Life in the Cafe: On Diasporism in Aharon Appelfeld's "All Whom I Have Loved" and "A Table for One"

[...]they also shed light on unresolved questions regarding choice, fate, catastrophe, and redemption in Jewish history. [...]it is through the endless motion of Appelfeld's protagonists that the various dramas with which his works deal intersect: the disorien-tation of European Jewry prior to World War II, the cataclysm of the Holocaust, the displaced condition of Jewish refugees after the war, and, intertwined into all these, the autobiographical turmoil of a persecuted child who searches in vain for shelter and protection. [...]movement is motivated by a sense of lack:^sup5^ journeys are triggered by a passion for a religious experience and an insatiable desire for an origin, a lost mother, a starting point, a primal, preverbal, constitutive experience.