A holocaust novel that may be a good introduction to Appelfeld's work

A few years ago I read Aharon Appelfeld for the first time, starting w/ his then-most-recent novel, Suddenly Love, and you can see from my posts on that novel that I was truly disappointed in the work but recognized that was not a fair intro to AA (see posts from 2014); AA died last week, and I read a few memorial notices, which inspired me to read among his earlier, reputation-making works; yesterday I started reading The Iron Tracks (1991), and I can seem from the first 3rd of this short novel that it's a profound and unusual piece, with echoes of other novelists who wrote about the Holocaust (in this case the protagonist, a middle-aged man named Erwin, is haunted by his experiences living through the devastation of Eastern Europe during the War, the many losses, including the death of his parents, his multiple migrations and the learning and forgetting of multiple European languages - all I think modeled closely on AA's experiences although his father did survive the war) with a nod toward the mysterious, even supernatural worlds of Kafka and of contemporary South American writers. (Surprisingly, at least in the first third there is no significant mention of AA's adult homeland, Israel - though he's an Israeli writer he seems to be the polar opposite of his contemporary Yehoshuah who writes about contemporary Israeli work; AA's work is a turn toward memory and history). The narrator of The Iron Tracks tells us that his life consists of an annual curcuit on the European railways - a great oval, he says - that takes him from one small outpost to another (visiting each on the same date each year), all of which hold painful memories for him. His perpetual journey is an attempt to recover memory and perhaps to assuage the pain he witnessed and enduring in youth. In some of these towns he encounters hostility and anti-Semitism; in others, he is received graciously, as an old acquaintance. He does seem to be involved in some sort of smuggling operation, the outline of which is not yet clear; he also references his "enemies," whom he finds spying on him or following him at various stages of his journey - though it's not yet clear whom these enemies represent or whether they're even real of just imagined. The novel so far is hazy and mysterious, and its ultimate success will depend on how much clarity AA can bring to this strange man and his obsessive mission. 



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