Novel
Badenheim 1939
באדנהיים עיר נופש
Aharon Appelfeld · 1978
Synopsis
In the spring of 1939, holidaymakers arrive at Badenheim, a small Austrian spa town where Doctor Pappenheim organises a music festival as he does every year. The streets fill up, the artists rehearse, the gardens are in bloom. A strange sanitary service nevertheless moves into the town, investigates, takes a census, has notices posted, and unease spreads. Trude, the wife of the pharmacist Martin, sinks into anxiety; others accuse one another; most reassure themselves, and Pappenheim finds a bright side to each measure.
Context
The novel first appeared in 1975, in the volume Shanim ve-shaot, alongside a novella entitled 1946, then in a separate edition. The threat is given only an administrative name, that of the sanitary department, and critics classify the book among allegorical satires. Translated into English by Dalya Bilu in 1980, it was the first of Appelfeld's books to appear in that language; it received the National Jewish Book Award in 1989 and was staged in 2007. In French it exists in Arlette Pierrot's translation, reissued in paperback by Points in 2009.
Who it is for
A short novel, translated into French. It is better to know what awaited the Jews of Europe after 1939: the book counts on this knowledge in the reader.
Prizes and reception
Described as the greatest novel of the Shoah; awarded a prize in the United States in 1989, the author's first book translated into English.
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