All Whom I Have Loved: A Novel [Paperback]

All Whom I Have Loved is the haunting story of a Jewish family in Eastern Europe in the 1930s as seen through the eyes of an unforgettable nine-year-old boy. The beloved only child of divorced parents, Paul watches helplessly as his family and his world dissolve around him. At first he lives with his mother—a secular, assimilated schoolteacher, whom he adores until she “betrays” him by marrying a gentile. He’s then sent to live with his father—once an admired avant-garde artist, but now reviled by the critics as a “decadent Jew,” who drowns his anger, pain, and humiliation in drink. Paul searches in vain for a life of stability and meaning. The earthy peasant girl who briefly takes care of him, the pull he feels toward the Jews praying in the local synagogue, and his fascination with Eastern Orthodox church rituals give him only tantalizing glimpses into worlds of which he can never be a part.
 
The fates that Paul’s parents will meet with Paul as terrified witness, and his own fate as an orphaned Jewish child alone in Europe in 1938, are rendered by Aharon Appelfeld with extraordinary subtlety and power, as they foreshadow, in the heart-wrenching story of three individuals, the cataclysm that is about to engulf all of European Jewry. A riveting if ominous tale . . . In it, the unmistakable voice of a master is recognizable from its opening phrase. —California Literary Review

The urgent moral relevance of Appelfeld's profound novels is one of the scandals of our age . . . It is a mark of his humane genius that he has made a great art out of so profound a silence. —Los Angeles Times

Poetic in his instincts, Appelfeld has an artfully spare writing style, pregnant in its imagery, intentionally coy in its resonance. —Liesl Schillinger, lÃ.