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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read?

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt.

Today I'm honored to have as my guest, Harone Applefeld, a writer who is now living in Israel.

His first appearance in the United States was Badenheim, 1939. His most recent book

is The Iron Tracks, published by Schocken. He's the author of 10 other novels that have been

translated into English, and a book of essays and lectures called Beyond Despair.

Among the other books are The Age of Wonders,

The Retreat to the Land of Catals,

The Immortal Bartfuss for Every Sin,

The Healer, Katerina, and Unto the Soul.

These books represent a remarkable body of work in that they attempt to try to find what might be a way of dealing with an event like the Holocaust in an art form, within the conventions of an art form. How did you discover the conventions that would allow you to write about

so disastrous and overwhelming a series of events?

I have discovered slowly, very slowly, and just give you an example.

I was trying for years to be attached to my memory.

And I have written a book about my experience in the forests

in the Ukraine during the second world

and it came out

...