Aharon Appelfeld, Israeli Novelist Haunted by the Holocaust, Dies at 85
Aharon Appelfeld, the acclaimed Israeli novelist who wrote disturbing, obliquely told stories of self-deluded Jews slowly awakening to the reality of the Holocaust, died on Thursday in Petah Tikva, near Tel Aviv. He was 85.
His death was confirmed by Beilinson Hospital, where he died.
As someone whose mother was killed at the beginning of World War II, and who escaped a labor camp to hide among hostile peasants, Mr. Appelfeld made the Holocaust his great subject. Yet he told his stories from a seemingly naïve eye, a baffled child’s eye, working by indirection and intimation. The horrors, as critics pointed out, happened offstage; his novels rarely identified the threat explicitly as storm troopers with whips or concentration camps with poison-gas showers.
Rather, people wrestled with the banalities of daily life as ominous events were apprehended like distant thunder, lending his narrative the absurdist quality of a Beckett play or the chill of a Kafka story.
In “Badenheim 1939,” perhaps his most famous novel, which the critic Irving Howe called “a small masterpiece,” cultivated, petit bourgeois Jews blithely sunbathe, flirt and nosh on strudel and ice cream at a resort outside Vienna, deluding themselves about ominous developments like the shadowy Sanitation Committee’s requiring all Jews to register. Soon they are figuring out how to help the committee relocate them to Poland, where the implication is that they will soon end up in concentration camps.
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In “The Age of Wonders,” a return train trip by a vacationing mother and son is disrupted by the registration of Jewish passengers and foreshadows a journey on a cattle car, just as the appearance of a creaking locomotive does after an eastward journey by a mother and son in “To the Land of the Cattails” (1986).
“The ingenuous person is always a shlimazl, a clownish victim of misfortune, never hearing the danger signals in time, getting mixed up, tangled up and finally falling in the trap,” Mr. Appelfeld told Philip Roth in a conversation published in The New York Times Book Review in 1988. “Those weaknesses charmed me. I fell in love with them. The myth that the Jews run the world with their machinations turned out to be somewhat exaggerated.”
To his hapless characters, many of them westernized Jews who try to dissociate themselves from what they see as a Jewish rabble responsible for their demonization by anti-Semites, the menace is mysterious, the outcome unknown. They are also hobbled by the human need to deny approaching reality, to keep deluding oneself, while the murderers and persecutors, as Mr. Appelfeld said, know precisely what they intend to do.
The reader knows the menace from the beginning, and is bitterly aware that the Holocaust will swallow the assimilated as well as the outwardly religious. That historical knowledge lends the convulsive events their haunting quality.
Mr. Appelfeld’s indirection allowed for an intellectual engagement that won him a strong following that awaited his every novel — and he did not disappoint. He delivered books in Hebrew almost every couple of years, and at least 16 novels were translated into English from 1981 to 2011.
He was a major figure in a constellation of world-class Israeli writers that included Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua and David Grossman. Mr. Roth called hima “displaced writer of displaced fiction who has made of displacement and disorientation a subject uniquely his own.” The critic Eva Hoffman wrote, “In his call to break the concealed silence, he has courageously begun to illuminate regions of the soul usually darkened by secrecy and sorrow.”
Mr. Appelfeld, an elfin, round-face man with what Mr. Roth described as “the playfully thoughtful air of a benign wizard,” was born Feb. 16, 1932, in a town near Czernowitz, in what is now Ukraine but what was then Romania. The family was proudly middle class, speaking the treasured German of the area’s better-off inhabitants and forbidding the earthier Yiddish. They spent summers in spa towns like Badenheim.
“It took years to understand how much my parents had internalized all the evil they attributed to the Jew, and, through them, I did so, too,” he told Mr. Roth. “A hard kernel of revulsion was planted within each of us. The change took place in me when we were uprooted from our house and driven into the ghettos. Then I noticed that all the doors and windows of our non-Jewish neighbors were suddenly shut, and we walked alone in the empty streets.”
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Mr. Appelfeld and his father endured a forced march through mud to a labor camp in Ukraine. He escaped the camp and resourcefully spent the next three years as a shepherd working for various peasants and always concealing his Jewish identity, and then joined the Soviet Army as a cook’s helper. It was the kind of anxious vagabond existence that his child characters reprised. When the war was over, he returned to his hometown, which was now devoid of Jews, an experience he captured in “The Age of Wonders.”
After months in a refugee camp in Italy, he made his way in 1946 to what was then the British mandate of Palestine, worked on a kibbutz, studied Hebrew at night and fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
“Naïvely I believed that action would silence my memories, and I would flourish like the natives, free of the Jewish nightmare, but what could I do?” he told Mr. Roth. “The need, you might say the necessity, to be faithful to myself and to my childhood memories made me a distant, contemplative person. My contemplation brought me back to the region where I was born and where my parents’ home stood. That is my spiritual history, and it is from there that I spin the threads.”
Mr. Appelfeld portrayed Holocaust survivors in “The Immortal Bartfuss” (1988) as more than slightly lost as they mutely wander the Israeli landscape. “No one knew what to do with the lives that had been saved,” he wrote.
In the Roth interview, he said the Holocaust was “the type of enormous experience that reduces one to silence” because “the wound is too deep and bandages won’t help, not even a bandage such as the Jewish state.”
Moreover, like Theo, the protagonist of “For Every Sin” (1989), he sometimes found himself repelled by fellow survivors, believing that his engagement with them would produce only more misery.
The novel, though, suggests that survivors need to confront the past, an argument he advanced directly in a 2005 Op-Ed for The New York Times, in which he pointed out that “every barrier, every distance, inevitably separates you from the most meaningful experience of your life.”
In the 1950s, he learned that his father was alive — in Israel. Israeli newspapers reported that the reunion, after almost 20 years, was so emotional that Mr. Appelfeld was never able to write about it.
He completed his studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and despite a national don’t-look-back ethic, he began writing short stories rooted in his war experience, choosing Hebrew rather than his native German. His first novel, “The Skin and the Gown,” was published in 1971.
He also supported himself by teaching — eventually becoming a professor of literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Beersheba.
He is survived by his wife and three children.
Mr. Appelfeld won the prestigious Israel Prize for literature in 1983, and many other prizes followed. Yet when his books started making an impression in Israel, it was not among the Holocaust survivors, who he said “were afraid to be confronted with their past,” but among their children.
“Until now, those parents are still afraid to touch my books, and it’s very moving to see because there was such a deep gap between parents and children,” he told Richard F. Shepard in a 1992 interview for The Times. “Somehow my books have helped to cross the gap.”
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Aharon Appelfeld (Hebrew: אהרן אפלפלד; born Ervin Appelfeld[2]; February 16, 1932 – January 4, 2018) was an Israeli novelist and Holocaust survivor.
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[hide]Biography[edit]
Ervin Appelfeld was born in Jadova Commune, Storojineț County, in the Bukovina region of the Kingdom of Romania, now Ukraine. In 1941, when he was nine years old, the Romanian Army retook his hometown after a year of Soviet occupation and his mother was murdered.[3] Appelfeld was deported with his father to a Nazi concentration camp in Romanian-controlled Transnistria. He escaped and hid for three years before joining the Soviet army as a cook. After World War II, Appelfeld spent several months in a displaced persons camp in Italy before immigrating to Palestine in 1946, two years before Israel's independence. He was reunited with his father after finding his name on a Jewish Agency list. The father had been sent to a ma'abara (refugee camp) in Be'er Tuvia. The reunion was so emotional that Appelfeld has never been able to write about it.[4]
In Israel, Appelfeld made up for his lack of formal schooling and learned Hebrew, the language in which he began to write. His first literary efforts were short stories, but gradually he progressed to novels. He completed his studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He lived in Mevaseret Zion and taught literature at Ben Gurion University of the Negev and was often writing in Jerusalem's Ticho House (Beit Ticho).
In 2007, Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 was adapted for the stage and performed at the Gerard Behar Center in Jerusalem.
Choice of language[edit]
Appelfeld was one of Israel's foremost living Hebrew-language authors, despite the fact that he did not learn the language until he was a teenager. His mother tongue was German, but he was also proficient in Yiddish, Ukrainian, Romanian, Russian, English, and Italian.[3] With his subject matter revolving around the Holocaust and the sufferings of the Jews in Europe, he could not bring himself to write in German. He chose Hebrew as his literary vehicle for its succinctness and biblical imagery.
Appelfeld purchased his first Hebrew book at the age of 25: King of Flesh and Blood by Moshe Shamir. In an interview with the newspaper Haaretz, he said he agonized over it, because it was written in Mishnaic Hebrew and he had to look up every word in the dictionary.[5]
In an interview in the Boston Review, Appelfeld explained his choice of Hebrew: "I’m lucky that I’m writing in Hebrew. Hebrew is a very precise language, you have to be very precise–no over-saying. This is because of our Bible tradition. In the Bible tradition you have very small sentences, very concise and autonomic. Every sentence, in itself, has to have its own meaning."[6]
The Holocaust as a literary theme[edit]
Many Holocaust survivors have written an autobiographical account of their survival, but Appelfeld does not offer a realistic depiction of the events. He writes short stories that can be interpreted in a metaphoric way. Instead of his personal experience, he sometimes evokes the Holocaust without even relating to it directly. His style is clear and precise, but also very modernistic.[7]
Appelfeld resided in Israel but wrote little about life there. Most of his work focuses on Jewish life in Europe before, during and after World War II. As an orphan from a young age, the search for a mother figure is central to his work. During the Holocaust he was separated from his father, and only met him again 20 years later.
Motifs[edit]
Silence, muteness and stuttering are motifs that run through much of Appelfeld's work.[4] Disability becomes a source of strength and power. Philip Roth described Appelfeld as “a displaced writer of displaced fiction, who has made of displacement and disorientation a subject uniquely his own.” [8]
Awards and honors[edit]
- 1975 Brenner Prize for literature.[9]
- 1979 Bialik Prize for literature (jointly with Avot Yeshurun).[10]
- 1983 Israel Prize for literature.[11]
- 1989 National Jewish Book Award for fiction (Badenheim 1939 (ISBN 0-87923-799-6 ) and The Immortal Bartfuss (ISBN 0-8021-3358-4))
- 1997 Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[12]
- 2004 Prix Médicis (foreign works category) for his autobiography, The Story of a Life: A Memoir (2003, ISBN 0-8052-4178-7)
- 2005 Nelly Sachs Prize by the city of Dortmund.
- 2012 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for Blooms of Darkness: at the time, Appelfeld was the oldest ever recipient of the prize[13]
- 2016 Sydney Taylor Book Award for Adam & Thomas
Cultural references[edit]
Appelfeld's work was greatly admired by his friend, fellow Jewish novelist Philip Roth, who made the Israeli writer a character in his own novel Operation Shylock.
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