Continuing with the theme of works by Aharon Appelfeld, here’s an article by Jonathan Rosen from the Forward of thirty years ago, published when that periodical was (all-too-briefly, alas…!) under the wise helm of Seth Lipsky. The article is an interesting hybrid: Part book review (focusing on Badenheim 1939, and, The Healer), part interview, and, part sociological and philsophical exegesis.
On (re)reviewing the article for this post, I couldn’t help but take note of Aharon Appelfeld’s statement…
Eastern European Jews knew they should suffer,
will suffer,
that suffering belongs to them.
For the German Jews who saw themselves as Germans this was too terrible.
…in light of the recent Tikvah Fund podcast of a discussion between Jonathan Silver and Daniel Gordis, concerning Gordis’ essay (also available as a podcast) at Mosaic Magazine, “How America’s Idealism Drained Its Jews of Their Resilience.”
The Lesson In the Forest
Forward and Back
Jonathan Rosen
The Forward
November 30, 1990
Aharon Appelfeld was born in Czernovitz, Bukovina, to an assimilated, prosperous Jewish family, but he grew up in the forests of Eastern Europe where he wandered alone after his escape from a Nazi labor camp at the age of eight. It was in the forest that he first brooded on the nature of his Jewishness. “During those two and a half years I discovered the Jewish mystery. Why was it,” I asked myself, “that all the world wanted the Jews dead? It seemed that even the animals hated me. In a childish way I thought maybe it was my smell. It was a kind of mystery.”
After the war Mr. Appelfeld made his way to Palestine. He has remained in Israel since then, writing the novels that have, over the last ten years, earned him a growing reputation in America. The night before we meet, Mr. Appelfeld delivered a speech at the Jewish book fair on the importance of writing in Hebrew. He speaks with the composure of someone who has refashioned his life, but for all the gentle refinement of this small, bald, bespectacled man there is still something of the forest about him. He listens with the nervous alertness of a bird who might fly.
We are in his hotel restaurant, except for a waiter who constantly refills our coffee cups and who addresses Mr. Appelfeld deferentially as “Monsieur.” He and Mr. Appelfeld regard each other intently, as if they knew each other once in a past life. When the waiter walks away, Mr. Appelfeld whispers, “A Viennese accent. He is a refugee, I’m sure.” He belongs to Mr. Appelfeld’s world of victims and displaced persons, of lives touched by the Holocaust.
Mr. Appelfeld, though identified as a Holocaust writer, does not write directly about the destruction of the Jews. His books take place on the eve of war or in its bleak aftermath. His characters are perched on the brink of a catastrophe that is never named. The action unfolds against the backdrop of our own historical knowledge, a method that draws us uncannily into his books. In “Badenheim 1939,” the novel which made him famous in this country, a group of Jews at an Austrian resort are slowly encircled by the forces of Nazism. Drunk on coffee and pastries, lulled by music and the poetry of Rilke into a kind of trance, these Jews are powerless to resist. They step onto the trains “as easily as grains of wheat poured into a funnel.”
“Badenheim 1939’’ is characteristic of much of Mr. Appelfeld’s fiction, but the author resists the label of Holocaust writer. “I’m trying to understand the entire phenomenon of Jewishness. What is this illness, what is this healthness, what is this greatness called Jewishness?”
Some would say that he is more curious about illness than health. Raised, as he tells me, in a home that forbade Yiddish and enforced German, a home where East European Jews were looked on with disdain (though the town he grew up in, now part of Romania, was itself in Eastern Europe), it is easy to understand his assumption in the forest that Judaism was a kind of sickness and that he had caught the disease. It was only later, he says, meeting East European Jews in his wanderings during the war, meeting refugees afterwards, that he came to appreciate the richness and resiliency of the religion.
The Jews he grew up among seem to him now peculiarly unsuited for survival. “When these Jews were brought from Vienna and Germany to the camps, the worst thing for them was that they were counted as Jews. I will tell you now a piece of news. Most Jews transported from Vienna and Germany to Eastern Europe, to the camps, committed suicide. I have seen this with my own eyes. Eastern European Jews knew they should suffer, will suffer, that suffering belongs to them. For the German Jews who saw themselves as Germans this was too terrible. They committed suicide.”
It is not surprising that ill health often marks the Jews in his fiction and that ill health functions as a kind of trope for an ailing soul. Does Mr. Appelfeld think of Judaism itself as a kind of disease? He doesn’t deny it. “Sometimes a sick tree has wonderful colors,” he says.
Mr. Appelfeld’s most recently translated novel, “The Healer,” published this year by Grove Weidenfeld, the question of well-being is obsessively treated. This hypnotic novel tells the story of Felix Katz, an assimilated businessman from Vienna whose daughter Helga has fallen ill. To cure her, Felix and his wife and son move east, to the Carpathian mountains where a healer is said to live. The healer, an old rabbi reputed to have magical powers, turns out to be sick himself.
Snowbound for the winter, Felix must sit, full of rage and contempt, cut off from his beloved Vienna while his wife and daughter visit an ailing mystic whose only prescription is the study of Hebrew. Felix at last “escapes” with his son and travels to Vienna, where he imagines salvation awaits him. The year seems to be 1939. The city he loves will no longer have him. Felix is overwhelmed by his Jewishness the way a character in a Greek tragedy is overwhelmed by fate.
Despite the bitterness of the book, Mr. Appelfeld professes a great devotion to the assimilated, Germanified Jews he writes about so unsparingly. “I adore this phenomenon of assimilation,” he tells me. “What does it mean? It means someone who does not wish to be a Jew but who is somehow affiliated. More important, he has guilt feelings. It’s a kind of drive.” For Mr. Appelfeld, “these people created the modern world,” even if it is a world he found false in the forest. He is deeply influenced by writers like Franz Kafka and Joseph Roth, whose ambivalence was paramount to their conception of the world. “Ambivalence is a good thing,” says Mr. Appelfeld. “One shouldn’t be too sure – that’s a good rule. And there should be a bit of irony too. That’s also a good rule.”