Appelfeld, Aharon | Naomi B. Sokoloff (essay date 1992)
Naomi B. Sokoloff (essay date 1992)
SOURCE: “Aharon Appelfeld—The Age of Wonders,” in Imagining the Child in Modern Jewish Fiction, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992, pp. 129–52.
[In the following essay, Sokoloff considers Appelfeld's use of a child's perspective in Age of Wonders, maintaining that it “may cast the world of devastation in a light that makes recollection of the past more bearable for author and reader.”]
The heaviest wheel rolls across our foreheads To bury itself deep somewhere inside our memories.
—Mif, “Terezín”
But now I am no more a child For I have learned to hate. I am a grown-up person now, I have known fear. Bloody words and a dead day then, That's something different than bogie men! But anyway, I still believe I only sleep today, That I'll wake up, a child again, and start to laugh and play....
[The entire page is 11060 words long]
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