THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020 81
who have been plucked from the fire,
beliefs that are beyond their under-
standing,” Appelfeld writes.
In this way, the partisans’ moun-
taintop, which was already a kind of
Sinai, also becomes a version of the
Alpine sanatorium where Hans Cas-
torp undergoes his spiritual educa-
tion, in Thomas Mann’s “The Magic
Mountain.” Like Mann, Appelfeld
surveys all the great quandaries of the
twentieth century, only in their Jew-
ish versions. Can modern people gen-
uinely return to a pre-modern way of
belief? (“How does one pray without
believing the words of the prayer?”
Appelfeld writes.) Is communism the
heir of Judaism’s faith in a messianic
future, or a perversion of that faith?
Why did the Nazis, even after Ger-
many began to lose the war, continue
to prioritize killing Jews above urgent
military aims? And how can Jews con-
tinue to raise children in a world where
such hatred is possible?
By the end of the novel, none of
these questions have been answered,
because they can’t be. After further
trials, the surviving partisans make
their descent from the mountain back
into real life, where they must face the
continuing hostility of their neigh-
bors and the challenge of starting their
lives over. For Appelfeld and many
other survivors after 1945, the only
possible next step was to go to Israel,
where they would be asked to forget
the past in order to build the future.
“To the Edge of Sorrow” ends on
a more ambiguous note. On the nov-
el’s last page, a camp survivor asks
one of the partisans where they should
all go:
“Home,” he answers right away.
“Which home?” asks the survivor.
“There’s only one home we grew up in and
loved, and we’re returning to it.”
But what is that home, which Ap-
pelfeld deliberately refuses to name?
Is it Eastern Europe, whose Jews were
almost all murdered? Is it Israel, which
Zionism sees as the Jews’ historic home
and to which it calls them to return?
Or perhaps, for Appelfeld, the only
possible home was like that moun-
taintop—a half-remembered, half-
imagined place that could exist only
in the pages of a book.
BRIEFLY NOTED
Weather, by Jenny Offill (Knopf ). Lizzie, the narrator of this
novel, is hired to answer e-mails for a prominent professor
who lectures widely about the imminence of climate apoc-
alypse. As she fields questions from evangelicals, environ-
mentalists, preppers—“everyone who writes her is either
crazy or depressed”—she finds her life mired in dread. In
diaristic fragments, Lizzie builds a taxonomy of end-times
experts: disaster psychologists, futurists, climate scientists,
survival instructors, war journalists, hippies. Offill’s mor-
dant humor keeps the story nimble even as the novel re-
veals its central inquiry: How do we make our way to safety,
and whom do we bring with us?Apeirogon, by Colum McCann (Random House). This mul-
tifaceted novel, whose title means “a shape with a count-
ably infinite number of sides,” tells the story of an unlikely
friendship amid the Israel-Palestine conflict. Bassam Ar-
amin, a Palestinian who served a prison sentence for throw-
ing a grenade, and Rami Elhanan, a former Israeli soldier,
each lost a child to the violence. Drawn together by grief,
they now work to educate people about the conflict’s human
cost. Blending fiction and nonfiction in more than a thou-
sand mini-chapters, McCann’s account includes tales about
the history, people, and weapons involved in the occupation
of Palestine as well as interviews with Rami and Bassam.
The ambitious form sometimes elides the nuances of Ra-
mi’s and Bassam’s stories, but McCann’s generous narrative
amplifies their emotionally resonant message.Something That May Shock and Discredit You, by Daniel
Mallory Ortberg (Atria). The author of this collection of es-
says and humorous interludes illuminates the story of his
gender transition by assembling an unlikely group of inter-
locutors, including William Shatner, Ovid, the Golden Girls,
and John Bunyan. Ortberg does not simply narrate his ex-
perience of transition; he also grapples with the challenge
of doing so, toggling skillfully between criticism, personal
essay, and literary pastiche, and at one point satirizing the
“po-faced transmasculine memoir I am trying not to write.”
Animated by Ortberg’s Christian faith and eclectic cultural
enthusiasms, the book is a syllabus of sorts—a road map
for navigating one remarkable writer’s mind.In the Dream House, by Carmen Maria Machado (Gray-
wolf ). The titular house in this memoir is where the au-
thor and her girlfriend live in passionate bliss, until the
girlfriend turns manipulative, cruel, and sometimes vio-
lent. Then it becomes a “dungeon of memory” and the
unifying metaphor of an account that emerges in shards
of autobiography, history, and fable. Searching for other
stories like hers, she finds few, and reflects on the “archi-
val silence” surrounding queer domestic abuse. The mem-
oirist’s task, she writes, is to “braid the clays of memory
and essay and fact and perception together, smash them
into a ball, roll them flat.”