The 28th Day of Elul

By Richard Elman

The story opens in Israel, where Alex Yagodah makes his home. He has been notified by an American lawyer that he stands to inherit a good deal of money if he can say that he remains a Jew. Alex Yagodah's answer composes the substance of The 28th Day of Elul a powerful, bitter memoir of his youth in provincial Hungary at the time of the Nazi occupation. Alex Yagodah belonged to a well to do family in the town of Clig. Theirs was a comfortable, carefully ordered existence, in which the suffering of Jews elsewhere remained distant and un troubling. The Yagodahs and the people around them could find in pretense a protection against hard choices. Young Alex's own life was absorbed by his love affair with Lilo. But one morning all the ]ews of Clig were summoned to the public square, to be told that they were to be deported at once. Alex's father arranged a means of escape for the family; but that arrangement (worked out in a business-like and even ceremonious fashion) carried with it the necessity of a huge betrayal. This extraordinary novel gains in meaning and intensity from the voice of the narrator. Weary, savagely intelligent, still moved by the memory of Lilo, Alex Yago a particular and terrible plight, an experience lived by one man, but larger than one man's experience.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0017KZ2QY
• Release Date: January 1967
• Publisher: Scribner
• Length: 279 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.