I met the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld in 1987 on the same day I met Raul Hilberg and Cynthia Ozick. I had read Appelfeld’s first novel, Badenheim 1939 (1978; trans. 1980), several years earlier and found it disturbing in an unexpected way. The action takes place on the cusp of the Holocaust. Its Jewish characters are oblivious to what’s coming. We know, they do not.
Appelfeld’s mother was
murdered in 1941 when the Romanian Army retook his hometown after a year of Soviet
occupation. He and his father were deported to a forced labor camp in
Romanian-controlled Transnistria. He escaped and for three years hid in the
forests of Ukraine. He later became a cook in the Soviet Army. In 1946 he
arrived in Palestine, two years before Israel became a nation.
Based on my brief
conversation with Appelfeld at a Holocaust conference, I could never have
guessed the events he had endured more than forty years earlier. He was soft-spoken,
laconic, avuncular. Physically, he reminded me of my step-grandfather. He was
short and round yet oddly powerful looking, like an aging boxer. I liked him
and went on to read another four or five of his novels. He died in 2018 at age
eighty-five.
In an interview with
Eleanor Wachtel, she notes that Appelfeld does not blame pre-war Jews for weakness and self-hatred, a common accusation. He replies:
“No, I do not blame them.
I like them because I like weakness. I’m a lover of weakness, human weaknesses,
I mean. People have a lot of weaknesses, and I am nourished by their
weaknesses.”
This seems irrational and
even self-destructive. Appelfeld could not have survived the Holocaust had he
been weak. Wachtel asks why he loves weakness and he replies:
“Because a weakness is
humane. To hate yourself is humane. You love the non-Jew; it’s humane. I
understand why you love the non-Jew. . . . So, I don’t blame, because I know
where all this comes from.”
There’s a cult of strength
– and not merely among the Nazis -- that readily turns into bullying and
savagery. Humans are not good at regulating strength. We tend to overdo it. In
evolutionary terms, those who are strong – physically, emotionally, intellectually -- are
likelier to survive, and Appelfeld is not advocating extinction. I think he is
expressing a literary, not necessarily a moral preference. He understands his
characters and knows they will do foolish things. In this, he reminds me of George
Eliot and Henry James, who often feel sympathy for their people. I think of Catherine
Sloper in James’ Washington Square. Later
in the same interview, Appelfeld says:
“Well, it is wonderful to
be a writer, because I am a woman and I am a child. I’m an elderly man and I’m
a non-Jewish person. A writer has to be devoted totally to the person he is
writing about.”
[The Wachtel interview can
be found in Encounter with Aharon
Appelfeld (Mosaic Press, 2003), edited by Michael Brown and Sara R.
Horowitz.]
2 comments:
Thanks for another interesting piece about someone I had not previously heard of.
I noticed that the literary critic (specializing in poetry), Helen Vendler, died on April 23rd, aged 90. I have her volume on Shakespeare's sonnets which, of course, I haven't read yet.
And, thanks to someone on Twitter, I've picked up Simon Leys's essay collection, "The Hall of Uselessness" (2011; reprinted by NYRB in 2013).
Always something more to read!
I read Badenheim 1939 a few years ago and found it all the more effective because of its obliqueness, its restraint, its lack of hysteria. The horrors to come we can fill in for ourselves. I like writers who let me do some of the lifting.
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