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The conflict is again explored amongst Jews prior to the war as to those Jews who were, "petit bourgeoisie", non-practicing, "intellectuals", and even a close friend that takes the dramatic step of circumcision as a man well into the middle of his years. The Father of the boy who's story we read is a writer of some renown that believes his Austrian Birth, education, and books published in German separate him from the other Jews he has so much contempt for. His friend that embarks on the mentioned operation is at once both ridiculed by the Father, and then is the object of a frantic effort to prevent him from allowing this act of, "disfigurement", to his person.
The primary Family all have their own issues with their religion, or what it, "should be". The Family deals not only with friends that choose their own way, but even the boys Aunt who he lives with as a child, eventually dies within the walls of a Catholic Monastery.
As he has in his other books the actual Holocaust itself is not written of. There is a single event when they are locked in a Synagogue, are packed onto a train, and then it is 30 years later and the protagonist is now a middle-aged man. Like the Author he has immigrated to Israel but comes home for reasons of his own. This final part of the work is fascinating as the Author brings the man home and it feels as though what he sees and does is real, and also that it may not be happening at all. The last comment is too extreme, for it does happen, it is just that the Author seems to give a transparency, to place a haze between his character and those he encounters, either from his life as a boy, or strangers who have inherited old ideas.
I have read many of Mr. Appelfeld's works and have found them to be some of the best literature on both the pre and post Holocaust experience. His survival was remarkable, it is little less than astonishing that he can not only write of this terrible era in History, but he can share it with all who are interested.
The book's title probably refers not only to the boy's wonder, his difficulty in understanding what is happening around him and the reactions of Austrians, both Jews and non-Jews. It probably also refers to the assimilation that the boy sees and his inability to understand why some Jews are trying to save themselves by converting to Christianity, even members of his own family.
Appelfeld does not describe the horrors of the holocaust in this novel because the focus is self-hatred, but there is a scene where the Jews are required by the Nazis to congregate in a synagogue, from where, unknown to them, they will be transported to the camps. The scene is written to reflect the same self-hatred by the assimilated Jews.
The last third of the novel tells about the return of the boy from Jerusalem to the city of his youth some 30 years later. He also had some family problems. He is searching for something that he is unable to find. The city has no Jews, but there are some people with some Jewish ancestry, and the self-hatred is continued long after the holocaust, as does anti-Semitism, even among his father's old friends.
The narrator of the story the adolescent Bruno tells of his own adventures in this assimilating world. He describes the way it falls apart in the first half of the work. In the second half of the work Bruno returns after the Shoah to the town of his youth. He meets many different characters including half- Jews with a positive if somewhat fantastic relation to their own Jewishness. He also meets one reprehensible convert who has stayed alive by repudiating the Jewish people. He again meets Austrian or half- Jewish women who regret that they have spent their lives with Austrians, and not made lives with kinder, more considerate)(according to them)Jewish husbands.
As is often the case in the novels of Appelfeld there is no decisive conclusive end. The hero by returning has no major revelation or insight or overall philosophical position to develop in relation to what has happened.
The strange silence of the main character, the failure of him really to meditate in depth on those lost gives a puzzling, detached character to this work.
The reader senses Appelfeld is giving us insight into the worlds of these assimilated and assimilating Jews But before the unspeakable he is silent , disturbed and disturbing.
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