In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Life in the Cafe:On Diasporism in Aharon Appelfeld’s All Whom I Have Loved and A Table for One
  • Iris Milner

In 1908, a short time after his departure from London and his return to Eastern Europe, Yosef Hayim Brenner published “El ha-matarah” (Toward the target)1 which features the character Shlomo Mittleman, an activist and self-appointed delegate to the Zionist congresses who lives in London and constantly defers his dream to emigrate to the land of Israel. “El ha-matarah” is a political story; Brenner lends it an amused and ironic overtone, through which he mocks the verbose nature of practical Zionism (tsiyonut ma‘asit). In it he also poses profound questions concerning fundamental aspects of Jewish existence, mediated through the grotesque character of Simcha, Mittleman’s simpleminded brother-in-law. Simcha’s strange habit of repeating the last words of every sentence he hears echoes and ridicules the empty ideological chatter of the anglophile Mittleman. At the same time, through his peculiar character and its resulting estrangement, the story provides a provocative insight into the character’s strong preference to observe the Zionist project from afar while adhering to a diasporic life of permanent exile.

Indeed, “El ha-matarah,” together with Brenner’s other literary works that are set in early twentieth-century Palestine, was a tool for mediating the diasporic aspect of Jewish existence within the newly established Hebrew cultural arena. At the dawn of an age when Hebrew literature enthusiastically propagated the project of transforming Erets Israel from a mythological site into a concrete, homey space,2 the main characters in [End Page 459] Brenner’s work refused to settle down and experience physical and spiritual redemption. Brenner’s oeuvre thus explored the extent to which an urge for a nomadic, rootless existence, rather than a desire for permanent settlement in the Land of Israel, determined the essence of Jewish identity.

Some fifty years later, when the myth of the autochthonic birth of the “new Jew” from the soil of his or her renewed homeland had become firmly entrenched in Israeli culture, and reflections about the fragility of ties with the Israeli place were carefully veiled, Aharon Appelfeld inherited the nomadic urge from Yosef Hayim Brenner—a writer he conceives of as his kindred spirit3—and similarly took upon himself the mission of problematizing this ideology. Almost all of his novels and short stories, published from the beginning of the 1960s onward, express a sense of detachment, whether chosen or forced, from a permanent home, and raise serious doubts regarding the possibility of dropping anchor in any specific physical location in a final and redemptive manner. Appelfeld thus reanimates the diasporic orientation in Hebrew literature that originated in Brenner’s works; his entire oeuvre, though written in Jerusalem, is a striking testament to the eternal Jewish nomad. The endless journeys of his protagonists in convoys, trains, wagons, and on foot,4 the recurring difficult attempts to settle down, and the morbid qualities often associated with home in his stories, all highlight the hopes and expectations as well as the moral conflicts of such nomadism. Consequently, they also shed light on unresolved questions regarding choice, fate, catastrophe, and redemption in Jewish history.

Moreover, it is through the endless motion of Appelfeld’s protagonists that the various dramas with which his works deal intersect: the disorientation of European Jewry prior to World War II, the cataclysm of the Holocaust, the displaced condition of Jewish refugees after the war, and, intertwined into all these, the autobiographical turmoil of a persecuted child who searches in vain for shelter and protection. Accordingly, movement is motivated by a sense of lack:5 journeys are triggered by a passion [End Page 460] for a religious experience and an insatiable desire for an origin, a lost mother, a starting point, a primal, preverbal, constitutive experience. Although they sometimes reach specific locations where redemption is temporarily gained (such as the home of the righteous man in the Carpathians in At One and the Same Time)6, these journeys ultimately lead the nomads toward utter detachment and displacement.7

This essay discusses the unique version of the theme of diasporism in two...

pdf

Share