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Book Reviews 119 Melvin Bukiet's stories provide one response. Jews will continue to remember. Alan L. Berger Jewish Studies Program Syracuse University Katerina, by Aharon Appelfeld. New York: Random House, 1992. 212 pp. $18.00. Since the appearance in English ofBadenbeim: 1939 in 1980, Aharon Appelfeld's stature as a serious novelist has continued to grow. Katerina, his ninth novel to appear in English, comes to us in a wonderfully nuanced translation byJeffrey M. Green that captures the poetic brooding of the original and reaffirms Appelfeld's position as a major novelist in the tradition of Franz Kafka, among others. Katerina reflects Appelfeld's boldness and inventiveness as a writer willing to take risks. His bold stroke, in this instance, is to conduct a meditation on the moral extremes of human character through the voice of an uneducated Ruthenian peasant woman who has spent her youthful years working for Jewish families, and who, in sharp contrast to her rabidly antisemitic compatriots, becomes powerfully attracted to Jews and Jewishness. Katerina speaks a colloquial Yiddish that surprises some of the Jews she comes in contact with; she becomes acquainted with the laws of kashrut, and she acquires a familiarity with Jewish holy days and religious rituals. In creating a speaker who belongs to the world of Ruthenian peasantry as well as the world of East European Jewry, Appelfeld is able to examine the virulent antisemitism of Slavic Europe from an inner and outer perspective. Though she herselfdoes not hate Jews, Katerina, as one who is Ruthenian born, sometimes sees the Jews from the viewpoint of those who took part in their destruction. And even when she herself does not see Jews. from the Ruthenian perspective, other Ruthenians talk to her as if she were one of them, so in the kind of discourse she receives and in describing the behavior of her fellow Ruthenians, she becomes a reflector (and sometimes a deflector) of Ruthenian Jew hating. In recalling her distant past, the near octogenarian Katerina who weaves the tale remembers"... my friend Waska, a quiet and decent lad. We used to herd the flocks together. I loved him because of his generosity, his manners, and his forthrightness.... That Waska, who used to hug and kiss me delicately, who was bashful about asking for my body, that darling 120 SHOFAR Fall 1993 Vol. 12, No. 1 Waska went out in the winter with all his friends to hunt Jews, and when a Jew who had crossed his path-not a young man-managed to slip out of his hands, Waska didn't give up. He ran after the Jew and caught him, venting all his fury" (pp. 108-109). As a Ruthenian, Katerina can see the two sides of Waska. Though he is not brutal and bestial to her, as are so I many of the Ruthenians she describes, even the gentle Waska becomes a predator to the Jews and pursues them without mercy. Katerina, it should be said, moves not only in and out of two religioethnic worlds, but also in and out of dream and reality, past and present, the worlds of the living and the dead, the natural and the supernatural. Human beings in her waking world are ponrayed in pa~terns of animal imagery, as ifAppelfeld has taken the hard edge off, and metaphorized the graphic savagery ofJerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird, a book that records a life experience similar to Appelfeld's-that of a Jewish orphan boy wandering through the killing fields of Eastern Europe in the early 1940s. The hypnotic lyric surface of Katerina is broken by a devastating pattern of images in which Ruthenian peasants are consistently associated with wild beasts and predators, while Jews are ponrayed as the defenseless prey. At one stage in her life, Katerina adopts two orphaned Jewish brothers. Their aunt comes to reclaim them with the help of "two Ruthenian thugs" she has hired. When the children try to run away, the Ruthenians "... leaped into the vegetation like wolves.... In my hean, I knew that the boys' fate was sealed. Nothing escapes the wolfs fangs, and those Ruthenians were worse than wolves. They wouldn't leave the thicket...

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