Sam Apple, author of Schlepping Through the Alps, presents his Alpine journey with Austria's last wandering shepherd – also a Yiddish folk-singing phenomenon.

Date: Friday, April 7, 2006
Place: Steinhardt Hall, Hillel at the University of Pennsylvania, 215 South 39th Street, Philadelphia
Time: 7:30/Kosher Shabbat dinner followed by speaker
Cost: $10 students, $15 non-students
R S V P : Adina Steinberg , adinaste@pobox.upenn.edu / 215-898-6451

Sam Apple’s first book is Schlepping Through the Alps: My Search for Austria's Jewish Past with Its Last Wandering Shepherd. A contributing book editor at Nerve.com, Apple has also written for The New York Times, the Forward, The Jerusalem Report, and Slate.com.

In Schlepping Through the Alps, Apple has written what The Washington Post calls, “the liveliest, most unusual travel tale in recent memory.” This 2005 memoir-cum-fable describes the young writer’s trek through Austria with the nation’s only wandering shepherd, Hans Breuer. Breuer fascinates Apple, an admitted Austria-phobe, for a number of reasons. The shepherd is a Yiddish folk-singer, who sings lullabies to quiet his herds of sheep and gives concerts of lost Yiddish folk melodies in historically anti-Semitic towns. Growing up in post-World War II Vienna, Breuer views his recovery of Yiddishkeit as part of a larger commitment to fight against his country’s Nazi past. Apple’s tale is the remarkably funny personal journey of a New York Jewish writer traveling through Europe’s recent past.

Sam Apple has written about youngish Yiddish culture for the Jerusalem Report. Check out his August, 1999 piece entitled, “Saving Yiddish from Itself”.

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