This month features: Badenheim 1939, Aharon Appelfeld, translated by Dalya Bilu, Penguin Modern Classics, 0141188200, £7.99

To translations, we always give the benefit of the doubt.

But what are we to make of this?:

‘Badenheim’s intoxicating spring was playing havoc with the vacationers again. Dr. Shutz was left without a penny to his name and sent two express letters to his mother. The schoolgirl was apparently costing him a fortune. Frau Zauberblit sat with Samitzky all day long. It seemed that this man was all that was left her in the world. Dr. Pappenheim was sunk in gloom; the spring always made him sad… The twins wandered about the town, a secret branded on their brows. In the hotel they were spoken of as invalids, in whispers. They ate nothing, and drank coffee all day long.’

To begin with, we have cliché after cliché: playing havoc, without a penny, all day long, sunk in gloom.

Who do we blame for this? The writer? The translator?

If the writer, then by getting the benefit of the translated doubt they appear better than they originally are.

If the translator, then the writer may appear (in English) worse than they are, but, as we’ve given them the benefit of the doubt, our estimate of them may be just about right.

Is blame the right response, though? Perhaps the clichéd language is deliberate on Aharon Appelfeld’s part – employed in order to reveal a complacency of soul within the characters being described. If so, here is another version of the benefit of the doubt: the clichés couldn’t possibly be straight, so we assume they are being used cannily, ironically.

For the moment, I’m going to assume the latter – because it fits with the form of this short, powerful book.

And in the quoted paragraph, with the entry of the twins, there is evidence of direct, efficient statement. When Appelfeld wants to, he can write the killer sentence.

‘The musicians stood by the gate like tame birds on a stick.’

And elsewhere in the book there is beauty plain:

‘A cold light broke out of the north and spread through the long corridor. It seemed not like light but needles cutting the carpet into squares.’

The story of the book is really all there, by implication, in the title: Badenheim 1939.

The main character of the book is the fictional Central European holiday-resort, Badenheim; the main action is the passing of the 1939 season, from the arrival of the first entertainer to the departure of the last guests.

What the reader brings to the novel, even on acquaintance with nothing more than those two words, is a knowledge of how the beginning of 1939 differed from the end – of how a Europe of leisure (Baden means to have or take a bath; heim means home; Badenheim means bathing-place) became one of total war. (However, Germany’s anchluss (annexation) of Austria took place on March 11th 1938.)

Many of the ironies are embedded in the first paragraph, where we hear:

‘The town was about to be invaded by the vacationers.’

(Dalya Bilu’s translation is into American English, as vacationers suggests. But there are very few other obvious Americanisms; although one character, later on says a little jarringly (even, I’d think, for Americans), ‘We’ll take a raincheck for a party in Warsaw, a lavish party.’)

Also buried in the first few lines are these bland words: ‘Two inspectors passed through an alley, examining the flow of sewage in the pipes.’

As intoxicating spring becomes full summer, the dictates of the Sanitation Department become harsher and harsher; and it isn’t merely drains over which they have jurisdiction – the almost exclusively Jewish population of Badenheim is at first mildly restricted, then definitely imprisoned, then starved and finally transported. Their end, given our outside historical knowledge, seems inevitable. But inevitable from what point of view? Or inevitable at all?

For me, the question of this book is one of decadence. Its most brilliant moments come at points of terrible, temporary relief:

‘All the delicacies were finished. Strangely enough, the people weren’t hungry. All they wanted were cigarettes. If only they had cigarettes they would be all right. But without cigarettes it was hell. And wonder of wonders, Sally found a packet of cigarettes.’

Despite the town being full of workaday musicians, plus a world-class string trio, there is no final concert, no defiant gesture. Instead, a prostitute has a fortieth birthday party which doesn’t go particularly swingingly.

The decline is gradual, and our moral difficulty (with relation to decadence) is to keep remembering that it is not inevitable.

In Badenheim, neither the residents nor the holiday-makers could be said to be innocent – indolent, yes; gluttonous, jealous, conceited, definitely. But does this make them guilty? A little. Does this make them deserving of punishment? Not exactly. (But both Socialists and National Socialists would have thought so.) Does it make them deserve the punishment they were to receive? Absolutely not.

These degrees of moral calibration are far from clichéd.