"At last - David Applefield's long-awaited novel! And the world according to Applefield is a Janus-head of the U.S. and Europe: America through the eyes of the old culture. Once Removed is a wise and moving novel, informed by empathy, irony, pain and hope. Thomas E. Kennedy, European Editor, Cimarron Review, author of The Book of Angels

In 1947, Holocaust survivor Jacob Simon and his identity-shocked eleven year old daughter Dzidzia leave a devastated Europe and a haunted past. Forty years later, in the Intensive Care Unit in a hospital in Houston, Texas, as Jacob Simon struggles for his life, the horrors of the past surface again, memory confounds reality. The banal realities of contemporary America - hospital waiting rooms, fast food restaurants, hotel lobbies - become interwoven with the reminiscences of Krakow, Poland, of the thirties and forties.

In Once Removed, the last seventeen days of one Survivor's life assumes ironic and poignant meaning. This is a novel with a multitude of layers, generations, and decades. It takes the reader on a psychic trip, a return journey from America back to Europe and back to America.

Once Removed will find a special place both in the evolving literature of the Holocaust as well as contemporary American fiction. Applefield, an American writer and editor who has lived in Paris since the early 80s, writes with power and maturity, tackling some of the large themes of our time.