SOURCE: “Aharon Appelfeld—The Age of Wonders,” in Imagining the Child in Modern Jewish Fiction, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992, pp. 129–52.

In the following essay, Sokoloff considers Appelfeld's use of a child's perspective in Age of Wonders, maintaining that it “may cast the world of devastation in a light that makes recollection of the past more bearable for author and reader.”

The heaviest wheel rolls across our foreheads To bury itself deep somewhere inside our memories.

—Mif, “Terezín”

But now I am no more a child For I have learned to hate. I am a grown-up person now, I have known fear. Bloody words and a dead day then, That's something different than bogie men! But anyway, I still believe I only sleep today, That I'll wake up, a child again, and start to laugh and                     play. 

—Hanuš Hachenburg, “Terezín,” I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children's...