'The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping,' by Aharon Appelfeld

    This slow, almost sleep-walking, novel begins as follows:
     "At the end of the war, I became immersed in constant slumber. Though I moved from train to train, from truck to truck, and sometimes from wagon to wagon, it was all in a dense, dreamless sleep. When I opened my eyes for a moment, the people looked heavy and expressionless."
    Erwin was sixteen or so when he arrived at a refugee camp in Naples, with little idea how he got there. Other refugees recognized him as 'the sleeping boy,' who was a serious encumbrance, but nevertheless they carried him, looked after him, and kept him with them. From time to time during the course of the book, he runs across people who remember him as 'the sleeping boy.'
    In Naples, with a group of other youths, he was recruited by Ephraim to train as a pioneer. They ran, they exercised, they learnt Hebrew, and eventually they were shipped to "The Land," where they were held by the British in an internment camp before being assigned to a kibbutz. But still, from time to time, he had to sleep all day. Not long after beginning to work in the kibbutz, the group begins military training, and subsequently they are involved in actual fighting. Erwin (or now Aharon, as they had to adopt Hebrew names) is seriously wounded. The novel slowly makes its way through hospitals, operations, rehabilitation, to a final epiphany. Much of that prolonged period is devoted to flash-backs, or dreams, or just plain day-dreaming, when he meets his mother and his father, and other lost relations, and has conversations with them about his present situation. And he is visited by other wounded comrades from the kibbutz, each of whom suffers from some problem of the disruption they have experienced from their days as children. And there is much focus on language: the loss of his mother tongue (German) and his slow immersion into Hebrew. He copies extensive passages in Hebrew from the Bible so as "..to train my right hand, I wanted to tell her, but also to connect with the hidden meanings of the ancient letters."
    Erwin's father owned a sawmill, but longed to be a writer and often submitted manuscripts that were rejected. And Erwin seems to want to achieve for his father what he had failed to do--become a writer that produces work that 'sings,' Close to the end of the book, he writes a short story, a memoir of his childhood, in which he feels he has achieved what he sought.
    This is not an easy book, but I found it fascinating. God knows how many awards Appelfeld has won. And it is surely not coincidental that--like Erwin--he was born in Bukovina, escaped into the forest at the age of nine, when the Romanian Army took his home town from the Russians and his mother was murdered. He and his father were sent to a German concentration camp in Transnistria, Romania, from which he escaped and hid for three years. He was in a camp for displaced persons in Italy before immigrating to Palestine in 1946.
    Give it a try...