Blanca, born Jewish in pre-war Germany, converts to Christianity with the approval of her parents who are themselves alienated from Judaism, in order to marry a caricatured brute named Adolf. When the novel begins Blanca is on the run with her young son after a catastrophic event, going North, going toward an ideal, fantastical, safe home. The novel explores questions of religiosity and cultural senses and ideals and identity; questions about education, intellectual identity, kinds of feeling, ways of relating to the self and others within a larger cultural setting in which there is an attempt to segregate qualities of feeling and work according to what is and isn't German and therefore what is and is not Jewish. The novel is also concerned with power, destruction, love, friendship and isolation. There is a full atmospheric quality to the novel in the sense that it draws out and draws on the atmosphere of the main character's emotional experiences and sense of the world. The unreality and stark realities of living imprisoned by circumstances, one's own troubled relationship to identity, is in here in beautiful ways. There is a quality of summary that is frustrating for me at times, a feeling of narrowness, thin vision of character and mood that does shift sometimes, and may be building toward a cloistered feeling, cloistered and trapped and living in an animal fear, but for me it makes parts of the book, moments and characters fall into the realm of the symbolic -- at times I felt I was listening in on a kind of repetitive, moralizing lecture but I couldn't quite say on what, which is what brings it always back to life.
Blanca Guttman is a promising high school student when she is assigned to tutor Adolf Hammer, a Christian from a working-class family. Attracted by Adolf’s need for her, Blanca falls for him and agrees to convert and marry rather than attend university. Adolf’s robust Austrian family dislikes Blanca’s slight frame, her mother’s chronic illness, and her father’s profession as a book seller. Adolf convinces Blanca to distance herself from her family and begins to beat her in an attempt to toughen her up. But when her mother dies and Adolf convinces Blanca to put her fifty-three year old father in a nursing home, Blanca realizes that she has given up far too much. She considers leaving Adolf only to discover that she is pregnant and condemned to live in the prison of her marriage forever.This is a beautifully written, yet sad tale of a vulnerable girl whose story sheds light on the condition of European Jews a generation following the Jewish Enlightenment. Blanca is young and impressionable. Her parents, while providing a loving home, possess little direction or confidence to pass on to their daughter. Consequently, Blanca’s adult life is a daze of confusion and despair. She cannot change enough to please Adolf just as the Jews could never assimilate enough to gain the acceptance of their Christian neighbors. In contrast to Blanca, Adolf’s hard-drinking and Jew-hating rages make him seem driven with purpose. Ahron Appelfeld’s simple, yet dramatic story translated by Jeffrey Green is a superb tale with poignant lessons about identity and legacy.
What do You think about Until The Dawn's Light (2011)?
This was an interesting story of a disenfranchised woman who never finds her place. Blanca is born a Jew in a place where prejudice is rampant- early 20th century Austria. She converts and marries an awful prejudice gentile who makes her life absolutely miserable as she comes to understand it is impossible for to escape from her heritage and her family. Her heroics to save herself and her child become so sadly misguided that it is difficult to read, even as the reader knows she is heading down the wrong path. It is a well-told very deterministic sad story with little hope.
—Louise Silk
This is a well written novel by a world renowned writer, however, its subject matter is so depressing that I can give it only a 3 star rating. It is set in Austria in the early 1900s when a young woman in a small town converts from Judaism to Christianity to marry her very large/tall/broad/dumb schoolmate whom she tutored (without success). Blanca is beaten by her husband Adolph and it seems that this is the normal treatment of women among the peasants. Blanca is frail, works hard to keep the house spotless and food on the table and she is semi-crazy. Her infant son, Otto, is also frail. I was about to stop reading when an event occurred that had me curious as to how the book would end. There is much in the book about the mass conversions of Jews to Christianity as a form of survival for the Jew and of a shame felt by Jews to be Jews, and of the Christians not being able to accept the Jews as Christians but continuing to harbor resentment towards the ex-Jews. I wished that Blanca had lived up to her potential, but then, how many of us do so?
—Judy
A dark and somewhat sad tale of an abused Jewish woman who suffers physically and mentally at the hands of her gentile husband in turn-of-the-century Austria. Although a little is lost in the translation from the Hebrew by Jeffrey Green, the language is still poetic and the story is compelling. Not an easy read, but one that delivers until the end. I was a little confused by the main character's final action in the last few pages, but enough has happened to her up to that point, I suppose, to make any decision she undertakes seem justified.
—Paula Margulies
