{"product_id":"schlepping-through-the-alps-isbn-9780345477736","title":"Schlepping Through the Alps","description":"Hans Breuer, Austria’s only wandering shepherd, is also a Yiddish folksinger. He walks the Alps, shepherd’s stick in hand, singing lullabies to his 625 sheep. Sometimes he even gives concerts in historically anti-Semitic towns, showing slides of the flock as he belts out Yiddish ditties. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen New York-based writer Sam Apple hears about this one-of-a-kind eccentric, he flies overseas and signs on as a shepherd’s apprentice. For thoroughly urban, slightly neurotic Sam, stumbling along in borrowed boots and burdened with a lot more baggage than his backpack, the task is far from a walk in Central Park. Demonstrating no immediate natural talent for shepherding, he tries to earn the respect of Breuer’s sheep, while keeping a safe distance from the shepherd’s fierce herding dogs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs this strange and hilarious adventure unfolds,\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003ethe unlikely duo of Sam and Hans meander through a paradise of woods and high meadows toward awkward encounters with Austrians of many stripes. Apple is determined to find out if there are really as many anti-Semites in Austria as he fears and to understand how Hans, who grew up fighting the lingering Nazism in Vienna, became a wandering shepherd. What Apple discovers turns out to be far more fascinating than he had imagined.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith this odd and wonderful book, Sam Apple joins the august tradition of Tony Horwitz and Bill Bryson. \u003ci\u003eSchlepping Through the Alps \u003c\/i\u003eis as funny as it is moving.\u003cb\u003eAdvance praise for \u003ci\u003eSchlepping Through the Alps\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This marvelously alert, one-of-a-kind book fascinates by virtue of its eccentric honesty, humor, warmth, and intelligence. Sam Apple’s writing style sparkles, and the two brilliantly achieved, richly sympathetic characterizations at the heart of the book–the singing shepherd and the author himself–make for a dazzlingly satisfying read. I absolutely loved it.”\u003cbr\u003e–PHILLIP LOPATE\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“At its best, Apple’s narrative voice is as grave as W.G. Sebald’s while as self-deprecating as a poetic version of Woody Allen’s. Europe in the wake of the Holocaust is risky material. I know of no other American of Apple’s generation writing non-fiction who has attempted as subtle and oblique an approach as this.”\u003cbr\u003e–HONOR MOORE, author of \u003ci\u003eThe White Blackbird\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In this wonderful book, Sam Apple has written a brilliantly comic and very dark pastorale about shepherds, Nazis and Jews, modern-day Austria, love and fidelity, and he has done it with such subtlety–with bright colors at the center and darkness around all the edges–that the effect is quite singular. I have never read a book quite like this, and I loved it; it’s that simple.”\u003cbr\u003e–CHARLES BAXTER, author of Saul and Patsy: A Novel\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eand Burning Down the House: Essays on FictionSAM APPLE, who grew up in Houston, is a graduate of the creative nonfiction MFA program at Columbia University. Apple’s writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times,\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eForward, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Jerusalem Report \u003c\/i\u003eas well as on Salon.com. He currently lives in Brooklyn and is a contributing book editor at Nerve.Chapter One\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA Shepherd Comes to Manhattan\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf you’re traveling the Alps with a Yiddish folksinger who also happens  to be the last wandering shepherd in Austria and he assigns you the  task of walking behind his flock of 625 sheep, you’ll discover that the  little lambs sometimes tire out and plop down for naps. Since your job  is to make sure no sheep is left behind, you’ll approach the sleeping  lambs, your shepherd’s stick firm in your right fist, and shout, “Hop!  Hop!” You’ll have learned to make this noise, which rhymes with “nope,”  from observing the shepherd and his sons. On occasion, when a lamb is  in a deep sleep and not responding, you’ll look around quickly to see  whether the coast is clear. If the shepherd is far ahead or busy  singing Yiddish ditties to himself, you’ll kneel down next to the  sleeping lamb and say, “Come on, little cutie. Time to move on.” Then  you’ll attempt to give the lamb a quick pat on the head. Usually the  lamb will wake up before you touch it and scurry ahead in search of its  mother. When this happens, you’ll let out several angry hop hops, as  though you’re completely in charge.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAfter a while on the job, you’ll grow a little cocky. You’ll continue  along even when a few sheep are still lingering behind because you’ll  have learned that, for the most part, the sheep don’t want to be left  alone. As you walk, you’ll wonder about this instinctual urge to stay  close to the flock, and before you know it, you’ll be lost in thoughts  about evolution. You’ll remember that we once traveled open landscapes  in groups not unlike these sheep. You’ll think about what it would be  like if the sheep were forced to live apart from one another in  miniature suburban homes. Would they ever find happiness? Would they  greet one another while grazing in their front yards?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSuddenly, you’ll reach a narrow passage and find you’ve drifted too far  ahead and are now stuck in the middle of 625 tightly packed sheep.  You’ll realize that the sheep, for all their virtues, don’t have much  regard for human shins or feet. They’ll bump their woolly sides against  you from every angle until you almost lose your balance. You’ll try to  clear some space with your stick, but it will be no use. The sheep will  treat you like the novice you are. Then, just as you’re regaining your  bearings, a mangy gray sheepdog will race by and bark its angry orders.  Your heart will skip a beat, and you’ll hurry ahead as fast as the  others. If only for that one fleeting moment, you will understand the  hardships of life in the flock.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAfter this unsettling experience, you’ll remain in back. Watching the  sheep from behind, you’ll note the way their ears flop when they run,  turning their heads into full-bodied birds in flight; the way sheep, in  the hunched position they assume to urinate, resemble kangaroos; the  way even a castrated male will mount an unsuspecting ewe; the way the  ewe will continue her furious nibbling at the earth as she shakes off  the pesky eunuch; the way a sheep’s stomach gradually ex-pands as the  day goes on, so that by sundown a cantaloupe-sized bulge has formed on  its left side.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf you’re on a particularly good patch of land, meaning the grass is  plentiful and not too tall (sheep prefer their grass fresh), the sheep  will spend a long time in one place. This is when you’ll put down your  backpack and look around at the snowcapped peaks and the endless  expanse of Alpine foothills, hills so green and peaceful that whenever  you cross them, you have to fight the desire to get down on your side  and roll. You’ll turn to the quiet streams cutting this way and that,  pick the red flowers that peek out of crevices in the rocks, and think,  Hmm, maybe I’ve made a horrible mistake by overlooking a career in  shepherding.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut eventually your eyes will wander downward, and then all you’ll see  is shit. Sheep shit, you’ll come to appreciate, is formless,  unaesthetic shit; shit that, if not for the smell, could pass for mud.  Next to the charming pebbles of goats or the healthy round cakes of  cattle, the mushy green-brown splotches sheep leave behind can only  disappoint. Still, you’ll keep staring at the shit because it’ll be  everywhere, a parade of digested grass and Alpine flowers. You’ll see  one sheep’s shit stacked upon another’s. You’ll see globs of dried shit  clinging like black icicles to the wool of sheep tails. You’ll get to  know the shit so well that, for the first time in your life, shit will  seem harmless. You’ll walk through it as though you’ve been walking  through it for years. You’ll stab at it with your shepherd’s stick for  sport.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut a moment later you’ll look down at your stick to make sure it’s not  too dirty because you’ll have grown emotionally attached to it. You’ll  realize that the stick is not just a prop, but an integral part of what  makes a shepherd a shepherd. You’ll be so fond of your knobby wooden  staff that after a while you’ll accept its phallic symbolism even  though you hate that sort of insight. You’ll think, The stick is my  manhood. I am the stick.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt least that’s what you’ll think if you’re like me. But let’s hope  you’re not like me, since then you’d also be a little too skinny. And  your hair would be rather poofy. And, at age twenty-five, the only  thing you’d have been really sure of was your desire to write about a  singing Austrian shepherd named Hans Breuer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI first met Hans in New York in July of 2000. A friend had forwarded me  an e-mail announcement from a small Yiddish cultural outfit called  Yugntruf (Call to Youth), which was sponsoring a concert and slide show  by Hans at New York University. The e-mail included the following  background information on Hans:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHans truly is a wandering Jew, for he has no permanent home. And  everywhere, everywhere—Hans sings Yiddish lidlekh [songs] to his sheep  as he leads them through valleys and over mountains. And as he goes, he  thinks out loud to the sheep, and to whomever will listen, about  history, politics, geography, geology, and about being a Jew among  “unknowing” racists. A peripatetic philosopher and a fine one, is Hans.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSince it’s not every day I have the opportunity to meet a fine  peripatetic philosopher, let alone one who sings, shows slides of his  sheep, and lectures on racism, I immediately e-mailed my RSVP for the  concert.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe performance space at NYU turned out to be a classroom with a  wall-to-wall blackboard and about fifty desks, half of which were  filled with middle-aged Jews. I took a front-row seat along with the  friend who had forwarded me the e-mail.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI had expected Hans to be an old man. I imagined him with missing  teeth, his back bent from years of hard labor. When Hans showed up a  few minutes late, his back was straight, and his teeth, though a bit  crooked, appeared to all be in place. At forty-five he was well built,  husky without being heavy. He wore a black leather cap, a light pink\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eT-shirt, sandals over his socks, and hexagonal glasses. His tangled  hair, a lifeless brown, reached almost to his shoulders. Long and  unruly sideburns framed his face, which struck me as vaguely Semitic,  save for his strong cheekbones. After making a subtle turn to the  right, his nose ended at a broad, rounded tip.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs promised, Hans had brought slides of his sheep with him. While a  bushy-haired teenager fiddled with the projector, Hans addressed the  audience in English, speaking slowly in an accent that brought to mind  a slightly mad German professor. Due to the chaos of his travels, Hans  explained, his hands moving in tandem with his words, the sheep slides  had been mixed up and would not be coordinated with his songs. Although  it’s unlikely that anyone else in the room would have noticed the  difference, Hans seemed rather upset about this technical glitch and  apologized for it several more times in the course of the evening. He  also apologized for not having brought his shepherd’s hat. (“Normally I  like very much to wear my hat when I seeng.”)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen the slides were ready, Hans nodded at the young man in charge of  the projector and then belted out his first song, “Hey, Tsigelech,” or  “Hey, Little Goats.” The “hey” was held for a long note, followed by an  even longer, echoing “tsi-ge-lech.” At the time I didn’t understand the  words, but Hans’s emotion-filled voice and intense eyes had a powerful  effect. Even as I smiled at the strangeness of this gruff-looking man  passionately taking on the high notes of folk ditties, there was no  escaping the pull of his performance.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen Hans finished the song, he picked up a piece of paper and read the  following aloud:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“At an auction, three thousand schilling more are offered for a young  cow that has been raised in the mountains—with the same milk  output—than for one that has been raised down in the valley. What is  the reason? It is because she is healthier. She has the Alpine herbs in  her flesh and the waterfall in her blood, the air and the wind of the  high mountains under her skin and the soft glowing colors of the rocks  in her eyes.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs the evening wore on, Hans mixed up the routine, performing classic  Yiddish folk tunes about life in the shtetl along with hits from  Yiddish musicals of the 1920s and ’30s. Even during the livelier songs,  which occasionally had the audience clapping along, a sense of longing  resonated in Hans’s voice. As he sang, he looked out over the heads of  the audience and pleaded with open hands. His feet remained planted in  one spot, but his upper body swayed reedlike from right to left. He  might as well have been auditioning for the lead in Fiddler on the  Roof.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHans’s melancholy demeanor made me feel all the more awful about the  giggling fit that finally overtook my friend and me. Moved as I was by  the pathos of Hans’s voice, the slides of ewes giving birth in the  background as Hans sang Yiddish show tunes was more than I could  handle. I tried biting my lips, but every time I regained control, my  companion’s hiccups of laughter would unsettle me again. This was  especially embarrassing in that I had already introduced myself to the  organizers of the event as a journalist and requested an interview with  Hans after the program.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHans appeared unbothered by the laughter, and the show continued with a  young woman singing several duets with him. After each song Hans  stopped to read more esoteric reflections on life in the Alps.  Following a song about a peasant woman pondering the ideal husband—a  shoemaker? a tailor? a student?—Hans offered this:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What we are told not to do as children is quite normal up here [in the  mountains]. You should do it here, to shout as loud as you can. . . .  Shout down more than one thousand feet to your animals, driving them  back from the wrong way where they move.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHans stopped to demonstrate, startling the audience with a room-shaking  bellow.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAfter the concert the organizers hurried Hans off, but not before he  agreed to meet me for an interview the next day in Brooklyn, where he  was staying at the home of a Yugntruf member. I was hoping to publish a  newspaper article on Hans, but I figured that even if I couldn’t, I  wanted to hang out with him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI arrived at the two-story house on a wide tree-lined street a little  after 10:00 a.m. Hans answered the door and led me into a sunlit living  room. He was barefoot, in a loose-fitting white T-shirt that exposed  the upper reaches of his chest hair. His sagging blue work pants could  have passed for cool in some circles. Now without his glasses, his long  unkempt hair gave him the aura of an aging ’70s rock star.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI took a seat on the couch. Hans sat down across from me, then leaned  over the coffee table between us and began arranging the loose pages of  a photocopied booklet. The booklet was supposed to have been handed out  at the concert the night before, but Hans hadn’t had enough time to put  it together. It included the reflections Hans had recited between songs  as well as twenty-two questions and answers about Hans’s life as a  wandering shepherd:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eQuestion #1: How many sheep have you got?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnswer: 675 on October 6, 1997. The number changes constantly. You may  ask the shepherd, then he will ask his wife and she may ask her  shepherd’s diary—if she finds it. . . . Or we can ask the two boys who  gave the wormpowder the last time and made marks to count.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere was no small talk. I asked Hans about his background, and he  began a two-hour narrative, again and again straying from his own story  to talk about Austrian politics and history. His face glum, his hands  struggling to convey meaning when he couldn’t find the appropriate  English words, Hans spoke more openly than anyone I had ever  interviewed. I learned again that one should never make assumptions  about this shepherd. I had assumed that he had grown up in the  countryside. In fact, Hans was from Vienna. I had assumed his Jewish  parents had instilled a love of Yiddish in him. In fact, only his  father was Jewish, and he had taught Hans that Yiddish was a bad  dialect of German. When Hans told me that his father was Jewish, I  assumed his father had undergone a harrowing ordeal at the hands of the  Nazis. In fact, Hans’s father spent the war in England, while his  non-Jewish mother, a member of the Communist resistance, was captured  and tortured by the Gestapo. I had assumed that Hans had grown up in  his parents’ home. In fact, Hans left home for good shortly after his  fifteenth birthday.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith the interview winding down, I began to feel panicked. I had great  material, but I hadn’t yet gotten to the bottom of the story. I still  had no real understanding of why Hans was a shepherd or what Yiddish  music had to do with anything in his life. Then Ilene, the owner of the  house, whom I had met briefly after the concert, walked into the living  room.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Can I interrupt?” she asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI nodded. Ilene turned to Hans. “I guess I’d like to know what this is  all about. Last night you showed slides of sheep and sang Yiddish  songs. But what is the real relation?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHans leaned back in his chair and laughed. “Me. I am the relation.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIlene crossed her arms. “But how does singing Yiddish songs go with  shepherding in the Alps?” she asked.[quote]--The Washington Post","brand":"Ballantine Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303380078821,"sku":"NP9780345477736","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345477736.jpg?v=1767736186","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/schlepping-through-the-alps-isbn-9780345477736","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}