Gîlā Rāmrāz-Raʾûḵ Books

The contemporary Hebrew novelist Aharon Appelfeld is one of the foremost chroniclers of the impact of the Holocaust on the human psyche. His fiction weaves sensitive and disturbing tales about individuals in the pre- and post-Holocaust worlds. In the first book devoted entirely to Appelfeld's work, Gila Ramras-Rauch explores his life, his shattered universe, and the development of his unique esthetic. A book-by-book analysis of his entire body of fiction - short stories, novellas, and novels from the early 1960s to the early 1990s, including such works as Smoke; Tzili, the Story of a Life; Badenheim 1939; and Katerina - provides a perceptive guide to Appelfeld's enchanted yet terrifying fictional world.

Between the realistic novel of the 19th century and the post-modern novel, there is a literature of transition. The protagonist in that literature begins to cut his moorings from the world of the probable, retreating into an inner, solipsistic world, a private existence not shared with the reader. In the process, the protagonist himself is made to undergo transformation in a deeply personal sense. This book examines those transformations in their broadest variety - in protagonists as different as Aschenbach in Death in Venice and Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis.