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*All Whom I Have Loved* is the haunting story of a Jewish family in Eastern Europe in the 1930s as seen through the eyes of an unforgettable nine-year-old boy. The beloved only child of divorced parents, Paul watches helplessly as his family and his world dissolve around him. At first he lives with his mother—a secular, assimilated schoolteacher, whom he adores until she “betrays” him by marrying a gentile. He’s then sent to live with his father—once an admired avant-garde artist, but now reviled by the critics as a “decadent Jew,” who drowns his anger, pain, and humiliation in drink. Paul searches in vain for a life of stability and meaning. The earthy peasant girl who briefly takes care of him, the pull he feels toward the Jews praying in the local synagogue, and his fascination with Eastern Orthodox church rituals give him only tantalizing glimpses into worlds of which he can never be a part. The fates that Paul’s parents will meet with Paul as terrified witness, and his own fate as an orphaned Jewish child alone in Europe in 1938, are rendered by Aharon Appelfeld with extraordinary subtlety and power, as they foreshadow, in the heart-wrenching story of three individuals, the cataclysm that is about to engulf all of European Jewry. ** ### From Publishers Weekly Israeli novelist Appelfeld (*The Story of a Life*; *The Iron Tracks*) sets this pre-Holocaust novel in 1938 Czernowitz, Ukraine, where narrator Paul Rosenfeld, a nine-year-old Jewish boy, watches his family and community fall apart. Paul, whose isolation is exacerbated by his exemption from school because of his asthma, watches as, in short order, his parents divorce, his adored nanny is killed by her jealous fiancé and his schoolteacher mother abandons him (first when she marries a colleague and converts to Christianity, and later when she contracts typhus and dies). Paul is left in the care of his father, a depressed, alcoholic painter who hardly speaks except to rail against the anti-Semitic art critics who have labeled his art "decadent" and thwarted his career. Paul daydreams about an idyllic country vacation he once took with his mother and finds himself drawn to the Orthodox Jews he meets. Meanwhile, strangers hurl anti-Semitic insults and World War II looms. Though Appelfeld's bewildered child narrator is a pleasure to follow, he stumbles into gratingly precious territory on occasion. For all its morbidity, the story is seductive and, ultimately, devastating. *(Feb.)* Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ### From Booklist Growing up in Bucharest, Czernowitz, and various small places in Eastern Europe in the 1930s, Paul Rosenfeld, nine, cares little about his Jewish identity; in fact he despises "the bearded Jews" who pray in the synagogue next door, and local anti-Semitism barely registers. His life is focused on family turmoil after his beloved mother remarries and he must live with his gifted artist father, who veers between alcoholism and bouts of feverish work. The child's naive first-person narrative is sometimes excruciatingly detailed and slow--this would work better as a short story. But the translation from the Hebrew is eloquent, and well-known Israeli writer Appelfeld gets perfectly the way politics seems very unimportant and distant compared with the anguish of a mother dying of typhus and a father struggling for recognition. For the reader, who knows that the Holocaust will wipe out Paul's world, there is bitter irony in the drama of daily struggle. *Hazel Rochman* *Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved*