https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/09/aharon-appelfelds-legends-of-home
The New Yorker
March 9, 2020 Issue
Aharon Appelfeld’s Legends of Home
Because the late Israeli novelist could not remember his own past, he
was forced to imagine it.
By Adam Kirsch
March 2, 2020
In an Israeli context, Appelfeld’s obsession with Europe’s past was
almost defiance.
In 2018, Israel lost its two greatest novelists, Amos Oz and Aharon
Appelfeld. Both were older than the country itself and had witnessed its
entire dramatic history, but the ways they dealt with that history could
not have been more different. Oz, born in Jerusalem in 1939, threw
himself into the development of the young Jewish state: he wrote about
the kibbutz where he lived and the psychology of the first Israeli Sabra
generation, and assumed an active role in politics as a founder of the
Peace Now movement. If you wanted to understand Israeli society in its
first half century, Oz’s novels would be the natural place to start.
Reading Appelfeld, by contrast, tells you basically nothing about the
country in which he lived—at least, not directly. Though he wrote in
Hebrew, taught at an Israeli university, and received Israel’s highest
literary honors, his imagination remained fixed in the land of his early
childhood, which was Eastern Europe. Appelfeld wrote more than forty
books—including “To the Edge of Sorrow,” which appeared in Hebrew in
2012 and is now out in a posthumous English translation by Stuart
Schoffman (Schocken)—and almost all of them are set in the former
Austro-Hungarian Empire. They are often about people like his parents:
assimilated, German-speaking, middle-class Jews who live in provincial
cities, vacation at country resorts or in spa towns, and worship
literature and music instead of the God of their ancestors.
And so they are all, inevitably, about the Holocaust, which annihilated
those Jews and their civilization when Appelfeld was a young boy. He was
born in 1932 in a village near Czernowitz—a city that was then in
Romania and now belongs to Ukraine—and his childhood came to a
terrifying end in 1941, when the fascist Romanian government deported
the region’s Jews to labor camps. The soldiers who came to Appelfeld’s
house shot his mother in the yard as he listened, then sent him and his
father to a camp, where they were separated. Appelfeld escaped, hid in
the forest, and spent the next few years roaming the countryside, either
sleeping outdoors or lodging in Ukrainian homes, until he managed to
take refuge with the approaching Red Army.
By the time he arrived in Palestine, in 1946, two years before the
founding of Israel, Appelfeld had been utterly stripped of his identity.
He had lost family, home, and country, as well as years of education and
experience. “World War II went on for six straight years, but sometimes
it seems to me that it lasted only one long night, from which I awoke a
completely different person,” he wrote in his 1999 memoir, “The Story of
a Life.”
The uniquely strange atmosphere of Appelfeld’s fiction comes from the
fact that, because he could not remember his own past, he was forced to
imagine it. “The Story of a Life,” in which Appelfeld tries to write
about his experiences in a nonfictional register, is a valuable but
meagre and fragmentary book. In his novels, conversely, Appelfeld writes
with entranced certainty about experiences that could never have been
his and worlds that don’t quite resemble the real one.
In this way, Appelfeld resembles Kafka, whose influence he discussed in
a 1988 interview with Philip Roth: “He spoke to me not only in my mother
tongue but also in another language which I knew intimately, the
language of the absurd.” Absurd, in the philosophical sense of
inescapable yet pointless, perfectly describes the journey that the
narrator undertakes in Appelfeld’s book “The Iron Tracks” (1991). Set in
the years after the Second World War, it is the story of Erwin
Siegelbaum, a Holocaust survivor who spends his entire life on railroad
trips, making an identical circuit of Austria’s train stations every year.
“The trains make me free. Without them, what would I be in this world?
An insect, a mindless clerk,” Siegelbaum muses, evoking Gregor Samsa,
who turned into an insect in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” His perpetual
journey allows Erwin—which was Appelfeld’s first name, before he changed
it to the Hebrew Aharon—to remain homeless in the country that is his
only home. It is a parable of the Jews’ relationship to Europe after the
Holocaust, able neither to live in the Old Country nor to leave it
behind. “I have no stake here,” another Jewish traveller, whom Erwin
encounters on a train, says. “I have nothing. Still, it’s hard for me to
leave that nothing.”
For an Israeli novelist like Appelfeld, an imaginative obsession with
Europe and the past was a kind of defiance. From the beginning, one of
the key principles of Zionism was “negation of the Diaspora”: in their
homeland, Jews were supposed to turn their backs on centuries of
oppression. This idea was all the more urgent for the refugees who
arrived in Israel after the Holocaust, and were seen as terrible
reminders of the price of Jewish powerlessness. In “The Story of a
Life,” Appelfeld recalls that, as a new arrival in Palestine, he was
indoctrinated with the need to be totally reborn: his future was to
require “the extinction of memory, a complete personal transformation
and a total identification with this narrow strip of land.”
In “Badenheim 1939,” published in 1975, and perhaps his best-known book,
Appelfeld wrote as lethal an indictment of the self-delusions of prewar
European Jewry as any Zionist could want. A hideous idyll, the story
takes place in an Austrian spa town, whose Jewish residents spend the
last summer before the war listening to chamber music, eating pastries,
and engaging in intrigues, while the government’s Sanitation Department
issues ever more ominous proclamations about their impending deportation
“to Poland.” On the book’s last page, the town’s inhabitants gather at
the train station, and one of them remarks, “If the coaches are so dirty
it must mean that we have not far to go.” The line is devastating
because of the gap between what the Jews of 1939 knew and what the
reader after 1945 knows—a gap that can never be closed, no matter how
many times Appelfeld writes about it.
In Hebrew, the term for moving to Israel is aliya, which literally means
“ascent,” while leaving the country is yerida, “descent”—concepts that
carry an unmistakable moral valence. (In Amos Oz’s first novel,
“Elsewhere, Perhaps,” from 1966, the Dostoyevskian villain tries to
seduce a kibbutz girl into leaving Israel and going back to Europe—the
ultimate betrayal.) Those directional terms are central to the parable
that Appelfeld constructs in “To the Edge of Sorrow”—the story of a
group of Jews who go up a mountain in order to found a new kind of
society, only to have to come back down in the end, partly victorious
and partly defeated.
Many of Appelfeld’s novels are concerned with such miniature societies.
“Badenheim 1939” has its spa town, and “The Iron Tracks” its cast of
itinerants; “The Retreat,” from 1982, is about an old-age home of sorts
in twentieth-century Austria where a group of Jews go to unlearn their
bad (i.e., identifiably Jewish) habits. Such settings serve Appelfeld as
a fictional petri dish where certain human potentialities can be
developed to an extreme, while excusing the novelist from the sometimes
dreary obligations of social realism.
In “To the Edge of Sorrow,” the society in question is a band of Jewish
partisans during the Second World War. Numbering fewer than fifty, they
hide in the Ukrainian countryside, raiding farms for supplies and hoping
to hold out until the arrival of the Red Army. This sounds like the
premise of a wartime adventure story, but, although we do hear about
shoot-outs and sabotage missions, Appelfeld’s narrative style is
inherently unsuspenseful. His novels are not about waiting for what will
happen next but about immersion in a timeless present, a bubble world
that is all the more enthralling because you know it is about to pop.
This attitude toward time is surely a reflection of Appelfeld’s own
experience of the abrupt end of childhood, and maybe also of his period
in the forests, which was so different from the life he had known that
it hardly seemed to be happening in the real world.
The same is true of the collective life of the partisan band, whose
experiences are narrated by one of its members, the seventeen-year-old
Edmund. The leader is Kamil, a tough fighter who trains the young
recruits and leads them on missions to blow up the Germans’ railroad
tracks. But we soon learn that Kamil is also a spiritual seeker, whose
goal is not just the preservation of Jewish lives but the renewal of
Jewish life: “Our war is not merely to stay alive. If we do not come out
of these forests as complete Jews, we will not have learned a thing.”
When Kamil leads the partisans to the summit of the mountain, he is not
just securing a safe hideout for the coming winter. He is also Moses on
Sinai, hoping to receive a new law that will make a broken people whole.
He insists on setting aside time for studying religious books that the
partisans have rescued from abandoned Jewish houses, even though his own
acquaintance with Jewish texts is poignantly limited to the works of
Martin Buber, a modern popularizer.
But most of the partisans, like most Jews in Appelfeld’s fiction, are
secular people with no real connection to Judaism, and they see Kamil’s
preaching as embarrassingly retrograde. Karl, the symbolically named
communist, even relates how he used to go around bullying rabbis and
making them promise to stop teaching Judaism. Only Grandma Tsirl, a very
old woman, still possesses some of the simple faith of their ancestors.
“Sometimes Grandma Tsirl seems like a priestess whose tribe has been
lost and who tries to pass on to the remaining few, to the embers who
have been plucked from the fire, beliefs that are beyond their
understanding,” Appelfeld writes.
In this way, the partisans’ mountaintop, which was already a kind of
Sinai, also becomes a version of the Alpine sanatorium where Hans
Castorp undergoes his spiritual education, in Thomas Mann’s “The Magic
Mountain.” Like Mann, Appelfeld surveys all the great quandaries of the
twentieth century, only in their Jewish versions. Can modern people
genuinely return to a pre-modern way of belief? (“How does one pray
without believing the words of the prayer?” Appelfeld writes.) Is
communism the heir of Judaism’s faith in a messianic future, or a
perversion of that faith? Why did the Nazis, even after Germany began to
lose the war, continue to prioritize killing Jews above urgent military
aims? And how can Jews continue to raise children in a world where such
hatred is possible?
By the end of the novel, none of these questions have been answered,
because they can’t be. After further trials, the surviving partisans
make their descent from the mountain back into real life, where they
must face the continuing hostility of their neighbors and the challenge
of starting their lives over. For Appelfeld and many other survivors
after 1945, the only possible next step was to go to Israel, where they
would be asked to forget the past in order to build the future.
“To the Edge of Sorrow” ends on a more ambiguous note. On the novel’s
last page, a camp survivor asks one of the partisans where they should
all go:
“Home,” he answers right away.
“Which home?” asks the survivor.
“There’s only one home we grew up in and loved, and we’re returning to it.”
But what is that home, which Appelfeld deliberately refuses to name? Is
it Eastern Europe, whose Jews were almost all murdered? Is it Israel,
which Zionism sees as the Jews’ historic home and to which it calls them
to return? Or perhaps, for Appelfeld, the only possible home was like
that mountaintop—a half-remembered, half-imagined place that could exist
only in the pages of a book.
Published in the print edition of the March 9, 2020, issue, with the
headline “Legends of Home.”
Adam Kirsch is a poet, critic, and the author of, most recently, “The
Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century.”
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Received on 2020-03-13 18:05:49