Books |
Schlepping Through the Alps: My Search for Austria’s Jewish Past with Its Last Wandering Shepherd
Sam Apple
By
Published: Jan 01, 2005
Category:
Non Fiction
Schlepping Through the Alps: My Search for Austria’s Jewish Past with Its Last Wandering Shepherd
Sam Apple
At first I thought, “This is a joke.” Or, at least, a scam.
Consider the elements. A 45-year-old Austrian Jew (there aren’t many: just 185,000 of the country’s 6 million citizens). Who is a folk singer. Who sings in Yiddish. And who happens to be a shepherd (with a flock of 625 sheep).
And, for company, a Jewish kid in his 20s. Classic New Yorker: skinny, hypochondriac, unlucky in love.
Wouldn’t you think this is a pretty poor version of Hunter Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”?
But it’s legit. More than legit. Funny, tragic, profound, maddening, challenging — in dizzying array.
Back up. A month before Sam Apple met Hans, Austria’s “Freedom Party” — a direct descendant of Austria’s Nazi party — won 27% of the vote in the national elections. Then it merged with the People’s Party, putting it very close to the center of power. Israel recalled its ambassador; the European Union imposed sanctions.
And don’t forget the past: Forty per cent of the personnel of the Nazi killing machine came from Austria. The country sent a million soldiers to fight for Germany in World War II. Before Austrians killed almost all of their Jewish neighbors, they forced them, on a least one occasion, to get on their hands and knees in a Viennese amusement park and eat grass. And — oh, yes — Hitler was Austrian.
So Sam Apple’s meeting with Hans in New York and his decision to follow him and his flock in Austria is, automatically, the foundation of a story with levels of meaning. A lousy writer would have leaned on those levels, pumping Meaning into his story at every turn. You know: a wandering Jew, a stranger in his own land.
Sam Apple, happily, is a gifted writer. And a character in his own right. We follow his romances, his physical discomfort in the chilly mountains, his lack of skill as an assistant shepherd. Yes, Woody Allen comes to mind. But Apple has plenty of his own shtick.
It’s Hans who drives this book. He’s more than man enough to hang a book on. A complicated childhood and wild adolescence. A troubled relationship with women (he likes more sex than his wife will provide, so he has supplemented her, and she, in turn, has supplemented him — with their dentist). And, of course, the challenge of making a living by moving sheep from one place to the next.
Will Sam work it out with his new Austrian girlfriend before he figures out if the embers of anti-Semitism are on the verge of flaring up again? Is Hans wise to take on a second flock, and what about his romances? We care about these questions because Sam Apple has taken us deep into these two lives; we know them and want only the best for them.
At the end of the book, Sam says, “I’ve never been in fog like this.”
And Hans replies, “Sometimes when you have fog like this and you are with the sheep alone, it is like you are in a separate universe. It makes an incredible impression, so that you cannot imagine how the world continues behind the fog.”
Yes, I can picture that. But the power of this weird little book is such that I can picture much more — two men who have learned a few things over the months they spent together, and who have, thanks to Sam Apple’s easy-on-the-eyes prose, passed on that knowledge to us.
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