“God is in the sky,” young Aharon Appelfeld’s grandfather told him, “and there is nothing to fear.” Appelfeld was born into a middle-class Jewish family in what is now Ukraine in 1932, but by 1938 “the ground was burning under our feet” and he and his family were subsequently deported to a Nazi labor camp. He managed to escape in 1942 at the age of 10; he never saw his family again and died in Israel in 2018.
These brief facts inform much of Appelfeld’s writing. He found it “frustrating” to be labeled a “Holocaust writer,” a description supported by many of his books, including three reissued this week by Penguin Modern Classics. But his approaches to this eternal subject are always distant, never direct.
His most famous novel Badenheim 1939 (1980, translated by Dalya Bilu) is a terrifyingly effective parable of the crushing impact of the Holocaust on wartime Europe, suggesting that hope can be worse than despair. Every line is heavy with bitter irony, starting with the first: “Spring has returned to Badenheim.” For the Jewish population of this Austrian resort, this means preparing for “the invasion of holidaymakers” – and it seems natural that the cleaning department would want to get involved to make sure everything is in order.
But soon the Jews will have to register with the department to help resettle them. “We’ll be going to Poland soon,” a man tells his children. “Just think about it – Poland.” Throughout the brief descriptions of the town’s characters – each scene ends with a nail being hammered in – the terror creeps in. “It seems that a time from another place, from another time, has invaded the town and is quietly establishing itself.”
There is a well-judged unrest Badenheim 1939. Irony may seem an odd register to write about the Holocaust, but if anyone is qualified to judge, it is Appelfeld. He does not accuse the Jews of willful blindness to what was coming; what was coming was far beyond human understanding. “Kill your ordinary common sense, and perhaps you will begin to understand,” one character says. It reminded me of Primo Levi’s early experience in a concentration camp, when he grabbed an icicle that a guard had broken to quench his thirst. When Levi asked him why, the guard replied:There is no heat here.” There is no reason here.
Appelfeld’s time in the labour camp was ‘a pulsating darkness that will always remain locked inside me’
Appelfeld’s 1989 novel Catherine (Translated by Jeffrey M Green) even stranger Badenheim 1939but it is no less satisfying in the end. It opens in a simple, fairy-tale style – “My name is Katerina and I will soon be 80” – as she tells the story of her life as a Ruthenian (east Slav) growing up in the 1880s. She is taught to be suspicious of Jews – “There is nothing easier than hating Jews” – but when she becomes pregnant and is adopted by a Jewish family, she questions her prejudices. Yet anti-Semitism, we know, does not lie quiet.
Appelfeld’s measured style is perfectly suited to evasive answers. Badenheimlike a novel Catherine – full of horror and violence – initially works less well. Yet as Katerina’s story moves into the 20th century and becomes a chilling allegory, it achieves a satisfying power that transcends stylistic weakness.
There’s a lot to learn about Appelfeld’s approach to writing in his memoirs The Story of a Life (1999, translated by Aloma Halter). At the outset, he makes a distinction between memory and imagination for a writer, which, when handled correctly, are not in tension with each other but in synthesis.
Appelfeld’s early childhood was one of opulence – represented by overflowing bowls of strawberries and Jews who “crammed their rooms with expensive and cumbersome furniture” – and was abruptly cut short. Yet we get no direct insight into Appelfeld’s time in the labour camp. He speaks of “a pulsating darkness that will always remain locked inside me”. What happened there was “engraved in my body, not in my memory”: a physical reaction, not a conscious intellectual response.
Relating to: One man’s path to freedom
After escaping the camp, he lived a peripatetic life before moving to Israel after the war, where he eventually “found a fertile land of oblivion.” For many Jews, the country represented “the extinction of memory, a complete personal transformation, and a complete identification with this narrow strip of land.” This tells us a lot, and explains Appelfeld’s disdain for the “idealization” he found in Israeli literature; he learned Hebrew there only in protest. (His family spoke German and Yiddish.)
Appelfeld’s honesty and openness are a model for other writers to follow. Perhaps it was partly the loss of his native language that locked those years in Appelfeld’s memory. But Hebrew gave him a way to write these books—painfully beautiful books—and for that we can be grateful.
• Badenheim 1939, Catherine And The Story of a Life Published by Penguin Modern Classics (all £9.99). Support Protector And Observer Order your copies from guardianbookshop.com for £9.29 each. Delivery charges may apply