As the story opens, World War II has just ended. Sixteen-year-old protagonist Erwin, a Ukrainian of Jewish heritage, is joining a group of refugees on the way to Palestine. He learns Hebrew and is asked to change his name. In the fighting in Palestine, prior to Israel’s independence, he is wounded. While he heals, he contemplates life and copies biblical texts.

This is a low-key book. The journey is over quickly, and he is quickly wounded in the fighting. The vast majority of time is spent in recuperation. During this period, Erwin, renamed Aharon discusses many deep topics with doctors and visitors. He attempts to heal both emotionally and physically. He remembers his parents, who were killed in the Holocaust, and interacts with them in his dreams.

It is a different take on themes we often find in Holocaust literature. It portrays the anguish suffered by young adults who lost their parents and are not prepared to face life alone. The author explores the healing power of sleep, the importance of a name, and the desire to connect with the past.
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Aharon Appelfeld’s loosely autobiographical novel, The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping, charts the gruelling and pain-filled rite of passage of a teenage Holocaust survivor named Erwin, a passage that encompasses a lengthy physical journey as well as a process of convalescence and self-discovery. Like the author, Erwin, a Jew, grew up in Czernowitz, in Bukovina, a mountainous region that straddles modern day Romania and Ukraine. Erwin survived WWII by hiding in the cellar of a neighbour, who, after agreeing to shelter him, instead held him captive and forced him to perform slave labour, making articles of clothing that the neighbour would sell. Having escaped, he joined the flow of refugees and ended up in Naples. But Erwin’s case is unusual. Overwhelmed by a profound weariness, he cannot recall the journey because he slept most of the time and was conveyed along by the more tolerant and generous of his fellow travelers. In Naples he is recruited out of the refugee camp, and along with other young Jewish men is given military training and instruction in Hebrew by the charismatic Ephraim, who tells them that they will fight for their new country when they get to Palestine. Again, though, he is compelled to request days off from training to sleep. As part of the ritual of emigrating to Palestine, he is also expected to renounce his given name and adopt a new name. He chooses Aharon. Erwin/Aharon is devoted to his calling, to fight for the new Jewish state, but in his team’s first manoeuvre he is gravely injured (his leg is shattered), and he spends the next couple of years (and the rest of the novel) recuperating and undergoing a series of painful surgeries. Though disappointed, he comes to realize over time that, like his father, he was meant to be a writer, and he trains himself for this by copying passages from the Hebrew Bible (in order to internalize the language and its cadences) and the works of famous Jewish writers. As well, in his dreams from this period he connects with his parents and other relatives, who advise him on the most honest and truthful way to live his life. The novel ends with the still very young Aharon living by himself in an apartment in Tel Aviv pursuing the vocation of his father. The action of this novel builds gradually, and is often slowed by Aharon’s dreams, which he recounts in detail. Throughout the novel’s 70 very short chapters, the reader is kept off balance, wondering what’s next for Aharon, where life will take him, and how the pressures brought to bear on him will be resolved. A chief allure of The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping is the prose: Appelfeld’s unadorned but stunningly evocative writing provides an unsentimental and sometimes surreal rendering of the struggle to establish a Jewish state and homeland, a pivotal event in world history. Central to the story are themes of healing and survival, and young Aharon’s attitude toward his past is emblematic of this: pragmatic acceptance of what has befallen him and a firmly held resolve to not let it define or limit him. Despite his tribulations, Aharon remains cautiously hopeful for the future. Appelfeld does not dwell on the horrors of the Holocaust in this novel, instead focusing on the aftermath as experienced by one young man whose determination to live a worthy life and achieve something meaningful gives him the strength to move forward. ( )

A young Holocaust survivor takes his first steps toward creating a new life in the newly established state of Israel.