Critical Reappraisals of Aharon Appelfeld

The essays in Bein kefor leʿashan, an extraordinarily fine volume from Ben Gurion University Press, were originally a series of papers presented at a Hebrew University colloquium in 1994. That event marked the peak of Appelfeld's acclaim in Israel after a period when it might have seemed that he was receiving more attention in America, in English translation, than he was in his own country. The reasons for this disparity may reside in the fact that the Israeli literary establishment viewed Appelfeld as out of step with the dominant emphases-the kibbutz, the army, the entire "first-person plural" ethos (or the debunking of same)-of its leading authors. Appelfeld moved from the periphery to the center of Israeli letters only around the time that Israeli nostalgia for Diaspora Judaism manifested itself in works such as Binyamin Tammuz's Mishle bakbukim (1975) and Yitsḥak Orpaz's Reḥov hatomazhina (1979), and when Holocaust consciousness, or Holocaust-centeredness, in Israel began to catch up with these sensibilities in America. Appelfeld's fortunes in the United States-and perhaps, indirectly, in Israel as well-were given a huge boost by the attention lavished on Appelfeld by Philip Roth in his New York Times Book Review interview¹ and in Roth's novel Operation Shylock (1993).

The appearance in English translation now of Yigal Schwartz's monograph and of Gershon Shaked's excellent overview of Appelfeld in his Hasipporet haʿivrit, regrettably abridged in the otherwise very fine and useful English version, is a significant milestone for Appelfeld. Hitherto, English readers have been graced by Gila Ramras-Rauch's useful full-length monograph,² which provides plot summaries, bibliographies, and biographical background. The relative absence of plot summaries in Schwartz's book increases the English reader's appreciation for and dependence upon what Ramras-Rauch has done. Appelfeld's Beyond Despair, a collection of his lectures and interviews, is the best window in English into Appelfeld's worldview as expressed in his own words. And, of course, one cannot underestimate the importance of the labors of Appelfeld's translators, particularly the indefatigable Jeffrey Green, who have made available in English almost all of Appelfeld's works, including some novellas published only in journals or newspapers that readers of the original Hebrew would be hard-pressed to find. Alan Mintz's insightful analyses of Appelfeld's early stories in Ḥurban,³ Leon Yudkin's chapter in Escape into Siege,⁴ Naomi Sokoloff 's study in her Imagining the Child in Modern Jewish Fiction⁵ and her study of Tzili,⁶ Ruth Wisse's critical review in Commentary,⁷ and Jeremy Edlow's unpublished dissertation⁸ account for most of what has been available in English until now. Recently, Emily Budick's article appearing in Modern Language Quarterly⁹ frames the debate with Michael André Bernstein, the trenchant analyst/critic of Appelfeld's most famous English story,¹⁰ in the context of Holocaust literary theory.

In his book From Individual Lament to Tribal Eternity and in his essay from Bein kefor leʿashan, Yigal Schwartz dwells upon Appelfeld's personal search for the roots of his tribal...