- Paperback: 176 pages
- Publisher: Random House Inc; New edition edition (Jan 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0805210962
- ISBN-13: 978-0805210965
- Product Dimensions: 0.6 x 13.3 x 21 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 5,197,889 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
The year is 1937. On a remote hilltop some distance from Vienna stands a hotel called The Retreat. Founded by a man who is determined to cleanse himself and his guests of all "Jewish traits," it is a resort of assimilation, with daily activities that include lessons in how to look, talk, act--in short, how to pass--as a gentile. But with Hitler on the march, the possibilities of both assimilation and retreat are quickly fading for the hotel's patrons, men and women who are necessarily--and horrifically--blind to their fate. Mordant, shrewd, and elegantly written, The Retreat is a moving story of people forbidden to retreat from themselves, by the writer whom Irving Howe called "one of the best novelists alive."
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3.5 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A unique and troubling voice, 25 April 2005
By Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Retreat (Paperback)
Marginal Jewish characters who would do without their own Jewish identity gather together at a ' retreat' where they are to develop traits which will free them of their 'undesirable' Jewish traits. The major character, an actress who has been forced into retirement, and who has an uneasy relationship with her daughter comes to the Retreat and like its other inhabitants is enclosed and imprisoned by it. Appelfeld is a master of depicting such marginal characters, who seem somehow unreal and threatened not only by the hostile world outside but by their own lack of substance. On the edge of the great destruction of the Jewish people these characters seem half- dead and in some way longing for their own destruction.
Though I sense the art, the depth, the cunning of the master writer at work here I nonetheless found the reading difficult and claustrophobic.
Appelfeld is a writer of immense critical reputation, and truly a writer of unique perception, experience and sensibility.
He is truly a unique and troubling voice, the remembrance and the promise of a terrible disaster that has already happened, and is told as if it is about to come.
1 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Maybe I'm Missing Something..., 15 May 2001
By Emily Ellis Hoffman - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Retreat (Paperback)
I read this book in a day- very short and very vague. This is the first I've read of this author so I don't know if this is his style or a different feel than his other books. It is basically filled with characters that hate their Jewishness. However, these characters are one dimensional, boring sketches that failed to interest me. I kept trying to ponder this book after finishing for some worthy or powerful statement of Anything! All I discovered is that I'm GLAD some books are really short.
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