Aharon Appelfeld's Fiction: Acknowledging the Holocaust

Introduction

Introduction In his autobiography sippur hayyim [The Story of a Life], Aharon Appelfeld repeatedly uses a particular word to describe both the dominant register of his own relation to the world and the basic mode of his ¤ctional representations. That word is, in Hebrew, hitbonenut, which means observation, re®ection, contemplation , and insight. Related to the kabbalistic concept binah, the word is also laden with mystical connotation, suggesting meditation as well. In Appelfeld’s¤ction, to see is to observe and to observe is to meditate, albeit not necessarily in a ritualistic, religious manner. “I had never been enamored of pathos and big words,” writes Appelfeld in his autobiography, distinguishing his own art from that of the mid-century Hebrew literary scene, where he takes up his career. “I continued to like what I had always liked. Contemplation. Conjuring wordless re®ections. Evoking the stillness of objects and a landscape that seeps into you without imposing anything” (145). That lack of imposition, the acceptance of the fact that, as he puts it elsewhere, life also happened during the Holocaust (and before and after) is, perhaps, the de¤ning feature of Appelfeld’s art. Nothing could be further, not only from the dominant mode of Hebrew¤ction in the early and mid-century, as Appelfeld himself suggests (and as we shall see in great detail later on, when I discuss his autobiography), but from the characteristics of Holocaust writing generally.Appelfeld’s HebrewHolocaust ¤ction is unique within both these modern traditions of literature.1 When Appelfeld reached the shores of Palestine in 1946, or, more pertinent perhaps, when he began to study at The Hebrew University in the 1950s, Hebrew literature was just beginning to break away from the subjects, motifs, and ideologies that had de¤ned it in the pre-State period. Like its near relative Yiddish literature, Hebrew literature is distinctive among world literatures for taking its inception and, for over a century, producing a literary tradition outside Jewish national, geographic boundaries. As the international literature of a people aspiring to and ¤nally on the brink of statehood, Hebrew literature in the ¤rst half of the twentieth century was as much geared toward helping to produce the reality of a Jewish state as toward describing the real, lived lives of Jews in the diaspora and (increasingly) in the yishuv (the Palestinian Jewish community), in Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel. In the Zionist meta-story that began to emerge in these writings, the Old Jew of European descent was replaced (often through¤erce intergenerational rebellion and rejection) by the New Hebrew, the sabra or native-born “Israeli,” who worked the soil, defended the land, and insured the future of the Jewish people—on wholly new terms—in their new–old homeland .2 By the time Appelfeld began publishing his ¤rst poems, short stories, and novels in the 1960s and 1970s, writers such as A. B. Yehoshua, Amalia KahanaCarmon , and Amos Oz were also already beginning to challenge the basic assumptions of the pre-State literary culture. But to the psychological realism and political–ideological protests of these writers, Appelfeld, almost uniquely on the scene of Israeli ¤ction, added the subject of the refugee-survivor. He wrote about that “old Jew”who not only had come from Europe, but had also survived the Holocaust, and, furthermore, did not ¤nd in Israel a congenial, welcoming, and comforting new home. These European Jews—intellectuals, peasants, the elderly and the young, males and females, Communists, writers, and rabbis, from the cities and the farms—were represented in Appelfeld’s writings, not simply in the new national setting—the newly created State of Israel—but more frequently, and perhaps even more compellingly, in the diaspora itself, in the years preceding and often leading into the war. Although Appelfeld is most widely known as a writer of Holocaust ¤ction, most of his more than twenty novels and short story collections do not deal with the war years directly. And this is one area in which Appelfeld, as a Holocaust writer, and not only an Israeli writer, achieves distinction among the authors who have dealt with the European catastrophe: the Holocaust is not, for Appelfeld, a subject that either exhausts or displaces the telling of the story of Jews and Jewish history. As we shall see throughout this study and speci¤cally in relation to The Story of a Life, Holocaust ¤ction in many ways challenges the tradition of writing about the Holocaust. One of the...