Facing the Sting of Anti-Semitism
ALLEN, BROOKE
Writers & Writing FACING THE STING OF ANTI-SEMITISM By Brooke Allen Now 66 years old, Aharon Appelfeld is a survivor of the Holocaust, and its harbingers, aftershocks and reverberations are...
...Yet at the end, Theo gives up his dream of silence and solitude and music in some mountain monastery and accepts, albeit reluctantly, a communal life with other Jewish refugees...
...For example, here is Karl, looking back on some of the happier moments of his childhood: "But the morning at Gloria's side was always full of light...
...A great many of Karl's friends have made a similar decision, and those who do not approve at least understand and treat him with respect...
...You understand me, don't you...
...But the novels move obsessively into and around the topic...
...Being around these old men restores something of Karl's youth, with its sense of justice and of freshness...
...He now spent hours in the center, wandering among the stores, cafés and kiosks, even entering the synagogue...
...Appelfeld writes well about the educated, irreligious Jew who cannot believe m the tenets of his own faith, yet who knows that conversion has got to mean betrayal on some level or other...
...She fled back to the countryside upon his parents' deaths...
...Appelfeld has returned to the theme he explored in For Every Sin with his 12th novel, entitled simply The Conversion (Schocken, 240 pp., $22.00...
...Without advancement, there is no purpose or meaning in life...
...his characters are, like himself, Central European Jews facing, if not the memory of the camps, the sting of anti-Semitism and a discomforting uncertainty over the place of Jews within the larger world...
...Karl is now a Christian and holds the job he coveted, but he is no more accepted by the town's Christian community, not to mention its powerbrokers, than he was before...
...A different sort of writer might have made the moral cause and effect of Karl's unhappiness more obvious...
...The kites didn't go very high, but their flight, low as it was, amused him to tears...
...In Central Europe in the decades before World War II, thousands of Jews converted to Christianity...
...He tries to explain his feelings to fellow survivors: "Bach's cantatas saved me from death...
...There is little dialogue in Appelfeld's work, little humor (though he is not humorless), little in the way of description...
...Now I'm free...
...The family once had a maid, Gloria, a Christian peasant who brought up the small Karl and was part sister, part mother to him...
...The other refugees are predictably unimpressed, even hostile...
...Where in For Every Sin the Holocaust survivors of 1945 are disgusted by the idea of converting, some 40 years earlier the Jews of The Conversion tend to look at the issue more as a matter of pragmatics than of principle...
...Although he moved ahead steadily, he was aware that as a Jew he would have to stop short of the post he most desired, that of Municipal Secretary, which he unironically considered a "high office...
...When Karl asks why not, he replies, "Because I'm a Jew...
...I'm going back to the Church because Bach dwells there...
...But within the limitations he has set for himself, Appelfeld has continued to produce a literature of compelling moral choice...
...It had been a gradual retreat...
...If I've decided to become a Christian, it's because that's my faith...
...In fact, one of the interesting things about Appelfeld's novels is that while the protagonist may end up making the "right" moral choice, the author seldom takes the facile route of trying to convince us it is fulfilling or joyful...
...In style, too, it is very much of a piece with his previous books: dreamlike and anesthetized, the prose so measured and rhythmic it lulls the reader into an almost somnolent state—until, that is, a quick touch of color or an unexpected bite achieves a devastating effect...
...His new belief that he has the power to do good within the bureaucracy turns out to be an illusion, however, and he begins to dream of a better, more pastoral life...
...Obviously there are different kinds of meaning, and different kinds of advancement...
...He is confronted every day with the image of his own blighted character in his childhood friend Martin, once a high-spirited and brilliant boy, who has become a lonely alcoholic since his own conversion some years prior to Karl's...
...Is that clear...
...How can one reconcile religious faith with daily cruelties...
...Appelfeld has long shown a fascination for such apostates and their tormented, frequently contradictory ways of thinking...
...If your career requires you to convert," his mother always told him, "do it...
...He was ambitious from a young age, and his parents were ambitious for him...
...When Martin calls him a goy Freddy insists, tellingly but with unconscious humor, that he is an apostate, not a goy...
...During that long, enchanted summer he learned to skip rope, play jacks and fly kites...
...Karl and Gloria, now lovers, repair there in the hope of enjoying an uncorrupted existence...
...So Karl's life changed course...
...His Aunt Franzi, for instance, a well-known actress who "had married, divorced, and been involved in untold scandals, but for some reason...
...That was my nourishment for two and a half years...
...Finally, Theo is forced to admit to himself that it is not his love of Bach that drives him toward the Church, but an intolerable distaste for the group identity his Jewishness has imposed on him, for the very social cohesion that has allowed some Jews to survive...
...He never attempts to describe the Nazi concentration camps themselves...
...A good student, he attended the local gymnasium and decided to pursue an administrative career...
...I don't want that togetherness," he declares...
...Set in a provincial city somewhere in Austria-Hungary before World War I, it begins with the conversion of a youngish man named Karl...
...What principles are there to guide the skeptical, deracinated urban Jew...
...Published Here for the first time...
...A ceremony like this is no more than a tonsillectomy," observes a childhood pal...
...Is Karl's bad luck and tragedy due to his conversion...
...Those places, which he had ignored for years, seemed less neglected than he had expected...
...There's no advantage in it, but that's what I am...
...Karl has been heading in this direction for most of his life...
...Writers & Writing FACING THE STING OF ANTI-SEMITISM By Brooke Allen Now 66 years old, Aharon Appelfeld is a survivor of the Holocaust, and its harbingers, aftershocks and reverberations are the subjects of virtually all of his novels...
...He passes the days in a frozen routine, still occupying the little room he always had in his parents' house, even though his parents are long dead and he now lives there alone...
...You can't deprive me of that choice...
...A person has to advance...
...The old men came out to him as if seeking their lost son...
...Moreover, those of Karl's friends who have refused to convert do not seem much better off than he is...
...It is a Tolstoyan fantasy that, for Karl, is to remain only a fantasy...
...I won't conceal from you that it isn't always comfortable, but still, we're together...
...In many cases the reasons were more complex, though, sometimes involving a genuine attraction to Christian doctrine, a passion for Christian esthetics, or a secret and shameful wish to be free of Jewish identity and of the Jewish community...
...In both style and subject matter, his writing is extremely circumscribed...
...The Carpathian Mountains have traditionally been important in Appelfeld's symbolic geography as a place where Judaism has remained pure...
...He couldn't remember...
...In interviews, he has implied that the experience was ultimately too unreal and horrifying to make into effective fiction...
...Everything made her happy—a bird, a flower...
...In their youth, neither he nor Martin had ever hidden their Jewishness...
...More problematically, how does one deal with a lack of faith...
...Appelfeld immigrated to Palestine in 1946...
...The retreat continues...
...Karl eventually achieves his professional goal, but "What came after was merely a tedious marching in place, and, worst of all, the feeling that life is a fierce struggle without purpose...
...The Conversion originally came out seven years ago in Israel...
...Indeed, this actually seems to happen...
...Even a slice of bread and butter made her smile...
...Appelfeld, characteristically, chooses not to...
...Karl gets it in his head that if he could just find Gloria, his life would regain its meaning...
...Despite its temporal departure, those who are familiar with Appelfeld's work will find the novel goes back over territory he has already covered exhaustively...
...Not necessarily...
...The motivating force usually was social and economic advancement...
...In his 1989 novel, For Every Sin, he explored the perverse example of a young man, Theo, who decides to convert after the War, in spite of—or because of—his experiences in a concentration camp...
...I won't be angry with you...
...More than once they had struck those who had bullied them and said, 'Jews also know how to punch.' When had they become so self-effacing...
...Here we're together," one of them tells him...
...She had what his parents lacked— joyfulness...
...The ceremony has just ended, and at the congratulatory (or perhaps consolatory) touch of an old friend Karl is suddenly reminded of the past, of school, of "the graduation parties and his Aunt Franzi's bright face, an entire life that now flowed into the abyss with a deafening roar...
...Theo undergoes no epiphany, nor does he have any real sense of pleasure in the future confronting him...
...How should he position himself in a world dominated by Christians, and what should be his stance toward the Jewish culture that he too often holds in contempt...
...Gloria reappears one day and Karl, as if by magic, finds a cause: to defend the town's old quarter of Jewish shops, threatened with destruction by the Municipal Council...
...No less and no more...
...His friend Freddy, a doctor who also converted, succeeds in leading a spiritual and even saintly life...
...One of the challenges confronting these people is that of constructing a moral framework for their lives...
...One man Karl meets says, "I wouldn't change my faith for anything in the world...
...He is becoming a Christian purely in order to move up in the municipal bureaucracy...
...had never converted," dies in self-imposed exile and poverty...
...I want to be alone...
Vol. 81 • November 1998 • No. 13
