Suddenly, Love, Aharon Appelfeld
Suddenly, Love, Aharon Appelfeld
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
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Suddenly, Love

Author: Aharon Appelfeld

Narrator: Neil Shah

Unabridged: 6 hr 2 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/24/2014

Synopsis

Ernst is a gruff seventy-year-old Red Army veteran. Retired, he lives alone and spends his time laboring over his unpublished novels. Irena, in her mid-thirties, has been taking care of Ernst since his surgery two years earlier. Quiet and shy, Irena is in awe of Ernst's intellect. And as the months pass, Ernst comes to depend on the gentle young woman who runs his house. But Ernst's writing gives him no satisfaction, and he is haunted by his Communist past. He seems to lose the will to live. But this is something Irena will not allow. As she becomes an important part of his life, Ernst regains his sense of self and discovers, to his amazement, that Irena is in love with him. And, even more astonishing, he realizes that he is in love with her, too.

About Aharon Appelfeld

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 Medicis 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, Appelefeld died in Israel in 2018.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Joan on April 22, 2019

The title is misleading. Yes, this is a love story, but the love that develops between Ernst and Irena is not sudden nor is it romantic. As he is dying, Ernst discovers “a reservoir of living water within him.” Irena’s devotion to him is “the gateway to life.” Observing her serenity... her living life......more

Goodreads review by Robert on April 25, 2019

What makes this short novel special is its portrayal of a fresh sort of relationship, between two people — an educated man in his 70s and an uneducated woman in her 30s — with apparently opposite relationships with dead parents that have limited their lives in different ways. Their relationship brin......more

Goodreads review by Kim on October 22, 2020

This novel is written with few characters and a relatively spare setting. The effect is a tightly focused novel drawing subtle lessons and parallels. Silence plays the role of shadow character, distilled into the shape and weight of human history. For some, silence is the language of the sorrowful. F......more

Goodreads review by Jim on March 14, 2015

Ernst is a 70-year old Jewish man, a refugee from Europe, living in Israel several decades after World War II. Back in the 1930’s in Romania, he was a strident young communist who had rejected his family and his heritage. As part of the revolutionary vanguard, he and his young comrades torched “bour......more

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