BOOK NOTES – ABOUT COUNTRYSIDE by Gili Ben-Zvi

One peculiar day I walked into my local bookstore, my mind was slightly blank, engulfed in a not unpleasant fog, I felt resigned to the moment. In this state of aloof wandering I stumbled upon two books. The Jew’s Beech by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff with whom, neither I nor the German speakers in my vicinity, were familiar. Published in 1842 this novella is centered around a poor village in Westphalia in the eighteenth century. A life of impoverishment and prejudice sprinkled with a dose of Gothic sensibility. Though a comfortable afternoon read, it left me a tad numb. The second book I reached for was, Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck, which takes place in a lakeside house in Brandenburg, tracing the property’s different inhabitants throughout the brutal twentieth century. Erpenbeck plays nicely with the anonymity of her characters, strategically ascribing nothing more than functional terms to all but a chosen few. Perhaps those who have names are meant to hold a special place in the history she reconstructs for us. In both books the pastoral German countryside forms the ground on which social critique is explored. I must admit that the description of the Brandenburg lake district, which I frequently visit with family and friends, was an effective tool. It sharpened the dissonance between the joy and beauty of nature, and the bleak history of a place.