Publisher Description

The eighth of Aharon Appelfeld's brilliantly original novels to be published in English, The Healer is a remarkable story about faith and faithlessness among European Jews on the eve of World War II. Felix Katz is a Viennese businessman whose life is choked by suppressed rage and intolerance for those who have faith. When conventional methods fail to cure his daughter's emotional illness, Felix in desperation agrees to travel with his family to the Carpathian Mountains in search of a famous healer. Months later, after being snowbound in a rural Jewish village that sustains itself on faith, Felix returns to a Vienna plagued by the disease of anti-Semitism. The Healer wonderfully combines elements of fable with the complex sensibility of a great modernist writer sensitive to the overbearing moral issues of our time.

Author Biography

Aharon Appelfeld was born in Czernovitz, Bukovina, in 1932. When the Nazis swept east, his mother was killed, and he was transported to the labor camp at Transnistria, from which he soon escaped. For the next three years, he wandered in the forests. Sometime in 1944, he was picked up by the Red Army, served in field kitchens in Ukraine, and thence made his way to Italy. He reached Palestine in 1946. A veteran of the Israeli Army, now married and the father of three children, he teaches at Ben Gurion University.

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