Some of my earlier (“iest”?) posts comprise the covers of six novels by the late Aharon Appelfeld:
Badenheim 1939 (1980)
The Age of Wonders (1981)
Tzili, The Story of a Life (1983)
The Retreat (1984)
The Immortal Bartfuss (1988)
The Healer (1990)
“This” post also pertains to Aharon Appelfeld, but it’s of a different nature: It’s a review of The Immortal Bartfuss by Aloma Halter which appeared in The Jerusalem Post some thirty-two years ago. The review also includes a nice portrait of Appelfeld, but the photographer’s name is not given.
Surviving in silence
BARTFUSS THE IMMORTAL by Aharon Appelfeld
Translated by Jeffrey M. Green.
London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
135 pp. £10.95.
The Jerusalem Post
May 28, 1988
Aloma Halter
WITH Aharon Appelfeld, Israel has a novelist whose growing body of powerful work ranks him among the best of the world’s contemporary novelists. Unlike Bashevis Singer or Amos Oz, he can be categorized as neither “Jewish” nor “Israeli”: his writing is a unique blend of the two modes. Furthermore, there is a quality about his work – perhaps its simplicity, perhaps its abstraction, perhaps the sheer human credibility of the characters – that carries it beyond national and religious definitions and makes it universal. Above all, his work manages to uncover – to discover – something about the human condition. Reading Appelfeld, we understand more about ourselves.
Bartfuss The Immortal is one of Appelfed’s most compelling novels yet. This is the story of a survivor of the Holocaust who has acquired his enigmatic nick-name because of experiences in the Nazi death camps; other survivors respect, fear him and keep out of his way. Now in his 50s, Bartfuss lives in Tel Aviv. Locked into an unhappy marriage, the father of two daughters (one of whom is retarded) whom their mother has estranged from him, he earns his living easily and soullessly from trading on the stock exhange.
There is the very early rising, the invigorating first cup of bitter coffee, the cigarettes, the walk to the cafe, the strolls by the sea, the brief hour at the stock exchange and the meals in anonymous restaurants. Sometimes he takes the bus to Netanya. Mainly he concentrates, trying to stop his thoughts before they formulate themselves, and words, unnecessary words – forewarners of unwanted thoughts – fill him with revulsion. “He had invested a lot of energy into blocking up the openings through which thoughts could push out. In recent years he had managed to seal them off almost completely. Now he felt he didn’t have the power to stop them any more.” Bartfuss’s wife Rosa, who spends her time lying around the house eating sandwiches and gaining weight, likes words; she “piles them up,” she uses them against him. But Bartfuss has learned how not to retaliate; he leaves the house while his wife and unmarried daughter are still fast asleep and returns when they have already gone to bed. He will go to any length to avoid speaking to Rosa.
Extremely voluble or forbiddingly uncommunicative, Appelfeld’s most memorable characters share a dominant feature – speech, or its absence – that characteristic that has been called man’s most human attribute.
The strategies of survival which once saved his life – detachment, the ability to grit his teeth and endure, to freeze his emotions and restrain himself – have now hardened around Bartfuss, impeding his possibility for communicating, for fully living.
On a daily basis, he had evolved a way of being among people without any contact, without words … a way of surviving intact in his isolation. He had slept little, and never deeply; his room was sparse, almost ascetic, but his days had been full of reassuring rituals. Bartfuss’s routine had given him a kind of rigid, blinkered security which might have carried him, intact and detached, if not into old age, then at least on for many more years.
But Appelfeld’s character is at a turning point in his life. One spring, a series of minor events occur that jolt the routine, that begin to have a profound and perceptible effect on his life. He runs into faces from his distant past: Theresa, Dorf, Schmugler, Sylvia. The encounters with them revive emotions in himself which he had long believed, and hoped, were extinct.
The translation, by Jeffrey Green, reads superbly.