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Yaakov Fineâs practical wife and daughters are baffled by his decision to leave his flourishing dress shop for a ten-day trip to his familyâs ancestral village in Poland. Struggling to emerge from a midlife depression, Yaakov is drawn to Szydowce, intrigued by the stories he'd heard as a child from his parents and their friends, who would wax nostalgic about their pastoral, verdant hometown in the decades before 1939. The horrific years that followed were relegated to the nightmares that shattered sleep and were not discussed during waking hours.
When he arrives in Krakow, Yaakov enjoys the charming sidewalk cafes and relaxed European atmosphere, so different from the hurly burly of Tel Aviv. And his landlady in Szydowceâbeautiful, sensual Magda, with a tragic past of her ownâenchants him with her recollections of his family. But when Yaakov attempts to purchase from the townspeople the desecrated tombstones that had been stolen from Szydowceâs plowed-under Jewish cemetery, a very different Poland emerges, one that shatters Yaakovâs idyllic view of the town and its people, and casts into sharp relief the tragic reality of Jewish life in Polandâpast, present, and future.
In this novel of revelation and reconciliation, Aharon Appelfeld once again mines lived experience to create fiction of powerful, universal resonance.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
June 20, 2023 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780805243628
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780805243628
- File size: 7295 KB
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Languages
- English
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