Surviving the horrors of the Holocaust, Appelfeld suggests with characteristic terseness, entails more than simply the fight to keep breathing ... The struggle to save others is a moving one. As one elderly survivor says to Edmund, with great wonder: 'Even after disgrace and humiliation and abuse, people rise up from the dust to revive and help others.'
... Appelfeld gives readers an up-close, deeply moving story of characters haunted by grief and loss yet buoyed by courage and hope in the most adverse conditions ... a memorable chronicle of those who sought to persevere at the height of one of the world’s worst moments.
The uniquely strange atmosphere of Appelfeld’s fiction comes from the fact that, because he could not remember his own past, he was forced to imagine it ... In his novels...Appelfeld writes with entranced certainty about experiences that could never have been his and worlds that don’t quite resemble the real one ... In To the Edge of Sorrow, the society...is a band of Jewish partisans during the Second World War. Numbering fewer than fifty, they hide in the Ukrainian countryside, raiding farms for supplies and hoping to hold out until the arrival of the Red Army. This sounds like the premise of a wartime adventure story, but, although we do hear about shoot-outs and sabotage missions, Appelfeld’s narrative style is inherently unsuspenseful. His novels are not about waiting for what will happen next but about immersion in a timeless present, a bubble world that is all the more enthralling because you know it is about to pop.
... immediately recognizable as Appelfeld's through its spare, eerily understated approach, which records atrocities from a grim remove. Unlike many of the brilliantly allusive author's novels, this one makes explicit reference to the Holocaust, but there's still a dreamlike quality at work. The naturalness of the setting is in contrast to the artfully detached feel of the dialogue. In Schoffman's translation (his first of an Appelfeld novel), the language lacks the seductive pull of other works by Appelfeld, but the story moves toward its climax with the usual disquieting force ... Another haunting and heartbreaking tale of the Holocaust from one who survived it.
... [Applefeld's] novels are ahistorical and philosophic, moral dramas that have left the confines of eyewitness testimony for the realm of fable and allegory ... is in part a hymn to the vitalizing force of Jewish tradition. But its battered optimism is universal, as well. Where do you go for wisdom? the book asks. What is your community? What are the convictions that charge your daily tasks with meaning? Find those things, and no trial is unendurable.
... spirited ... Appelfeld describes the daily hardships and travails of the partisans in near-reportorial detail and endows all of his characters with sympathetic personalities born out of their discussions of philosophy, the moral choices they make, the books they’ve read, the traditions they celebrate, and their fond memories of life before the war. This powerful tale of lives lived amid the duress and horrors of war is unflinching in its authenticity.
