The land of the cattails is the homeland, toward which they are all struggling to return and which, like Kafka's castle, is always several leagues farther on. In fact, for Toni and her son Rudi, the journey from Vienna is so pleasant that they linger at the inns along their way, Toni's beauty and Rudi's teenage charms eliciting response from everyone. Only Toni's fear that Rudi, whose father is Christian, may resent or deny his Judaism, mars their passage homeward. When his mother develops typhus and is quarantined, Rudi starts to drink and to sleep with a girl from town. His carousing tragically delays their arrival at his grandparents' house. When at last they reach the village, Toni goes forth alone, and vanishes. Appelfeld's blend of fantasy and realism is again enormously effective in evoking the darkening shadows of the Holocaust.
To the Land of the Cattails evokes the uncanny atmosphere of Europe on the brink of the Holocaust with the same dreamlike realism that made The Age of Wonders a modern classic. In the summer of 1938, a Jewish woman living in Austria, suddenly gripped by a longing for her native land, departs with her adolescent son for the interior of Eastern Europe. As she proceeds, the landscape turns increasingly ominous and her son progressively more loutish. Just short of their goal, the young man falls into a drunken stupor. When he finally rouses himself and rushes to join his mother he is told she has been shipped off on a mysterious train to an unspecified destination. To the Land of Cattails is a haunting parable of the human spirit and an unforgettable account of the destiny of modern European Jewry.
