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3 Fear, Trembling, and the Pathway to God: The Iron Tracks [The] question is this: What condition must be created so that this or that mute phenomenon may begin to speak, to recount the pain and the accidents of, and the withdrawal into, its inaccessibility—which is to say, our pain at our inability to reach it? The symptom itself—constituted as a symbolic operation , seeking the text of a beyond inscribed within it—alludes to the work that, in the affected man, charts the suffering of its inability to speak.— Nicholas Abraham1 Like several other of Appelfeld’s most memorable and affecting characters, including Bartfuss in The Immortal Bartfuss or the older Bruno in part two of The Age of Wonders—whom we shall meet shortly—Erwin Siegelbaum in The Iron Tracks is a survivor who has escaped death but not deathliness. His life, therefore, is af®icted by the unceasing torments of loss and what the text calls haradah, anxiety and fear. Subject to intermittent bouts of melancholy and depression , Siegelbaum circles Europe by rail (hence the iron tracks of the title), supporting himself by collecting and selling Judaica, and driven forward by his secret mission: to murder the murderer of his parents, one Colonel Nachtigel. The novel traces Erwin’s annual route,recording his impressions,memories,and especially his conversations with those individuals who are as much a part of his yearly routine as his journey itself. Some of these individuals are, like him, collecting the remnants of Judaic history in Europe; others are old friends and comrades of his parents; still others the local peasants (Jews, non-Jews, and partial Jews), who run the inns and drive the wagons that constitute his present reality. It is through Erwin’s encounters, and the recollections that they inspire, that Appelfeld produces a picture of Eastern European Jewry, before and after the war. There is no doubt that Erwin Siegelbaum is a textbook obsessive-compulsive: repressive, anxious, and deeply depressed. The iron tracks are internal as well as external. Erwin is, however, also a poet, for whom the world is alternately and sometimes simultaneously a revelation and a nightmare. Were it not for the poetry that pierces his despair with as much illuminating power as his desperation darkens his daily existence, it might be possible to concur with the following grim reading of the story by the writer J. M. Coetzee: Despite his ostensible con¤dence in the healing powers of art (which would make of him a simpler, less self-doubting writer than his master Kafka), the vision of the soul of the long-term Holocaust survivor that we get in Appelfeld’s ¤ction remains bleak. Both Bartfuss in The Immortal Bartfuss and now Siegelbaum in The Iron Tracks are men who have cannily used the confusion of the postwar years to launch themselves to material success; yet in their mature years they ¤nd themselves living impoverished, affectless lives, driven by compulsions they do not understand. . . . Killing Nachtigel brings Siegelbaum no closer to release. In this respect, The Iron Tracks is a deeply pessimistic and even despairing book, the darkest that Appelfeld has written.2 To be sure, the iron tracks take Erwin Siegelbaum repeatedly over well-worn and painful territory, psychologically as well as spiritually: “I know my stations like the palm of my hand. I can reach them with my eyes closed. Years ago a night train skipped one of my stops, and my body stirred at once. I trust my body more than my mind. It detects the error on the spot” (11). “I have learned this route with my body,” he tells us; “my route is ¤xed, more ¤xed every year. Imprinted on my body, it cannot be shaken” (3, 15). And indeed, his experience of the iron tracks is one of bodily suffering, continuously rein®icted. But the iron tracks are also what convey him from “dread” and “melancholy,” which constantly threaten to overtake him (4), into life itself: not only the life of the past, contained in his memories and in the books and artifacts he lovingly recovers ,but the life of the present,in the various people and places he encounters. En route he reports: “In marvelous little Herben . . . my regular driver Marcello awaits me on April ¤fth. When I see him from the train window, happiness rushes through me as if I were returning to my lost hometown. . . . Thus it is every year. And in this repetition lies a strange...

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