In The Age of Wonders Appelfeld creates the childhood he never had: comfortable, intellectual, and strategically displaced a few hundred miles west of Bukovina. The narrator's father is an established Austrian writer—novelist, essayist, fervent admirer of Kafka and friend of Zweig, Schnitzler, and Max Brod. He and his wife and Bruno, their only child, live not too far from Vienna, not too far from Prague, and he hurries between the two capitals as his successful literary career requires. The family is Jewish upper class, more or less assimilated. When philandering Uncle Salo gets drunk at Bruno's birthday party he holds forth about their distinguished relatives: "he counted the musicians, painters, and writers, the converts and the international speculators." Note those converts; they are Jews whose Jewishness is marginal to their lives, a quirk of ancestry that has no bearing on their cultured agnosticism. Like Proust's pained, sophisticated...