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    All Whom I Have Loved3

    Mark Thwaite The Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld is one of a small group of world-class writers who seems always on the brink of winning the Nobel Prize. In All Whom I Have Loved we have another brilliant, if odd, rather unsettling and deceptively simple novel from a master of the form. Nine-year-old Paul Rosenfeld’s father, Arthur, is a once almost-famous painter, whose work is no longer flavour of the month -- indeed, its very "decadence" is held up by the growing number of anti-Semites as proof of a malignant malaise affecting all Jews. His wife, Henia, is a schoolteacher. When we first meet them, in Ukraine, in the 1930s, Paul's Mother and Father have just separated. Paul’s babysitter is a Ruthenian-speaking Christian called Halina. Shockingly, and for reasons never fully explained, Halina’s fiance comes to the house one day and, after a brief argument, kills her. Paul is totally bereft. His Father is drinking more and more, but he wants Paul to live with him in Czernowitz. A laconic, introspective man, Arthur only comes alive when he is painting or drunk. Despite this, he and his son grow close. Out of the blue, an old friend invites him to Bucharest to mount an exhibition. A few months of hard work and optimism lie ahead. But when Arthur’s work is shown the anti-Semites are there to condemn it. Disappointment becomes despair when Paul and his Father learn that Henia is near to death, suffering from Typhus. by Mark Thwaite

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