The Age of Wonders (English and Hebrew Edition)

I found this to be a well-written yet sad story about a Jewish boy’s experiences in Austria prior to World War II. Although the boy’s Father was a well-known writer and secular Jew, that made no difference to the boy and his family as attitudes toward Jews declined in the pre-war years. Later

the boy, now a grown man, returned from his current home in Jerusalem to visit the town in which he grew up. That turned out to be a melancholy and unsatisfactory experience.

Appelfeld does an amazing job of pulling the reader into the emotional space of the protagonist, although it’s a place the reader might rather not be. Reading books of this kind tend to be depressing yet I feel compelled to read them. This one, like others of Appelfeld’s I’ve read, deals with pre-WWII antisemitism, a topic which makes me uncomfortable. The atmosphere presented in the book felt so true that it frightened me. I was actually relieved when the story ended so Bruno could return to Jerusalem.

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