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1 Acknowledgment and the Human Condition: Historical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Approaches to Writing on the Holocaust The following chapters constitute a meditation on the ¤ction of Aharon Appelfeld . In particular I am interested in the philosophical, psychological, and religious dimensions of Appelfeld’s writing as they come to bear upon the subject of the Holocaust and as they enable us to glimpse an attitude or relationship to Holocaust representation, what we might think of as a poetics of Holocaust representation . I choose the word poetics carefully, with full consciousness of the potential problems inherent in such a word, and even the offense it might seem to offer to those who suffered the consequences of the catastrophe. Yet, as most scholars who have dealt with Holocaust literature have also pointed out, and as theorists such as Theodor Adorno himself, despite his declarations to the opposite , was fully aware, language and literature might constitute particularly apt vehicles of both apprehending and responding to the catastrophe. Both language and literature were themselves victims and instruments of the Holocaust. Both also offer legitimate, perhaps even inevitable means of our subsequent coping with it. “Holocaust literature,” writes Lawrence Langer in one of the earliest studies of this canon of texts, is not the “trans¤guration of empirical reality . . . but its dis¤guration, the conscious and deliberate alienation of the reader’s sensibilities from the world of the usual and familiar, with an accompanying in¤ltration into the work of the grotesque, the senseless, and the unimaginable, to such a degree that the possibility of aesthetic pleasure . . . is intrinsically eliminated.” In Alvin Rosenfeld’s words, such ¤ction affords more than “topical” interest, however signi¤cant the historical events in and of themselves. Rather, it is “an attempt to express a new order of consciousness, a recognizable shift in being.” Speci¤cally, it is an attempt to wrestle back language from the abyss to which Nazism delivered it and, by so doing, to reclaim the idea of the human. The Holocaust, Rosenfeld suggests, constituted a “double dying”wherein what died, as Rosenfeld quotes Elie Wiesel as saying, was not only “man, but the idea of man.”1 Holocaust ¤ction, in other words, is anything but a limited and delimiting literary enterprise. It does nothing less than produce a whole-scale shift in our modes of perception and representation and in our de¤nition of the human. For this reason, even though, as I have already noted, Appelfeld himself has objected strenuously to the label Holocaust writer, I pursue my somewhat circumscribed venture into Appelfeld’s Holocaust ¤ctions, making no attempt to cover the range of his achievement. Appelfeld is probably the best living chronicler we have of European Jewish life, preceding, during, and even following the catastrophe . As Gershon Shaked puts it so beautifully in his study of Appelfeld, it is as if the angel who, upon our being born into the world, seals our memories of the past reversed the process with Appelfeld, such that he virtually embodies the entire memory of the Jewish people.2 Insofar as Jews are ¤rst and foremost human beings like all others, this is to say as well that Appelfeld is one of our great writers of the human condition. Yet, as I have already suggested, the Holocaust does weigh heavily on all of his ¤ction, even where it is not the primary subject. Therefore, what I say concerning a select few of his works will, I hope, illuminate aspects of his larger undertaking as well. By focusing on this single, albeit major theme of his work, I hope to bring into view something of the essence of Appelfeld’s craft. This essence has to do with an investment in language as the instrument, not only of the rational and informational communication among human beings, but of their feelings and, ultimately, though obliquely, of their faith as well. Though such faith has everything to do with religion in the ordinary sense of the word, it is for Appelfeld, as we shall discover, also something vaster and more comprehensive than religious faith per se.3 Through contemplating Appelfeld’s Holocaust ¤ction, then, I intend to say something about Appelfeld’s writing generally, which is to say something about the human condition itself as re®ected in his writing. But I also aim at more than the explication of the writings of a single individual, however compelling those writings might be. The Holocaust is not just any subject, most especially for Jewish...

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