SOURCE: “In the Fertile Valley,” in Aharon Appelfeld: The Holocaust and Beyond, Indiana University Press, 1994, pp. 56–72.

In the following essay, Ramras-Rauch provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of Appelfeld's In the Fertile Valley.

Appelfeld's deep study of Jewish motifs begins in his second collection of short stories, Ba‘guy Ha’poreh (In the Fertile Valley, 1963). Appelfeld sometimes uses the first-person narrator in these stories of the 1960s; but when he does, the effect is not markedly different from his third-person narration. The reader is not introduced to the inner life of the character; nor is a single point of view maintained. Thus no special certainties are in store for the reader when a first-person narrator is introduced. On the contrary, the first-person voice often introduces doubt and uncertainty. Statements are often rhetorical, speculative, even poetic, but they do not supply any special information related to that voice. The...