The Conversion

First edition in English. 8vo. Pp. [vi], 228, [1]. Quarter-bound black cloth over charcoal-grey paper boards, lettered in silver to spine. Jacket design by Kathleen DiGrado.

Slight crease to top edge of upper dustwrapper panel, else Fine.

Translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M. Green.

Set in an Austrian city, two generations before the Holocaust, a novel about a Jewish man's conversion to Christianity in order to clear his path to a coveted government post.

Author appears as a character in Philip Roth's Operation Shylock (1993), who described him, as "a displaced writer of displaced fiction". Although raised with German as his mother tongue in then Romanian-controlled Czernowitz and proficient in half a dozen other European languages, Appelfeld wrote exclusively in Hebrew, which he learned as a teenage refugee following his lone trek to Palestine. "A work of subtle power, at once a historical novel and a moral parable." –The Boston Globe