About The Book

The Immortal Bartfuss breaks new ground for a writer already hailed as one of the most significant novelists working today. Aharon Appelfeld’s novel takes place in contemporary Israel and offers a profound and powerful portrait of a Holocaust survivor. It is the shattering story of a man reduced to his tragic limits.

Bartfuss, enigmatically called “the immortal” because of his experience in the camps, is now a citizen of Israel, the father of two daughters, a man trapped in a bitter marriage, engaged in shady business transactions, and reduced by memories and fears he struggles to immure in silence. Yet as he struggles’with himself and with others who have shared that past”we come to realize he is also a person attempting to keep alive some vestige of human dignity and compassion.

Using the techniques of omission and indirection perfected in such masterpieces as Badenheim 1939 and To the Land of the Cattails, Aharon Appelfeld has again salvaged a portion of the unsayable. The Immortal Bartfuss is further confirmation that Mr. Appelfeld is among the major figures in contemporary world literature.