https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/297929/aharon-appelfelds-to-the-edge-of-sorrow
Aharon Appelfeld’s ‘To the Edge of Sorrow’
The Israeli master’s latest novel to be translated to English is about
the intricate work of forging a community, and a national narrative
Tablet
Book Reviews
AHARON APPELFELD’S ‘TO THE EDGE OF SORROW’
The Israeli master’s latest novel to be translated to English is about
the intricate work of forging a community, and a national narrative
By Bailey Trela
February 3, 2020 • 12:00 AM
The Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld, who died in January of 2018 at
the age of 85, came late to Hebrew, the language in which he composed
dozens of novels, stories, and memoirs. Having been born in modern-day
Ukraine to German-speaking parents, it was only after Appelfeld fled to
Israel in the years following the war that he devoted himself to the
language, painstakingly translating novels word by word and slowly
developing his facility. The refraction of his youth through the
distance of exile and the adoption of a new lingua franca (especially
one in which he found an ingrained respect for precision, owing to its
biblical tradition) helped to produce a corpus of works marked by a
spare poeticism and a tendency, in the vein of Kafka, toward archly
metaphorical meanings.
To the Edge of Sorrow, Appelfeld’s latest work to be translated into
English (in this case by Stuart Schoffman), is in a sense a shadow
novel, a somber reflection of Appelfeld’s most famous work, Badenheim
1939. While the latter book, suffused with a caustic irony, depicted the
bitter infighting and self-recrimination of a community of Jews trapped
in a resort town as persecutory policies began to trickle in, the new
work takes as its focus a community of survivors struggling to persist
in straitened circumstances. Centering on a band of resistance fighters
hiding in a Ukrainian forest, the book trades in Badenheim’s
overwhelming air of paranoia for the equally fraught anxieties of
community-building—it is a book of creation, a summoning of togetherness
in the midst of overwhelming separation.
The book’s protagonist and narrator is Edmund, a 17-year-old who bears
the psychic wounds of guilt from his harried escape; at his parents’
bidding, he slipped away from a transport train, and made his way into
the woods. It’s not simply survivor’s guilt that nags at Edmund,
however—Appelfeld’s psychological compass is too well-attuned to leave
it at that. Even before the persecution had reached its peak, we learn,
Edmund was absent, withdrawn, and curiously vindictive despite his
passivity. “In those days I was blind and merciless,” he explains. “I
felt that my parents were drowning in their own world and blocking my way.”
The lambent, almost Zweigian lyricism that often suffuses Appelfeld’s
writing immediately hits a snag in To the Edge of Sorrow. As the group
moves from woods to wetlands to mountaintop, the romantic ideal of the
landscape—often limned by Appelfeld with a psalmic quality, a loving
attention to cool waters and green meadows—is abandoned in favor of a
tactical reading of the natural world. Beyond reflecting the
transformation of Appelfeld’s Jewish refugees into a roving, warrior
band, this reinterpretation of the landscape lies at the heart of one of
the novel’s most powerful conceits. “I assume that when the time comes,
not far off, we will become forest creatures,” Edmund reflects. The
refugees’ inhabiting and repurposing of the forest functions as a
reclamation and rewriting of the sylvan myths that undergirded German
nationalism in the early years of the 20th century.
Unsurprisingly, To the Edge of Sorrow is at heart a story about
transformation, about the intricate work of forging a community, and a
narrative, in the calamitous smithy of the war. As a text, the book is
driven by its characters, who Appelfeld constructs with a sensitive
grace and humanistic depth; they are luminous concoctions, awhirl with
mysteries and passions, at once sentimental and tragic. The refugees’
leader is the ascetic Kamil, a self-appointed spiritual guide prone to
manic-depressive mood swings and stirring, gnomic exhortations, and
whose central concern is Appelfeld’s as well: What, he asks, is the
point of survival if the soul emerges from the wreckage torn, tousled,
and debased?
The portrait of Kamil is a filament around which the central struggles
of the text coalesce, though Appelfeld’s done an incredible job of
peopling the book with a cohort of rich characters. There’s Felix,
Kamil’s sensitive deputy, who “seems to have derived his feelings from
music” and occasionally is heard to hum a Bach cantata; Danzig, a giant
of a man with a considerate heart who takes care of Milio, a watchful,
silent 2-year-old who was rescued outside of a ghetto; and Grandma
Tsirl, a 93-year-old seer and prophetess, a physical embodiment of the
tradition—cultural, religious, and familial—the resistance fighters have
been forced to leave behind.
In general, the fighters are addled with guilt over the raiding they’re
forced to do to survive. Appelfeld’s greater design becomes clear when
the band salvages from a ransacked Jewish home a bundle of texts,
including a Hebrew Bible, “an elegant Hebrew prayer book,” and “a very
old High Holiday mahzor.” When Edmund notes that without books the
fighters “would have no physical claim on a world we lived in
yesterday,” the note of Zweig in his phrasing (particularly The World of
Yesterday) seems significant; Appelfeld’s fictions frequently feature
evocations of a golden, lyrical past that is at once impossibly distant,
owing to the magnitude of midcentury Jewish persecution, and seemingly a
moment or step away—as though the utter incomprehensibility of the
Holocaust had slurred the demarcations of time.
Significantly, the books tether Edmund to a richly material memory of
home—to his parents’ reading aloud, for instance, from a copy of Proust
one year during Yom Kippur, when he was “enchanted by the melodious
prose, [and] the serenity of household objects.” Appelfeld has always
been concerned with the domestic traces of Jewishness and their
remarkable persistence; far more than other things, they remain after
the displacement of their original owners, and seem to frustrate the
co-opting of Jewish space. When, in an abandoned Jewish home, Edmund
notes the persistent odor of camphor in a closet “full of city clothes,
blankets, and down quilts,” he’s sensing a record of familial and
communal life that’s curiously difficult to erase.
Though that’s not to downplay the explicitly Jewish significance of the
rescued texts. To the reclamation of the forest as physical space,
Appelfeld adds the rebirth of a Jewish intellectual tradition in a sort
of sylvan symposium; at evening, the members of the camp talk and argue,
debating the purpose of Jewishness and how it will exist in the new
world. Appelfeld’s masterful depiction of this dialogue is rife with
internecine and doctrinal squabbles, with rationalists who argue that
Judaism is now impossible (“It’s an ancient, complex culture, and if one
is not exposed to it from childhood, its iron gates refuse to open”) and
Marxists who assert that escaping the ghetto was also, fundamentally, a
flouting of their parents’ teachings.
There is, too, a latent fear in the camp of the mysticism that Kamil
seems to embody. His mission—a reforging of the Jewish spirit—strikes
some of the fighters as delusional and dangerous. One night, a
frustrated fighter shouts at him:
“We’ve gone into the mountains not to receive new tablets but to save
our lives. Protecting life is an important value, and revenge is not
without value. To connect with the old beliefs that led us to the ghetto
and the camps—this is an unforgivable sin. This is not a time for
mystical delusions.”
It’s no accident that Edmund’s dreams of homecoming, which stipple the
text, often take the shape of “mystical delusions” in which “everything
is as it was,” down to the two poplar trees that sentinel his former
home. Appelfeld’s point would seem to be that a reconciliation with the
ancient strains of Judaism must entail a reconciliation on the closer
level of the domestic and intimately familial as well.
***
Throughout Appelfeld’s oeuvre, return is frequently figured as a
fantasy, a hazy, perfumed vision of cozy lanes and apple-blossom rains.
The protagonist of The Age of Wonders, for instance, returns to his
hometown decades after the war and slowly takes note of the absence of
its Jewish residents and how “everything stands there without them,
comfortable and homely, bathed in the same familiar light returning
every year in its placid provincial rhythm.” The central irony that
Appelfeld’s lyricism tends to discover in these moments is that, after
the Holocaust, so much of the world was not a waste, a desolation, but
was instead still immediately and lushly available.
If the rapture of the lyrically material past has often served a simple
contrasting function in Appelfeld’s work—highlighting the cruel
persistence of mundane reality and emphasizing the shocking devastation
of the Holocaust—in To the Edge of Sorrow it takes on a new cast. Though
their language is one of lust and revelry, Edmund’s memories of his
youth are a persistent source of shame. In the weeks leading up to his
family’s deportation, Edmund was distracted by his frantic amours with a
young girl named Anastasia. The lushness of the language in these
passages—“when evening falls … we are pressed tightly together under a
willow tree and drinking greedily of each other”—seems a form of
corruption when set against the simple, crisply elegiac prose of the
book’s main narrative.
Ultimately, it’s a mark of Appelfeld’s mastery that these verdant bursts
of libertinage can cohabitate with the shocking descriptions of Jews
rescued from transport trains that begin to appear in the book’s second
half, and which frustrate the text’s nascent salvation narrative. “We
assumed the refugees would be weak, wounded, and in pain,” Edmund
reflects, “but not people whose exhaustion had shut down their souls.”
The fragile sense of community the refugees have worked so steadily to
confect is shattered, at once, by the utter strangeness of suffering,
and by the fear of self-recognition that consumes Edmund and his fellow
fighters. Edmund is “repelled” by the “human skeletons” filling the
camp; he admits that the “heart, almost defiantly, refuses to identify
with them.”
The starkness of these observations can sometimes butt up uncomfortably
against the book’s tidier gestures. When retreating German forces shell
the band’s mountaintop base, devastating the group and killing Kamil,
the remaining members undergo several significant changes. Isidor, a
fighter given to delivering sourceless and melodious prayers, is forced
into a weeping that shares many of his praying’s most elusive qualities
while Milio is designated by his presumptive father Danzig as the band’s
future glossator; he has “sat and watched and packed vision after vision
into [his] soul,” and will one day recount it all.
The gesture toward the future is significant. Appelfeld’s nature scenes
are imbued with a moral meaning, and frequently mirror the migrations
and wanderings of Jewish history—the band’s nomadic exile in the
wetlands comes to signify forgetfulness, while their stay on a
mountaintop stands, unsurprisingly, for salvation. What’s interesting,
in a work of such direct resonances, is the way a specific parallel is
treated. Kamil’s rhetorical figuring of the band as a last bastion of
Jewishness and his insistence on the band’s learning Hebrew, as well as
the collective’s fundamental uncertainty about the nature of their
community—whether it should be religious or secular, self-contained or
expansive—all help to portray Appelfeld’s encampment as a model and
metaphor for the State of Israel. Yet Appelfeld never clearly states the
parallel, an elusiveness that serves to suggest the immanent political
reality of the Israeli situation, and its status as an unfinished and
ongoing project.
In the end, the elegant conversions of the book’s finale are a clue to
Appelfeld’s mission. To the Edge of Sorrow is ultimately a work of
careful artifice, of neat, almost hermetic resonances, and so it’s no
surprise that it ends with a familiar image, another reclamation.
Whereas Badenheim 1939 famously concludes with the arrival of a
transport train that comes on like a stony, biblical thunderclap, its
appearance “as sudden as if it had risen from a pit in the ground,” To
the Edge of Sorrow offers up a new vision of rail-bound departure. The
surviving members of the militia are “packed together in one carriage”
of a military train, in grim mimicry of the transport trains’
suffocating closeness, though as the group’s new leader points out, the
destination, this time, is home—wherever that might be, and whatever
that might mean.
***
Bailey Trela is a writer living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared or is
forthcoming in Full Stop, Harvard Review, and The Threepenny Review.
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Received on 2020-02-04 12:42:41