The Iron Tracks: A novel - Softcover

Appelfeld, Aharon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805210997 ISBN 13: 9780805210996

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1999

Synopsis

How does one live after surviving injustice? What satisfaction comes from revenge? Can the past ever be left behind?
Masterfully composed and imbued with extraordinary feeling and understanding, "The Iron Tracks" is a riveting tale of survival and revenge by the writer whom Irving Howe called "one of the best novelists alive today."
Ever since he was released from a concentration camp forty years earlier, Erwin Siegelbaum has been obsessively riding the trains of postwar Austria. His days are filled with drink, his nights with brief love affairs and the torments of his nightmares. What keeps him sane is his mission to collect the menorahs, kiddush cups, and holy books that have survived their vanished owners. And the hope that one day he will find the Nazi officer who murdered his parents--and have the strength to kill him.
A haunting exploration of one survivor's complex, wrenching, inner world, "The Iron Tracks" is distinguished by the depth of insight and the distinctively stark, elegant style that have won Aharon Appelfeld recognition as one of the world's great writers.

About this title

Review

"Appelfeld is an astonishingly subtle and sensitive writer whose work refines itself and grows purer over the years. Almost every sentence in The Iron Tracks sparkles with gemlike refraction. . . . Some believe this novel about a Holocaust survivor who travels the trains of south-central Europe in search of a Nazi tormentor is one of the finest books ever written about the pain and memory of war."
--Chicago Tribune (a Fiction and Nonfiction Favorite for 1998)

"This tale of reparation and retaliation is art at its highest."
--Washington Post

"Aharon Appelfeld's controlled fiction compresses large themes into small spaces. . . . He is a worthy successor to Kafka."
--Jonathan Rosen, New York Times Book Review

About the Author

AHARON APPELFELD is the author of more than forty works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Iron Tracks, Until the Dawn's Light (both winners of the National Jewish Book Award), The Story of a Life (winner of the Prix Médicis Étranger), and Badenheim 1939. Other honors he has received include the Giovanni Boccaccio Literary Prize, the Nelly Sachs Prize, the Israel Prize, the Bialik Prize, and the MLA Commonwealth Award. Blooms of Darkness won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2012 and was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013. Born in Czernowitz, Bukovina (now part of Ukraine), in 1932, he died in Israel in 2018.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0805210997
• ISBN 13: 9780805210996
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208