grew up in the Carpathian Mountains of Eastern Europe until World War II threw his survival into question (all based on facts from the author's life). The novel opens at the end of the war, after Erwin has emerged from a cellar where he's been hiding out for two years. He drifts to Naples, bereft of family and finding in himself a weariness he cannot shake. He and some other young men are separated from the refugee camp and given military training under the tutelage of Ephraim, a charismatic leader planning to lead his cadre into the conflict in Palestine that will end up creating Israel. Not only do the men get military training, but they also learn Hebrew, for Ephraim claims that Hebrew will help bond them by "[attaching] the language to [their] bodies." Erwin grows stronger but still feels an almost overpowering need for sleep, and this allows him the freedom to reconnect to his past through long, vivid dreams of his mother and father. Eventually, he's wounded in action in Palestine and confined to bed. During his slow recuperation he develops the goal of becoming a writer, a profession his father had aspired to but never achieved. To this end, Erwin spends his time copying verses from the Hebrew Bible, which informs both his literary sensibility and his prose style.Appelfeld's style is never flashy, but the plainness of his writing gives post-Holocaust events both starkness and power. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
