Appelfeld's strengths as a writer, and his weakness

The narrative line in Aharon Appelfeld's The Iron Tracks (1991) clarifies as the novel gets to about its midpoint: The narrator, Erwin (?), has explained that his life involves taking an annual circuit route through postwar Eastern Europe, stopping at many small stations and towns (on the same date each year) where he had experienced some kind of trauma or loss (and sometimes love) during the war years when he was a young man, escaped from a labor camp, fleeing for his life (during which time he witnessed the murder of his parents, who were Jewish communist activists). We learn that his journey is part of his professional life: He searches at various fairs and market places for Jewish artifacts - wine glasses, menorahs, prayer books, etc. - that are seen mostly as trash but that are extremely valuable to certain collectors. Over time, others - his "rivals" he calls them - have become aware of the value of these artifacts and have begun to follow him on his route. So much of the foreboding and mystery around his travels turns out to be misguided; he's just a dealer in artifacts, in effect. And yet: He also notes a secondary (or is it primary?) purpose for his peregrinations: He's in search of the man, Nachvogel (?), who assassinated his parents, and he carries a pistol w/ which he will kill N if her ever finds him. He follows various tips and clues he receives while en route and seems, by the mid-point of the novel, to have a good idea where the killer has settled. Throughout his journeys, he has several one-night stands with various prostitutes (AA is very discrete in describing these encounters), and earlier in his life had an ongoing relationship w/ a woman, Bertha, who has left him; he's a lonely, isolate character - we know nothing of where he may have any permanent home, though he talks of emigrating to Israel (as did AA) - and he encounters some warm friendship on his annual journey as well as, from time to time, some hostile anti-Semitism. AA's strength as a writer comes from his ability to create an atmosphere - we get the sense of a ruined landscape, with much underground hatred and menace and w/ many people leading lives of secret shame and terror, after the war - but not in developing a character. In the 2 of his novels that I've read the characters are few and they're sketchy: We know a lot about what this narrator does but not much about what makes him tick. He's an unexplored country, even to himself.

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