Aharon Appelfeld's The Story of a Life
Schweber, Matthew
THE STORY OF A LIFE by Aharon Appelfeld Keter, 1999 Translated from the Hebrew by Aloma Halter Schocken, 2004 208 pp $23 IF THE INJUNCTION against representing God began with Moses' receipt of...
...yET OVER THE last forty years, Israeli novelist, Aharon Appelfeld, one of the world's foremost writer-survivors, has braved the Gorgon...
...After I placed [my childhood experience of the Holocaust] in writing . . .What emerged . . . sounded bizarre, unconvincing, and even worse, invented . . It's probably, for this reason, that the memoir Appelfeld has written belongs more to the genre of novelist autobiography than to Holocaust testimonial...
...Only the New Life Club founded by Galician and Bukovinian survivors offers solace...
...I tried to be faithful to memory...
...During the inclement winters, he finds refuge with prostitutes, handicapped peasants, and assorted village outcasts, sensing in the reviled an affinity...
...To avail themselves of newfound professional and civic opportunities, they shed their religious forebears' traditions, heri122 DISSENT / Spring 2005 BOOKS tage, language, and customs...
...Story of a Life, in this regard, only clarifies what his readers always have known...
...Like many assimilated, bourgeois Jews of Mittel Europa, Aharon's parents accepted the era's Faustian bargain...
...In an interview with Philip Roth, Appelfeld explains, [1] he Jewish experience in the Second World War was not "historical...
...a dramatist of modern, assimilated, petit-bourgeois European Jewry...
...And it is this small preserve of Mittel Europa that grounds the man and nourishes the artist...
...And, as such, it provides his memoir's overriding leitmotif—the refrain he sounds repeatedly, recovering suppressed memories and plumbing deeper within...
...Czernowitz was ceded to Romania after World War I and then to the Ukraine after the Second World War...
...Robberies of local Jewish homes occur nightly...
...Years of wandering, it seems, had denuded him of his native tongues as well...
...Still, as early as 1937, omens abound...
...Beyond Despair: Three Lectures and a Conversation with Philip Roth [1994]) This dark, collective unconscious finds expression throughout Appelfeld's stories in ominous symbols and foreboding motifs: the ubiquitous train, nefarious bureaucracy, desolate landscape, futile journey, ignored harbinger, prophetic delusion, figurative illness...
...The literalism of testimony, the demand for facts alone, paradoxically, distorted them...
...It was from these that I wove my fiction...
...I didn't understand, nor do I understand the motives of the murderers...
...Otherwise, the howl from oblivion of Anne Frank's diary becomes in the hands of Lillian Hellman a tawdry, sentimental play celebrating platitudes about the resilient human spirit and the brotherhood of man...
...Now, fully assimilated, ambitious, hungry for status, wealth, and validation, Appelfeld's Jew dramatizes the cost in fractured identity, neurosis, ennui, and catastrophic blindness of his uprooting from that cohesive Old World: a fracturing of identity that has reduced the Jew to a flesh-branded number—a demolition of the individual that Appelfeld sees his literary project as designed to restore...
...Neither is he a hyphenated writer, like his American counterparts, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth...
...Appelfeld answers: Who can redeem the fears, the pains, the tortures, and the hidden beliefs from the darkness...
...He also sustains himself through purposeful self-deception, willing himself to believe that at war's end he and his parents will be reunited...
...by this I mean by everything that I saw and absorbed from my parents' home and throughout the long war...
...I was not able to connect words into sentences and the words were the suppressed cries of a fourteen year old . . . JAnd] without language, everything is chaos and confusion and the fear of things you needn't be afraid of...
...Though his blond hair and pidgin Ukrainian, he admits, helped him pass as Gentile...
...The arrival of cattle cars, for instance, ends Badenheim 1939, his first novel translated into English...
...Trusted friends and business associates start to shun his parents...
...Perhaps, then, chronicle depends upon the sophisticated conceptual resources only the adult mind can marshal to assimilate and order its trauma and preserve it for later recall...
...For in the Holocaust, we confront the outer limits of empathy, imagination, and comprehension and a depravity that defies words— a primordial evil Primo Levi has called "the demolition of man...
...Beyond Despair) Far from trivializing the Shoah, then, Appelfeld's fiction magnifies the horror...
...The hunger for bread . . . the aroma of a certain dish or the dampness of shoes .. . the fear of open spaces...
...But more than that, Story of a Life records variations on a life reclaimed from catastrophe...
...For them, religion was an anachronism binding the untutored to ignorance, superstition, and ancient tribal prejudice...
...Appelfeld was born in 1932 in Czernowitz, Romania, the former capital of the Bukovina province on the eastern slope of the Carpathian Mountains...
...We came into contact with archaic mythical forces, a kind of dark subconscious the meaning of which we did not know, nor do we know to this day...
...Or the story of Oskar Schindler, a mercenary outlaw of obscure motives, becomes, through the lens of Steven Spielberg, a caricature adapted to the commercial formula of Hollywood and a narrative anathema, besides, to the Final Solution's significance, which was not one cynical German's rescue of some fifteen hundred Jews but rather his compatriots' murder of six million of them...
...The Appelfelds spoke German, worshipped Germanic Kultur, disdained Yiddish, flouted the kashrut laws, and sneered at their observant parents and the conventionally orthodox Ostjuden...
...Ultimately, the advancing Russians absorb him into their army...
...And in so doing, he succeeds where Steven Spielberg's sentimentality and the kitsch of The Diary of Anne Frank's theatrical adaptation fail...
...And then, when it's too late, death strikes...
...In his stories, the cataclysm hovers over its survivors and its impending victims...
...Within the year, the Nazis liquidate the ghetto...
...and his mother's tender gaze...
...He has mined his deathstrewn past to create a prolific body of fiction in which he honors the imaginative taboo in its very breach: taking the Shoah as his subject, its prelude and its aftermath, without ever presuming to represent its grotesque mechanics...
...Yehoshua, or David Grossman...
...But following theatrical convention, the deportations, selections, and exterminations occur offstage, all the while haunting the setting and propelling the drama...
...nor, is he for that matter, a "Holocaust writer," in the vein of Wiesel or Levi...
...In portraying the individual dead and excavating their extinct world, he gives life to the abstract number...
...his purgatory, its terrain...
...If Isaac Bashevis Singer memorializes the religious Old World Jew's first groping toward modernity and enlightenment, the freedom and élan excited by the break with antiquity, then Appelfeld's fiction projects its negative...
...Who will take that great mass which everyone simply calls the "dreadful horror" and break it up into those, tiny precious particles...
...The strongest imprints those years have left on me are intense physical ones...
...Many children have already drowned like this...
...All these places had names, but there's not one that I can remember...
...Further alienating is the Zionist dogma that would have him extirpate his European past to construct a new personality as a farmer-warrior...
...MATTHEW S. SCHWEBER is a former JewishAmerican fiction fellow at Columbia's Graduate School of the Arts...
...It's clear to me that with only one small wrong move I'll sink down and I'll drown, and even Father won't be able to pull me out...
...There, miraculously, he survives the remainder of the war...
...For both Levi's stark deposition, If This Is a Man?, and Wiesel's more stylized memoir, Night, betray the unique intellectual patrimony their 124 DISSENT / Spring 2005 BOOKS authors brought with them to the camps...
...That is, can one ever imagine a crime so immense, so diabolical, so obscene that it rouses less outrage than numb disbelief...
...He picks up Singer's Jew one step further evolved in the historical process, from lapsed orthodox *The last of which may explain why Appelfeld appears as a character in Philip Roth's Operation Shylock, which is, among other things, a Zionist counter-narrative and celebration of the Jewish Diaspora...
...No one who has not experienced the event will ever be able to understand it...
...Memory proved to be the enemy of my writing...
...the quiet wonderment" in his grandfather's eyes following prayer...
...Jews to the cattle cars," they scream...
...Everything that happened is imprinted within my body and not within my memory...
...Or a bloodlust so medieval as to incite Polish peasants, unsolicited, to massacre thousands of the Jewish neighbors beside whom they'd lived for centuries...
...and "After the Holocaust to write a poem is barbaric...
...My shoes were lost some time ago and I bury my legs for a moment in the lining of his coat...
...He writes poignantly of the insecurity and loneliness this caused: estrangement from fellow survivors...
...Currently, he's writing a screenplay about Polish resistance leader Jan Karski and is at work on his first novel...
...The savage murder of one-third of world Jewry stands instead offstage in all its hideous obscenity, an ellipsis, with Appelfeld entrusting to imaginative interpolation an authentic response...
...The result is a key to an enigmatic author's identity and fiction...
...How to envision, in the heart of modern Western civilization, a state-run military-industrial machine designed to gas and burn an entire people and efface every trace of them from human history...
...His fiction may mold or rearrange and, most notably, elide the facts, but it never fabricates, invents, or distorts them...
...Like the warmth that pierces his ten-yearold, frostbitten feet, his fiction induces vertigo and dread, by rousing numbed consciousness...
...For that they will find the fictional adaptation of his experience, titled, not coincidentally, Tzili: Story of a Life more satisfying...
...They doubt the capacity of everyday language to capture the enormity and warn that attempts to do so risk trivializing, distorting, or even falsifying it...
...But remember: the authors of the two most renowned Holocaust testimonials, Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, were twenty-five and sixteen, respectively, when they were deported to Auschwitz...
...To the Land of the Cattails...
...Not quite parable or allegory, his fiction occupies a realm somewhere between literary realism and occult mythology, a phantasmal quality that happens to fit the author's conception of his subject...
...the recursive narrative and abrupt denouement...
...I NDEED, IT IS the inscrutability this mythos sometimes lends Appelfeld's stories that makes his alternately harrowing, poignant, and fascinating memoir, Story of a Life, so illuminating...
...Children lack a sense of chronology, of comparison with the past...
...The cells of my body apparently remember more than my mind...
...How tragically naive they proved—as their son's novels never tire of dramatizing...
...For some reason, this rapid movement makes Father angry . . . . If Father is angry, that means that I'm going to die soon .. . Both survive, however, the gauntlet leading them instead to a concentration camp...
...Through aesthetic principles or stylization...
...epidemic anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism, on the one hand, Jewish self-hatred and fetish for things Christian, on the other...
...A waitress on a train assumes with Aharon a proprietary, vaguely threatening intimacy...
...Rather, Appelfeld is a Diaspora writer...
...In 1941, the government erects the Czernowitz ghetto...
...In the summertime, he wanders, developing the hunted's survival instincts and drawing nourishment from the earth...
...Also drawn are a few Gentile bystanders noteworthy for their heroism...
...Death surrounded us on every side yet Father seemed to think that if we tried hard enough, there could be some respite, or perhaps rescue...
...What will bring them out of obscurity and give them a little warmth and respect, if not art...
...But if the reticent, gnomic voice recalls Kafka—an influence the author readily acknowledges—Appelfeld's stylistic blend of the real and the surreal and of the naturalistic, absurd, and hallucinatory, fashions an impressionistic universe entirely his own...
...Upon arrival, guards separate them, and Aharon, age ten, somehow manages to escape into the dense surrounding forest...
...Enter the trains and local Ukrainian youth to throw stones and gloat...
...Over the years I've tried [to bear witness] . . . but all this effort yielded no more than jumbled phrases, incorrect words, disjointed rhythms, weak or exaggerated characters...
...At most, Appelfeld will bring his readers to the precipice or lead them from the abyss...
...I have always loved assimilated Jews, because that was where the Jewish character, and also perhaps Jewish fate, was concentrated with greatest force...
...and a compulsive introversion...
...Appelfeld's work doesn't seek to reassure us that even in the heart of darkness flicker traces of light...
...Appelfeld, in contrast, was nine when the cataclysm struck...
...But what was I to do...
...Aharon's mother's fate at the hands of soldiers conducting the roundup is revealed with blood-chilling understatement: "I didn't see her die, but I did hear her one and only scream...
...Father holds my hand very tightly...
...For Every Sin and The Immortal Bartfuss depict tormented survivors roaming a macabre postwar Europe or casting about restive Displaced Persons camps and remote Israeli cafés, while The Iron Tracks evokes the pathos of a victim who, decades later, tries to escape his trauma by re-creating it, obsessively tracing a circular route through Central Europe on trains, recovering lost Judaica and searching for his parents' murderer...
...The world appears to be rational, but in fact, these were ruses, which only deep irrational drives could have invented...
...He practices law part time...
...WHY THIS IS the case we can only speculate...
...Despite living in Israel and writing in Hebrew, Appelfeld is not an Israeli novelist as are, say, Amos Oz, A.B...
...The pastoral marks Aharon's early childhood: idyllic summers spent in the lush Carpathian countryside at his grandparents' cottage, with memories of grazing cows, benevolent peasants, singing Gypsies, verdant forests, strawberry picking, "white skies...
...Sometimes it seems to me all my writing derives . . . from the years of coffee and cigarettes at the club...
...Yet, Story of a Life recounts little of what happened during the war because Appelfeld remembers little, at least as memory is traditionally understood...
...DISSENT / Spring 2005 125 BOOKS into rootless cosmopolitan...
...THE STORY OF A LIFE by Aharon Appelfeld Keter, 1999 Translated from the Hebrew by Aloma Halter Schocken, 2004 208 pp $23 IF THE INJUNCTION against representing God began with Moses' receipt of the Ten Commandments, the one against representing evil had to await Hitler's monstrosity...
...Only those who lived it in their flesh and their minds can possibly transform their experience into knowledge...
...And then he is transferred through a series of Displaced Persons camps in Italy until, in 1946, he secures safe passage to Palestine...
...Evidently, only the images and metaphors of fiction could do justice to the welter of searing impressions...
...In spite of Zionism's romantic premise about the Land of Israel's redemptive power to heal and to succor, more often than not, heartache, alienation, and desolation followed the surviving remnant eastward...
...among others...
...Of those who favor the latter, Elie Wiesel and Theodor Adorno stand among the most scrupulous and authoritative: theirs, respectively, "The truth of Auschwitz remains hidden in the ashes...
...He also relates another survivor's description of the Keffer Pen at Kalschund where for spectator sport, the SS stripped children naked and fed them alive to German Shepherds...
...Dreams of hunger and thirst haunt me almost on a weekly basis .. . During the course of the war, I was in hundreds of places...
...The child Appelfeld had recourse to neither...
...For if the war's end heralded a respite for the survivor, it didn't bring peace...
...APPELFELD ENTHUSIASTS will immediately recognize the narrative arc Story of a Life follows...
...THOSE EXPECTING the shocking diary of how an innocent child survived amid savage peasants, brutal elements, and mercenary Jew-hunters will be disappointed...
...My poetics had been formed at the start of my life...
...For, perhaps, in the end, an oblique reflection is as much of the Gorgon as we ever can hope to perceive...
...How do we who were not there conceive of hatred so virulent as to be suicidal: that with the Third Reich in peril, the Nazis refused to divert critical logistical support and DISSENT / Spring 2005 121 BOOKS manpower to defend themselves because it meant suspending the exterminations...
...it carries no ideological agenda...
...Auschwitz] is transfigured and stripped of some of its horrors...
...But my short legs barely touch the ground, and the icy water cuts into them and into my small waist...
...He affirms as much in Beyond Despair: Ultimately children did not absorb the full horror, only that portion of it which children could take in...
...Dante's Inferno informs the classically educated chemist's account...
...And there, within two squalid narrow side streets, young Aharon and his father are confined, along with tens of thousands of Bukovinian Jews...
...T]he loss of home, the loss of language, suspicion, fear, the inhibitions of speech, the feelings of alienation in a foreign country...
...The "Wandering Jew" is his fiction's lifeblood...
...To be sure, the memoir contains its share of bestiality...
...For not until Appelfeld returns to his roots to recover imaginatively what the Nazis extinguished does he find his voice and métier...
...Hiding in the forest, young Aharon watches Ukrainian peasants armed with axes apprehend a boy his age, drag him by the arms, and then exult upon turning him over to the authorities...
...The slight warmth hurts me so much that I quickly pull them out...
...Fate was already hidden within those people like a mortal illness...
...Of course, as with all survivors, the Shoah is the definitive experience of Appelfeld's life...
...He also chafes under the harsh physical demands that the army imposes and the traumatic memories military service awakens, discovering himself again "enclosed and threatened...
...It serves no commercial end...
...as well as section one of The Age of Wonder...
...Jewish liturgy's eternal dialogue with God colors the former Talmud student's...
...The Appelfelds fancied themselves, rather, freethinking individuals and progressive citizens of the Enlightenment...
...But how, then, does one fathom the satanic magnitude behind the mind-boggling abstraction...
...Elliptical prose and murky atmospheres reinforce the narrative indirection...
...It was then that my attitude toward people, toward beliefs, toward emotions, toward words was molded . . . I [am not] a "Holocaust writer...
...despair at finding a calling...
...First and foremost, the reader comes to understand that Appelfeld's medium—his resort to fiction instead of traditional Holocaust testimonial—is as much a deliberate aesthetic as a necessity demanded by the child survivor's unique trauma...
...126 DISSENT / Spring 2005...
...He explains, I say "I don't remember" and that's the whole truth...
...Later, Romanian soldiers and Ukrainian militia force father and son on a savage, two-month march across muddy steppes to a concentration camp...
...shame at his illiteracy...
...Indeed, Appelfeld has difficulty not just learning Hebrew, but communicating at all...
...Sometimes I see the war years like a dark and gloomy forest that goes on interminably . . . [I]t seems to me that it never really ended . . . I realize that there's been no letup since it began...
...And ever the portraitist, Appelfeld further depicts the DISSENT / Spring 2005 123 BOOKS heartrending motley of tortured souls he encountered in the DP camps: most, children like him—the resilient, deformed, exploited, and exceptional among them...
...Their dicta elevate testimony over poetry, silence over eloquence...
...archetypal earthy Gentiles and deracinated Jews...
...Roth interview) TO RETURN THEN to the initial question: what business is it of art, even at the margins, to enter the death zone...
Vol. 52 • April 2005 • No. 2
