Aharon Appelfeld - Katerina

In my youth, I had no desire either for prayer or for the Holy Scriptures. The words of prayers that I intoned were not my own. I went to church because my mother forced me. At the age of twelve, I had visions of obscenities in the middle of prayers, which greatly darkened my spirit. Every Sunday I used to pretend to be sick, and as much as my mother hit me, nothing did any good. I was as afraid of church as I was of the village doctor.

Nevertheless, thank God, I didn’t cut myself off from the wellsprings of faith. There were moments in my life when I forgot myself, when I sank into filth, when I lost the image of God, but even then I would fall to my knees and pray. Remember, God, those few moments, because my sins were many, and only Thou, with Thy great mercy, know the soul of Thy handmaiden.

Now, as the proverb says, the water has flowed back into the river, the circle is closed, and I have returned here. Too bad the dead are forbidden to speak. They’d have something to say, I’m sure. But the days are full and splendid, and I wander at great length. As long as the window is open and my eyes are awake, loneliness doesn’t grieve my soul.

Aharon Appelfeld is the author of more than twenty internationally acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, including Badenheim 1939, Tzili, The Iron Tracks, The Conversion , and The Story of a Life . His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He has won the Israel Prize in Literature, the National Jewish Book Award, and the MLA Commonwealth Award for Literature in America. Born in Czernowitz, Ukraine, in 1932, he lives in Israel.

Badenheim 1939

The Age of Wonders

Tzili: The Story of a Life

The Retreat

To the Land of the Cattails

The Immortal Bartfuss

For Every Sin

The Healer

Unto the Soul

Beyond Despair: Three Lectures and a Conversation with Philip Roth

The Iron Tracks

The Conversion

The Story of a Life

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Translation copyright © 1992 by Aharon Appelfeld

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Schocken Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Israel by Keter Publishing House, Jerusalem, in 1989.

Copyright © 1989 by Aharon Appelfeld and Keter Publishing House, Jerusalem, Ltd., P.O. Box 7145, Jerusalem, Israel.

This translation originally published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1992.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Appelfeld, Aron.

[Katerinah. English]

Katerina / Aharon Appelfeld; translated by Jeffrey M. Green.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-307-48670-7

I. Green, Yaacov Jeffrey. II. Title.

PJ5054.A755K3613 2006 892.4′36—dc22 2005049965

www.schocken.com

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