Sam Apple: Schlepping Through the Alps

Sam learns about the great beauty of the verdant valleys, or Alms, of the region; the fierceness of the herding dogs, who occasionally gobble up a sheep; and the squalor of making a living this way—Hans lives in a camper the size of a postage stamp.

SAM APPLE | SCHLEPPING THROUGH THE ALPS: MY SEARCH FOR AUSTRIA’S JEWISH PAST WITH ITS LAST WANDERING SHEPHERD (Ballantine Books; 288 pgs; $23.95)

Five years ago, journalist Sam Apple met and was captivated by Hans Breuer, a wandering Austrian shepherd who sings Yiddish folk songs to his flock of 600 sheep. The bizarre combo of Hans’ vocation and avocation, and the shepherd’s insistence on literally shouting out his Jewishness in a country in which Nazi sympathies are still present 50 years after WWII, made Sam curious.

Sam visits Hans in the Austrian Alps, tagging along, stepping over and into great splotches of sheep dip, living the pastoral life. As they wander together, Sam learns a great deal. He learns about Hans’ marital difficulties. Hans, apparently, was much more horny than his wife, and they became distant. “When I was younger,” Hans says, “you could put warm bowl of soup on my lap and I would get erection.”

Sam learns about the great beauty of the verdant valleys, or Alms, of the region; the fierceness of the herding dogs, who occasionally gobble up a sheep; and the squalor of making a living this way—Hans lives in a camper the size of a postage stamp.

Sam watches observantly as the earnest Hans confronts various residents of a town called Judenburg, who seem reluctant to admit that, yes, their town was named after a band of Jewish merchants. The very word “Jew,” it seems, is pejorative to these rural villagers, taught so well to hate during the Holocaust years.

And then, too, there’s a love story: Sam finds himself involved in a desultory but touching love affair with Irene, a progressive young Austrian gal. Sam’s meandering account of his Alpen travails is slowed by dry-but-necessary historical asides on Austria and the Jews. His story is helped along, though, by a liberal dose of humor. “Death, I thought. Everywhere I turned there was death,” writes the author, a professed neurotic. “The scythes, the dog attacking the sheep, my hypochondria, and, of course, the real death, the Holocaust. I felt ashamed that my obsession with the murder of Europe’s Jews could coincide with my hypochondria.”

It’s hard to forget the surreal moment when Sam and Hans encounter a nudist sleeping in the fields. It seems the sunbather houses a sort of unofficial museum of Nazi memorabilia in his basement. His tour through the collection of grim mementoes is conducted in the altogether. High weirdness.

As Hans and Sam wander the countryside, the book wanders aimlessly from idea to idea. Are we ever going to unlock the secret of Austria’s lingering anti-Semitism? How could former Nazi officer Kurt Waldheim be elected president of Austria in 1986? How, in 1999, could the far-right Freedom Party, an Austrian political party founded by former Nazis on “racist thinking,” according to The New York Times, win 27 percent of the vote? It’s a complex problem, but Hans’ revelations of his family’s suffering at the hands of Nazis and Communists alike offer some insight. History is not so easily shrugged off.

We’re left with a true tale told by a charming young narrator that sparkles when it’s funny, but frustrates as it seems to circle big ideas without really diving in. It reminded me of Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself to Live—another travelogue full of cute anecdotes that answers its own questions rather limply.

Still, this is Sam Apple’s first book, and his style, equal parts Woody Allen and Abba Eban, should make readers eager to see what he comes up with next.