2

This article analyses Martha Blum’s work, published in 1999. The walnut tree, the tree and the wood, is taken here as the symbol of beauty, harmony and softness, the symbol of an old world, destroyed and broken by persecution. If the novel hardly evokes the Holocaust, its shadow covers the whole text. How the destiny of Austrian Jews was broken, since Czernowitz in 1921 till Canada, fourty years later.By choosing as main characters of her novel the members of a wealthy, privileged Jewish family, Martha Blum transforms the walnut tree, their original metaphor, in an ambivalent object. The walnut tree is beautiful, solid, source of happiness. But it cannot receive the assassinated corpses of the Jews, because the blood and the nuts do not mix. The walnut tree must disappear from the story, because, in the civilization it represents, there is no mean to assimilate the concept of Holocaust.