The Retreat

By Aharon Appelfeld

Book Overview

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."

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0525242376
• ISBN13: 9780525242376
• Release Date: April 1984
• Publisher: Dutton Books
• Length: 164 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A unique and troubling voice

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.