The edges of atrocity

A. B. Yehoshua once said that, although Aharon Appelfeld had lived in Israel for most of his life, he could not be called an Israeli writer because he did not write about Israel. Gabriel Josipovici agreed. “Though Oz and Grossman have roots in Eastern Europe”, he wrote in a tribute to Appelfeld in PN Review (May/June 2018), “they were both born in Israel and their concerns are Israeli ones. Appelfeld, by contrast, is a European whose language happens to be Hebrew.” Appelfeld’s great subject was central and eastern Europe, and, because he was a Holocaust survivor, this meant his other key subject was the Holocaust.

In an interview in Forward in 2009, Appelfeld said, “I come from a different world [from Israel] – a different geography. I come from a world that suffered terrible catastrophe, and this experience requires a different language, a different tone”. This wasn’t just a question of language. It was a question of home, identity, belonging, of reconstructing himself as a person. This matter of construction and reconstruction is at the heart of Appelfeld’s writing. Where was he from? What happened to him there? The places and images that resonate in his best writing are not Israeli ones: they are situated many miles away, and years ago, in the forests, fields and towns of eastern Europe.

He was born Ervin Appelfeld in 1932. The key word that describes both his childhood and writing is division. Constantly, one place is set against another, one language against another, one ethnic group against another. And these divisions, we come to see, will lead to catastrophe. In an extraordinarily restrained, quiet prose, this is what his characters, too, will find out. They don’t know it yet, but they will soon.

This is from the final paragraph of Appelfeld’s masterpiece, Badenheim 1939 (1978), in Dalya Bilu’s original translation of 1980:

An engine, an engine coupled to four filthy freight cars, emerged from the hills and stopped at the station … “Get in!” yelled invisible voices. And the people were sucked in. Even those who were standing with a bottle of lemonade in their hands, a bar of chocolate, the headwaiter with his dog – they were all sucked in as easily as grains of wheat poured into a funnel. Nevertheless Dr. Pappenheim found time to make the following remark: “If the coaches are so dirty it must mean that we have not far to go.”

Or take the opening of The Age of Wonders (1978): “Many years ago Mother and I took the night train home from the quiet, little-known retreat where we had spent the summer”. The novel ends with the same boy, now grown up: “His eyes focused vacantly on the blinking railway signal, waiting for the brass plate to fall and the whistle of the engine to pierce the air”. And in between we have another train journey that gives meaning to both the beginning and the end: “By the next day we were on the cattle train hurtling south”.

This pattern of train journeys is partly what makes Appelfeld one of the great post-Holocaust writers. Philip Roth called him “fiction’s foremost chronicler of the Holocaust”. Primo Levi wrote: “Among us, the writer survivors, Aharon Appelfeld’s voice has a unique, unmistakable tone”. It is his reticence that is so powerful. “Appelfeld never wrote about gas chambers”, said Amos Oz, “never wrote about executions, about mass graves, atrocities and experiments on human beings. He wrote about survivors before and after. He wrote about people who did not know what was about to happen to them and about people who already knew everything but hardly spoke about it.”

In 1941 Appelfeld was nine years old and living in Czernowitz (then in Romania, now Chernivtsi in Ukraine) when his mother and grandmother were killed by the Romanians and Germans. “I didn’t see her die”, he writes of his mother in his memoir, The Story of a Life (2003), “but I did hear her one and only scream.” Appelfeld was deported with his father to a concentration camp. In 1942 he escaped from the camp and didn’t see his father again for twenty years. His father, too, escaped, Appelfeld told the Boston Review: “he was in Russia, and then after 20 years I met him, not knowing each other”. Appelfeld himself survived in the fields and forests. “I was wandering for three years”, he said in a later interview. “The peasants, if they knew I was Jewish, they would have probably killed me. So I had to be very alert, very careful.”

In The Story of a Life – which reappears in Aloma Halter’s original translation of 2004 – Appelfeld describes how, in 1946, he came to Palestine. Here he found a new language, Hebrew, and a new voice, fragmented, full of pieces. The central character in his final work, The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping (2017), published the year before his death, tries to connect things that have been broken almost beyond repair. He is shot in the 1948 war in Israel. His legs are shattered. Can they be connected? Can anything be connected in his life? Can he bring together the world of his childhood – Yiddish, the smells and memories of fields and forests, a faraway landscape – with a new language, Hebrew, a new name, Aharon, a new landscape?

Appelfeld’s breakthrough came in the late 1970s, when he published his debut, Badenheim 1939, concerning a resort for middle-class Jews who sunbathe, eat, quarrel, flirt, make music, read Rilke’s meditations on death and obligingly assist a mysterious Sanitation Department in its effort to organize their relocation to Poland, where “the air … is fresher’’ and Jews will have the opportunity “to get to know Slavic culture”. In the same year he published another memorable novel, The Age of Wonders, concerning a young man called Bruno and his father, a celebrated Austrian writer.

Several more novels came in the 1980s before his third truly great one, Katerina (1989), republished in Jeffrey M. Green’s original translation of 1992. When we first meet Katerina she is nearly eighty and has returned to her father’s farm, “small and dilapidated, with no building left intact”. She left her village behind more than sixty years previously, when she was just a teenager. “Everything is in its place, except for the people. They’ve all left and gone away.” There are two kinds of people who have “gone away”: the local inhabitants, Ruthenians, and the Jews. Of course, the Jews haven’t “gone away”. They have been killed. Watching from her prison, Katerina sees the trains passing by. “The trains, which would pass before us, were crammed with Jews. All the women were happy that we would be rid of them once and for all.”

The twist is that Katerina is not Jewish, but she finds work as a housekeeper for several Jewish families, learning fluent Yiddish. She is betwixt and between, part Gentile, part Yiddish-speaking, celebrating Jewish holidays. We are back to Appelfeld’s great subject: division. Except this time the novel is narrated by a non-Jew. What do Jews look and sound like to a non-Jew brought up by Jew-haters?

Katerina is full of breathtaking scenes of sadness and violence. Here is the death of the protagonist’s second child, Benjamin:

Murderer, I was about to shout, but before my voice could manage, he grabbed Benjamin from my arms and smashed his body against the wall. I saw, God in heaven, the divine head of my son, that vessel more precious than all vessels, smashed in two and spatters of blood darkening the dusk.

Without hesitating she kills her child’s murderer. “I carved him the way they butcher a beast in a meat shop.”

These explosions of violence are just one part of the novel. There is also Katerina’s terrible loneliness, the depiction of life in the small-town taverns, forty years of imprisonment for her retributive crime, and the constant memories of people she has loved.

Like Roth, Appelfeld is a master of the set piece. In The Story of a Life there is a moving account of a group of blind children, “dressed in their Sabbath best”, being marched from the Institute for the Blind to the local railway station, stopping at various points to sing songs by Schubert and Bach. When they reach the station the Ukrainian guards “immediately set upon the children with their clubs”. “At the railway station, they still managed to sing their anthem in its entirety before being pushed into the cattle cars.”

It is these stories of small children that are the most powerful. Children being eaten alive by wild dogs, antisemitic Ukrainian children (including the youths who jeer at the procession of blind children), the feral children of the DP camps, gangs of young thieves and hooligans, the spectre of Appelfeld himself on the forced march to the camp, being sucked into the deep mud. Is there any novelist in the past fifty years who has written more extraordinary scenes about young children?

The description of the passage about the blind children begins with these words: “No one knew what the next day would bring”. But devotees of Aharon Appelfeld will be able to guess. This mixture of reticence and horror is at the heart of his genius.

David Herman is a regular contributor to the AJR Journal (from the Association of Jewish Refugees) and has written about various Israeli writers

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