80 THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020
the philosophical sense of inescapable
yet pointless, perfectly describes the
journey that the narrator undertakes
in Appelfeld’s book “The Iron Tracks”
(1991). Set in the years after the Sec-
ond World War, it is the story of Erwin
Siegelbaum, a Holocaust survivor who
spends his entire life on railroad trips,
making an identical circuit of Austria’s
train stations every year.
“The trains make me free. With-
out them, what would I be in this
world? An insect, a mindless clerk,”
Siegelbaum muses, evoking Gregor
Samsa, who turned into an insect in
Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” His
perpetual journey allows Erwin—
which was Appelfeld’s first name, be-
fore he changed it to the Hebrew
Aharon—to remain homeless in the
country that is his only home. It is a
parable of the Jews’ relationship to Eu-
rope after the Holocaust, able neither
to live in the Old Country nor to leave
it behind. “I have no stake here,” an-
other Jewish traveller, whom Erwin
encounters on a train, says. “I have
nothing. Still, it’s hard for me to leave
that nothing.”
F
or an Israeli novelist like Appel-
feld, an imaginative obsession with
Europe and the past was a kind of
defiance. From the beginning, one of
the key principles of Zionism was “ne-
gation of the Diaspora”: in their home-
land, Jews were supposed to turn their
backs on centuries of oppression. This
idea was all the more urgent for the
refugees who arrived in Israel after
the Holocaust, and were seen as ter-
rible reminders of the price of Jewish
powerlessness. In “The Story of a Life,”
Appelfeld recalls that, as a new arrival
in Palestine, he was indoctrinated with
the need to be totally reborn: his fu-
ture was to require “the extinction of
memory, a complete personal trans-
formation and a total identification
with this narrow strip of land.”
In “Badenheim 1939,” published in
1975, and perhaps his best-known book,
Appelfeld wrote as lethal an indict-
ment of the self-delusions of prewar
European Jewry as any Zionist could
want. A hideous idyll, the story takes
place in an Austrian spa town, whose
Jewish residents spend the last sum-
mer before the war listening to cham-
ber music, eating pastries, and engag-
ing in intrigues, while the government’s
Sanitation Department issues ever
more ominous proclamations about
their impending deportation “to Po-
land.” On the book’s last page, the
town’s inhabitants gather at the train
station, and one of them remarks, “If
the coaches are so dirty it must mean
that we have not far to go.” The line
is devastating because of the gap be-
tween what the Jews of 1939 knew and
what the reader after 1945 knows—a
gap that can never be closed, no mat-
ter how many times Appelfeld writes
about it.
In Hebrew, the term for moving
to Israel is aliya, which literally means
“ascent,” while leaving the country is
yerida, “descent”—concepts that carry
an unmistakable moral valence. (In
Amos Oz’s first novel, “Elsewhere,
Perhaps,” from 1966, the Dosto-
yevskian villain tries to seduce a kib-
butz girl into leaving Israel and going
back to Europe—the ultimate be-
trayal.) Those directional terms are
central to the parable that Appelfeld
constructs in “To the Edge of Sor-
row”—the story of a group of Jews
who go up a mountain in order to
found a new kind of society, only to
have to come back down in the end,
partly victorious and partly defeated.
Many of Appelfeld’s novels are con-
cerned with such miniature societies.
“Badenheim 1939” has its spa town,
and “The Iron Tracks” its cast of itin-
erants; “The Retreat,” from 1982, is
about an old-age home of sorts in
twentieth-century Austria where a
group of Jews go to unlearn their bad
(i.e., identifiably Jewish) habits. Such
settings serve Appelfeld as a fictional
petri dish where certain human po-
tentialities can be developed to an ex-
treme, while excusing the novelist from
the sometimes dreary obligations of
social realism.
I
n “To the Edge of Sorrow,” the so-
ciety in question is a band of Jew-
ish partisans during the Second World
War. Numbering fewer than fifty, they
hide in the Ukrainian countryside,
raiding farms for supplies and hop-
ing to hold out until the arrival of the
Red Army. This sounds like the prem-
ise of a wartime adventure story, but,
although we do hear about shoot-outs
and sabotage missions, Appelfeld’s
narrative style is inherently unsus-
penseful. His novels are not about
waiting for what will happen next but
about immersion in a timeless pres-
ent, a bubble world that is all the more
enthralling because you know it is
about to pop. This attitude toward
time is surely a reflection of Appel-
feld’s own experience of the abrupt
end of childhood, and maybe also of
his period in the forests, which was
so different from the life he had known
that it hardly seemed to be happen-
ing in the real world.
The same is true of the collective
life of the partisan band, whose expe-
riences are narrated by one of its mem-
bers, the seventeen-year-old Edmund.
The leader is Kamil, a tough fighter
who trains the young recruits and leads
them on missions to blow up the Ger-
mans’ railroad tracks. But we soon
learn that Kamil is also a spiritual
seeker, whose goal is not just the pres-
ervation of Jewish lives but the re-
newal of Jewish life: “Our war is not
merely to stay alive. If we do not come
out of these forests as complete Jews,
we will not have learned a thing.”
When Kamil leads the partisans to
the summit of the mountain, he is not
just securing a safe hideout for the
coming winter. He is also Moses on
Sinai, hoping to receive a new law
that will make a broken people whole.
He insists on setting aside time for
studying religious books that the par-
tisans have rescued from abandoned
Jewish houses, even though his own
acquaintance with Jewish texts is poi-
gnantly limited to the works of Mar-
tin Buber, a modern popularizer.
But most of the partisans, like most
Jews in Appelfeld’s fiction, are secu-
lar people with no real connection to
Judaism, and they see Kamil’s preach-
ing as embarrassingly retrograde. Karl,
the symbolically named communist,
even relates how he used to go around
bullying rabbis and making them
promise to stop teaching Judaism. Only
Grandma Tsirl, a very old woman, still
possesses some of the simple faith of
their ancestors. “Sometimes Grandma
Tsirl seems like a priestess whose tribe
has been lost and who tries to pass on
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