Badenheim 1939 [Paperback]

Aharon Appelfeld (Author), Dalya Bilu (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0879237996 | ISBN-13: 978-0879237998 | Publication Date: April 10, 1998

It is the spring of 1939 in the age of anxiety. In months Europe will be Hitler's. And Badenheim, a resort town vaguely in the orbit of Vienna, is preparing for its summer season. The vacationers arrive as they always have, a sampling of Jewish middleclass life: the impresario Dr. Pappenheim, his musicians, and their conductor; the gay Frau Tsauberblit; the historian Dr. Fussholdt and his much younger wife; the 'readers,' twins whose passion for Rilke is featured on their program; a child prodigy; a commercial traveler; a rabbi. The list lengthens as the summer ages. To receive them in the town are the pharmacist and his worried wife, the hotelier and his large staff, the pastry shop owner and his irritable baker, Sally and Gertie (two quite respectable prostitutes), and, mysteriously, the bland inspectors from the 'Sanitation Department.'

The story unfolds as matter-of-factly as a Chekhov play. The characters on stage are so deeply held by their defensive daily trivia that they manage to misconstrue every signal of their fate. Finally, de facto prisoners in their familiar resort, the vacationers, now increased by the forced crowding-in of other Jews hardly on vacation, take on the lineaments of undefined disaster. The text builds a sense of foreboding in which each human detail is so persuasive, so right in its fidelity to the terrible evasions of the time, that it leaves the reader transformed by what he and the author know must happen to Badenheim's people.

Badenheim 1939, bound to be seen as one of this century's characteristic works of art, owes everything to its author's astonishing capacity to recreate the energies and confusions of a failing world's victims and without loss of that world's illusions of civility, the force of its social customs, or the cruel terms of its collapse.

In publishing the complete text of Appelfeld's short novel in translation for the first time, we introduce an writer of international stature to the English-speaking world.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This beautiful novel opens on the eve of World War II as a group of middle-class Jews arrive in the resort town of Badenheim, somewhere in Austria, ready to spend another idyllic summer vacation. But Europe in 1939 is no vacationland. Rumors of war rumble into the resort town, but the characters struggle to convince themselves that everything is perfectly normal. The great pleasure of the book comes in the Kafkaesque quality of Appelfeld's eye for the everyday and his restrained prose, set against the intimations of the approaching catastrophe. A great introduction to this important Israeli writer.

From Publishers Weekly

First published in 1980, Appelfeld's novel depicts a small town outside Vienna whose usual summer vacationers, middle-class Jews, find themselves held prisoner at their own resort on the eve of WWII.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: David R Godine (April 10, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0879237996
• ISBN-13: 978-0879237998
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 4.7 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,025,630 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Restrained, Polished and Beautiful, October 8, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Badenheim 1939 (Paperback)

Aharon Appelfeld's beautiful and highly polished novel, Badenheim 1939 was originally published in Hebrew in 1975. Although the Holocaust forms both the historical backdrop of the novel as well as its imaginative focus, it does so from behind-the-scenes and, as such, is subtle and implicit in its assertions, all to its enormous credit.

Badenheim 1939 is set at an Austrian vacation resort during the spring of 1939. A seemingly unremarkable assortment of middle-class Jews on holiday have gathered at Badenheim, only to later be united by what would become history's most atrocious turning point. The "Music Festival" resort of Badenheim will, soon enough, become a place of Jewish detainment from which the only exit will be via forced transport to Poland.

The vacationers, however, for the most part, remain in blissful unawareness of what is to come. Spring is in the air and summer is about to blossom; the Jews spend their days strolling the hotel gardens, visiting the cities cafés, sampling strawberry tartes at the local pastry shops, engaging in sports and bickering, gossiping, bargaining and complaining, much as any other vacationer. The mounting horror, which every reader of this sensitive and elegant book will realize, is made all the greater by the fact that it is a horror the characters simply cannot, or will not, see.

Badenheim 1939 is written with an artistic subtlety and insight with which most modern readers remain sadly unfamiliar. Appelfeld's concern, in this book, is with the prelude to the German catastrophe and not with its actual occurrence. The author, himself a Holocaust survivor, makes virtually no mention of the Nazi atrocities and shows no interest in the graphic portrayal of the brutalities committed. Appelfeld is certainly not oblivious to the facts, he simply has chosen to place his focus elsewhere. In Badenheim 1939, the Holocaust is an incipient threat rather than a full-blown horror.

Appelfeld's prose is more akin to lyric poetry than to narrative fiction and shows a tremendous gift for rhetorical restraint that is rare among writers. This is a beautiful and quiet tale, exquisitely told with imagery, understatement and indirection. The effects of the narrative accumulate and change in much the same way the seasons do, in increments that are minimal and yet extraordinarily moving. This is history, but it is history perceived at its most mundane. In this remarkable manner, Appelfeld creates something of extraordinary beauty and yet, manages to intensify the tragedy.

In the end, Appelfeld's characters do, of course, suffer the horrors that befell all Jews, of every nation, whether directly or indirectly. The genius of Badenheim 1939 lies in its projections of a gradual, incipient menace and its portraits of Jewish reactions, which range from ready adjustment to slowly unfolding despair.

It is in the space between the reader's knowledge of what is beginning to unfold for the Jews and the latter's own blindness to it that the book registers its most powerful impact, once again doing so without any direct reference to the ovens, the gas chambers or the camps. Appelfeld's artistic beauty lies in his amazing ability to suggest rather than describe. Giorgio Bassani was able to do something similar in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis but Appelfeld is, perhaps, the more superior.

Rarely has the tragic end point of Jewish fate been invoked no clearly and disturbingly and yet so indirectly. We come away from Badenheim 1939 as though from a finely-rendered tone poem, complete with the knowledge that we have been absorbed into a special moment in time and in feeling; in this case, the moment just before the trains departed for Poland, the final pause before the end.

34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Badenheim 1939, December 18, 2004

By 

Damian Kelleher (Brisbane, Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Badenheim 1939 (Paperback)

Badenheim is a quiet, idyllic holiday town in Eastern Europe. The 'leader' of the town, Dr Pappenheim, is busy preparing for the annual festival, writing letters and sending telegrams to beg and plead for musicians and artists from Vienna.

While the preparations are under way, the Sanitation Department begins quietly undertaking a rigorous inspection of each and every house and shop in Badenheim. Among the many questions asked is how many and who of the residents are Jewish. The vacationers and locals alike think nothing of the questions, nonchalantly confirming or denying their religion, and returning to their food, their wine, their entertainment. Here and there, a few people discuss the increasing powers of the Sanitation Department - they have just recently closed the Post Office - but nobody seems to mind. Badenheim is quiet and peaceful, and that is how they like it.

Time passes. The impresario, Dr Pappenheim, is still writing letters, but he senses that they are going off into the void, never to return. A few - very few - letters are still allowed into Badenheim, but for the most part, the Sanitation Department has closed off the city. Guards are posted to deny entry or exit to any man, woman or child of Jewish descent. It happens so slowly that nobody really notices, but at one stage, almost all of the non-Jewish people have gone, and of the tiny trickle of visitors allowed into Badenheim, every person is a Jew.

There is a quiet horror to Badenheim 1939. Throughout this very short book, it seems as though with each page, the oppression and terror of World War II is approaching the Jewish people of Badenheim, but they never see it. With every freedom slowly being denied - the shops are closed, the gates are sealed, outside communication is forbidden - the reader is left to wonder if this time, if this time when the Sanitation Department closes the pastry shop, say, will they understand? But they never do. Everything happens over such a long period of time, and so quietly, that nobody really seems to realise when they are suddenly trapped, except for a few minor characters who are slowly going mad, the cracks in the calm facade they have wrapped themselves in widening with every minute.

This book is most effective because we know what happened to the Jews post-1939. We know where they are going, and what will likely happen to them. The Sanitation Department assures them that they will be transplanted to Poland, and everything will be fine. They believe because they have to believe. Towards the end of the novel, the razor wire, the guns, the dogs all make an appearance. To ignore what is happening is suicidal, and yet they do. After all, how could a race of people imagine that they would be persecuted in such a terrifying manner? Surely, their minds would shied away from such horrible information, from the mere idea that a man - a country - wanted to eradicate six million of them? And yet, that is what happened, and that is how the novel ends, a perfect, bleak, dark ending that is all the more horrifying for how completely reasonable every single tiny little step leading up to their incarceration inside a derelict train, headed, presumably, for Auschwitz.

Badenheim 1939 is a powerful book because it shows how easy it is to accept something unacceptable, if it is presented in small, reasonable, easily palatable pieces. None of these characters are overly bad, or good - they are absolutely normal. They squabble, they argue, they love, they laugh, they sing, they cry. In fact, throughout the entire novel, nothing untoward happens to any of them - except for the encroaching holocaust.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simple and powerful, October 13, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Badenheim 1939 (Paperback)

At first blush, it seemed that author Appelfeld is spotlighting the ignorance of humanity to impending terror by making fun of the characters. But further analysis reveals that Appelfeld in fact was a child when this stain on humanity's history was unfolding. His elders were in fact hiding their heads in the sand, but then so was the entire world. He may in fact then be crying out and trying to understand why the children were betrayed by the only people who could have any influence in trying to save themselves and their children. If his family and friends acted as fools, then that is the way that he portrays them. And just in looking at his writing style, I think that he is outstanding with straightforward sentences, clean dialogue, and implied conclusions.