Appelfeld, Aharon | Gila Ramras-Rauch (essay date 1994)
Gila Ramras-Rauch (essay date 1994)
SOURCE: “In the Fertile Valley,” in Aharon Appelfeld: The Holocaust and Beyond, Indiana University Press, 1994, pp. 56–72.
[In the following essay, Ramras-Rauch provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of Appelfeld's In the Fertile Valley.]
Appelfeld's deep study of Jewish motifs begins in his second collection of short stories, Ba‘guy Ha’poreh (In the Fertile Valley, 1963). Appelfeld sometimes uses the first-person narrator in these stories of the 1960s; but when he does, the effect is not markedly different from his third-person narration. The reader is not introduced to the inner life of the character; nor is a single point of view maintained. Thus no special certainties are in store for the reader when a first-person narrator is introduced. On the contrary, the first-person voice often introduces doubt and uncertainty. Statements are often rhetorical, speculative, even...
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