`Tiny, Precious Particles'

The Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld was born in 1932 in Romania. Eight years later the Nazis seized Czernowitz, his home town, killed his mother and deported Appelfeld and his father to a concentration camp in the Ukraine. He escaped and remained a fugitive for three years before joining the Red Army. Read some of the details in The Story of a Life, his emblematic chronicle of 20th-century horrors narrated by a voice as quiet and oblique as the voices in his novels. Where Piotr Rawicz, another Holocaust survivor, narrates scenes of unbearable cruelty in Blood from the Sky, Appelfeld’s aesthetic remains rooted in indirection. Even when his narrative is dry and factual, a mist clings to his words. I can’t think of another novel in which so much is left so eloquently unsaid as Badenheim 1939.

I met Appelfeld 20 years ago at a holocaust conference I was covering as a reporter. He was soft-spoken, laconic, avuncular. I introduced myself and we talked. I no longer have my notes but I remember how disarming his affability seemed. Did this explain his aesthetic, his reliance on absence as presence? How could a boy who lived by his wits from age 8 turn into so gracious a man? Other writer-survivors -- Jean Amery, Tadeusz Borowski, Paul Celan, Primo Levi – have chosen suicide, and who is to condemn them? Appelfeld not only went on living but thrived. His friend Philip Roth has written that Appelfeld possesses the “playfully thoughtful air of a benign wizard,” and I observed the same quality. In the Radov Lectures he delivered at Columbia University in 1991, published as Beyond Despair, Appelfeld says:

“All true art tirelessly teaches that the whole world rests upon the individual. That is its central point, whether it remains caught up with it or sets forth from it towards society or metaphysical space. The individual, with his own face and proper name, will always be the great subject matter of art.

“When people challenge me and ask what is the place of art in that sphere of death and horror, I reply: who can redeem the fears, the pains, the tortures, and the hidden beliefs from the darkness? What will bring them out of obscurity and give them a little warmth and respect, if not art? Who will take that great mass which everyone simply calls the `dreadful horror’ and break it up into those tiny, precious particles?”

Appelfeld’s artistic credo is bafflingly generous for a man of his experience. First, he insists on the primacy of the human. Art is about people – an observation that ought to be self-evident, but one that provokes sneering contempt in some quarters. Likewise, the artist’s role is sacramental . He “redeems” those who suffered obscurely, anonymously, and would otherwise be forgotten. Memory is holy.

Zbigniew Herbert likewise survived the Nazis and Soviets, and managed to preserve an emotional and aesthetic equanimity. I’ve cited this passage before, from “The Price of Art,” one of Herbert’s essays in Still Life with Bridle, but it resonates with Appelfeld’s words and reminds us of the resilience of the exceptional individual:

“It is we who are poor, very poor. A major part of contemporary arts declares itself on the side of chaos, gesticulates in a void, or tells the story of its own barren soul.

“The old masters – all of them without exception –could repeat after Racine, `We work to please the public.’ Which means they believed in the purposefulness of their work and the possibility of interhuman communication. They affirmed visible reality with an inspired scrupulousness and childish seriousness, as if the order of the world and the revolution of the stars, the permanence of the firmament, depended on it.

“Let such naïveté be praised.”