'It Is Wonderful to Be a Writer'

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.]