Katerina

Sixty-three years ago then teenager Katerina left her Ukraine village because her father's mountain of a second wife makes her uncomfortable with her demands and she fears the changes in her father since her mom died. She travels to Poland where she obtains work as a housekeeper to different Jewish families. Katerina finds her hosts treat her with respect and kindness unlike her own blood; she is horrified with how the non-Jewish Poles mistreat her employers even getting away with murder. When her son, raised Jewish, is killed, she knifes his murderer. Of course killing a Jew is not necessarily a crime, but killing the killer is so Katerina spends the next four decades incarcerated. She is shocked during World War II when her fellow prisoners gleefully applaud the transporting of the Jews to concentration camps. When the war ends, Katerina is freed and returns to her Ukraine family farm knowing no Jews live in Europe except those from her memories occupying a major place in her heart and soul as she writes her life's lament while closing in on her eightieth birthday. KATERINA is a terrific insightful look at a woman who believes one must never forget those you love martyred in your soul by a world filled with morally always right killers. The sad Katerina knows first hand that intolerance and prejudice in any form murders even the innocent. Aharon Appelfeld provides a strong poignant reflection on life and death. Harriet Klausner

"Katerina" by Aaron Appelfeld is an original look at The Holocaust. This is a piece of history, an event that has been written about countless times, but this writer's perspective is unique. The book is a historical novel; however the circumstances he describes could have, and probably did happen in very similar form.The protagonist Katerina is not a Jew, she is not raised to respect Jews, and her surroundings are that of anti Semitism. However events lead to her working for a Jewish Family, and as the years pass she learns to understand their culture and their religious beliefs. As her knowledge grows so does her respect for them and with it a steady degrading of the hatred for anti-Semitism she can no longer justify.A horrifying act of cruelty to which she reasonably responds leads to her imprisonment. And it is in this prison setting the Author creates for her decades of fear and loathing of those she came from and their hatred of Jews for which she feels such contempt. Her one consistent visitor is her Lawyer, again a Jew. She is kept in this prison where the trains that carry the Holocaust's victims pass by each day. She lives with people who happily celebrate the genocide while clothing themselves in the victim's clothes and other personal effects that were confiscated.After half of her life is passed in prison the War ends and the prisoners walk free. Even her freedom is tainted, as she is forced to endure the celebratory attitude of her fellow prisoners that all the Jews are gone, the killers of Christ have themselves been killed. So even when she returns to her village that she left behind 63 years in her past she does so knowing the people she adopted as equals have been decimated, and people that never knew her then, now know her as the murderess, the legend she has become.The Author portrays a scene of this very old woman coming upon what was a Temple, and the effect of the writing is as galvanizing as any thing you may read. This is a book that is unlike others books about the Genocide of WWII, all the horror is there, but it is left more to your mind's eye than placed before you in all its historical butchery. The emotional trauma this woman endures during the War combined with the balance of her suffering in life, is of a magnitude that is awesome both in its scope and depth of despair.

Katerina is a Ruthenian peasant woman (a Gentile), forced to work for a Jew. Over time, she becomes fascinated with the Jews. The story takes place in the Ukraine, before the Holocaust. Interesting insight into anti-Semitism as well as life as a peasant.