Badenheim 1939

A small masterpiece of world literature, set in Europe months before the Nazis began their rise.

It is spring 1939. And Badenheim, a resort town vaguely in the orbit of Vienna, is preparing for its summer season. The vacationers arrive as they always have, a sampling of Jewish middle-class life: the impresario Dr. Pappenheim, his musicians, and their conductor; the bubbly Frau Tsauberblit; the historian, Dr. Fussholdt, and his much younger wife; the “readers,” twins with a passion for Rilke; a child prodigy; a commercial traveler; a rabbi.

The list of guests grows longer as the summer goes on. Receiving them in the town are the residents: the pharmacist and his worried wife, the hotelier and his large staff, the pastry shop owner and his irritable baker, Sally and Gertie (two prostitutes), and, mysteriously, the bland inspectors from the “Sanitation Department.”

Finally, the vacationers, whose numbers have now increased by the forced crowding-in of other Jews hardly on vacation, become de facto prisoners in their familiar resort; their “vacation” begins to take on the lineaments of undefined disaster.

Author, and Holocaust survivor, Aharon Appelfeld created a world in Badenheim 1939 that has only gained power for readers since its publication in 1980. Philip Roth called Appelfeld “a displaced writer of displaced fiction who has made of displacement and disorientation a subject uniquely his own.”