THENEWYORKER,MARCH9, 2020 79
In an Israeli context, Appelfeld ’s obsession with Europe’s past was almost defiance.
BOOKS
LEGENDS OF HOME
The career of Aharon Appelfeld.
BYADAM KIRSCH
ILLUSTRATION BY JULES JULIEN
I
n 2018, Israel lost its two greatest
novelists, Amos Oz and Aharon Ap-
pelfeld. Both were older than the coun-
try itself and had witnessed its entire
dramatic history, but the ways they
dealt with that history could not have
been more different. Oz, born in Jeru-
salem in 1939, threw himself into the
development of the young Jewish state:
he wrote about the kibbutz where he
lived and the psychology of the first
Israeli Sabra generation, and assumed
an active role in politics as a founder
of the Peace Now movement. If you
wanted to understand Israeli society
in its first half century, Oz’s novels
would be the natural place to start.
Reading Appelfeld, by contrast, tells
you basically nothing about the coun-
try in which he lived—at least, not di-
rectly. Though he wrote in Hebrew,
taught at an Israeli university, and re-
ceived Israel’s highest literary honors,
his imagination remained fixed in the
land of his early childhood, which was
Eastern Europe. Appelfeld wrote more
than forty books—including “To the
Edge of Sorrow,” which appeared in
Hebrew in 2012 and is now out in a
posthumous English translation by
Stuart Schoffman (Schocken)—and
almost all of them are set in the for-
mer Austro-Hungarian Empire. They
are often about people like his par-
ents: assimilated, German-speaking,
middle-class Jews who live in provin-
cial cities, vacation at country resorts
or in spa towns, and worship litera-
ture and music instead of the God of
their ancestors.
And so they are all, inevitably, about
the Holocaust, which annihilated those
Jews and their civilization when Ap-
pelfeld was a young boy. He was born
in 1932 in a village near Czernowitz—a
city that was then in Romania and now
belongs to Ukraine—and his child-
hood came to a terrifying end in 1941,
when the fascist Romanian govern-
ment deported the region’s Jews to
labor camps. The soldiers who came
to Appelfeld’s house shot his mother
in the yard as he listened, then sent
him and his father to a camp, where
they were separated. Appelfeld escaped,
hid in the forest, and spent the next
few years roaming the countryside, ei-
ther sleeping outdoors or lodging in
Ukrainian homes, until he managed
to take refuge with the approaching
Red Army.
By the time he arrived in Palestine,
in 1946, two years before the founding
of Israel, Appelfeld had been utterly
stripped of his identity. He had lost
family, home, and country, as well as
years of education and experience.
“World War II went on for six straight
years, but sometimes it seems to me
that it lasted only one long night, from
which I awoke a completely different
person,” he wrote in his 1999 memoir,
“The Story of a Life.”
The uniquely strange atmosphere
of Appelfeld’s fiction comes from the
fact that, because he could not remem-
ber his own past, he was forced to imag-
ine it. “The Story of a Life,” in which
Appelfeld tries to write about his ex-
periences in a nonfictional register, is
a valuable but meagre and fragmen-
tary book. In his novels, conversely,
Appelfeld writes with entranced cer-
tainty about experiences that could
never have been his and worlds that
don’t quite resemble the real one.
In this way, Appelfeld resembles
Kafka, whose influence he discussed
in a 1988 interview with Philip Roth:
“He spoke to me not only in my
mother tongue but also in another
language which I knew intimately, the
language of the absurd.” Absurd, in
