Summary:

It is spring 1939 in the age of anxiety. In months Europe will be
Hitler's. And Badenheim, a resort town vaguely in the orbit of
Vienna, is preparing for its summer season. The vacationers arrive as
they always have, a sampling of Jewish middle-class life: the
impresario Dr. Pappenheim, his musicians, and their conductor; the
gay Frau Tsauberblit; the historian, Dr. Fussholdt, and his much
younger wife; the "readers," twins whose passion for Rilke is
featured on their program; a child prodigy; a commercial traveler; a
rabbi. The list waxes as the summer wanes. To receive them in the
town are the pharmacist and his worried wife, the hotelier and his
large staff, the pastry shop owner and his irritable baker, Sally and
Gertie (two quite respectable prostitutes), and, mysteriously, the
bland inspectors from the "Sanitation Department."The story unfolds
as matter-of-factly as a Chekhov play. The characters on stage are so
deeply held by their defensive daily trivia that they manage to
misconstrue every signal of their fate. Finally, the vacationers,
whose numbers have now increased by the forced crowding-in of other
Jews hardly on vacation, become de facto prisoners in their familiar
resort; their "vacation" begins to take on the lineaments of
undefined disaster. The text builds a sense of foreboding in which
each human detail is so persuasive, so right in its fidelity to the
terrible evasions of the time, that it leaves us transformed by what
we and the author know must, and will, happen to Badenheim's
visitors.Badenheim 1939 owes everything to its author's astonishing
capacity to recreate the energies and confusions of innocent and
uncomprehending victims who, always loyal to civility and social
graces, fail to even dimly see the cruel terms of their imminent
fate.

Classification:

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Dewey Class: 813 -- Fiction

Book Details:

Physical Description: 5.4"x8.4"x0.5"; 0.5 lb; 144 pages
Edition Info: Paperback; 2009-05-01

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•	Literature & Fiction -- Contemporary (83036)
•	Literature & Fiction -- General -- General (80688)
•	Literature & Fiction -- Genre Fiction -- Historical (22082)
•	Literature & Fiction -- Literary (43482)

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