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5 Religious Faith and the “Question of the Human”: Tzili: The Story of a Life A question that circulates throughout Appelfeld’s ¤ction, virtually in de¤ance of what we would imagine as a decorous or legitimate inquiry for Holocaust¤ction to make, is, as I have begun suggesting, just that question that Nazism itself asked—and answered—about the Jews: how do I know that another human being is in fact a human being, to be treated by me one way and not another ? We might at ¤rst be inclined to respond that Appelfeld’s texts raise this question of the human to ask it in relation to the Nazis, or, perhaps, in asking the question vis-à-vis the Jews, to reverse Nazi rhetoric and answer with a resounding af¤rmation of the humanness of all human beings (including or especially the Jews). But this is not, I think, the case. Not that there is any doubt throughout Appelfeld’s ¤ction that human beings (Nazis, Jews, others) are human beings and not creatures of another sort. Indeed , that af¤rmation of the human, severed from some sort of logical, rationalistic proof that might constitute an answer to the question of how I know another human being is a human being, is one of the hard-won achievements of Appelfeld’s writing. In Appelfeld’s ¤ction, we know other human beings to be human beings by some means other than scienti¤c knowledge per se. Accordingly , we must acknowledge them to be human. This is not to say that we necessarily know how to treat other human beings as human beings. Morality may not be instinctual, though like much human behavior it may originate in or at least be perpetuated by something like instinct .Nonetheless,knowing other humans to be human is a part of our internal wiring. Since the Nazi program of extermination was based as much as on anything else on the claim that the Jews were not humans, retrieving the fact of this inborn knowledge is one basic rebuttal of Nazism itself. “The Jews are undoubtedly a race,” Art Spiegelman quotes Adolf Hitler in the opening volume of Maus, which is his own exploration of the limits of human de¤nition, “but they are not human.” Is there any way at all that even Adolf Hitler could have meant this? The Question of the Human and Rational Humanism In order to set aside some of the things that Appelfeld’s questioning of the human might have meant but does not, I need to cite several features of his writing. One such feature of Appelfeld’s ¤ction, which calls into doubt whether it intends to raise issues concerning the humanness of the Nazis, is that there is little depiction of them in his ¤ction. At the same time, and more perplexing perhaps, his ¤ction very frequently presents its Jewish characters through just those stereotypes that were used by the Nazis to raise questions about the Jews’ humanness. This aspect of the text may re®ect Jewish self-understanding (like the auto-antisemitism of the fathers in The Age of Wonders and The Healer). It may also have something to do with representing the considerable ideological component of culture such that (as we saw in Badenheim) we all participate in its essential assumptions, even when they are mortally self-destructive. But there is more than this going on here, especially given the equally noteworthy fact of the antimimetic style of Appelfeld’s writing, which makes it possible to ask the other presumably unaskable question: how do we know that this catastrophe happened, and happened this way, as reported by survivors and witnesses? There is to Appelfeld’s ¤ction a decidedly Kafkaesque, allegorical, and surrealistic quality. Even if his ¤ction, as I have been arguing, is anything but a decentered , deconstructed postmodernist text,nonetheless the bearing of contemporary thought on Appelfeld’s writing is, I think, quite considerable. A return to former modes of Holocaust representation, which centered on making real— morally, historically, descriptively—the world of the catastrophe, will not illuminate the deepest levels of Appelfeld’s enterprise. Appelfeld’s ¤ction resists what such modes of writing can threaten, which is to reproduce an ideological form of thinking that, however right or accurate the texts’ ideologies might seem to us, verges on replicating a central feature of fascism: its “faith,” to use Appelfeld’s word in The Iron Tracks, which it shares with Communism and with certain institutional forms...

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