Aharon Appelfeld
Holocaust survivor, writer, novelist and teacher
Aharon Appelfeld, novelist. Born: 16 February, 1932, Bukovina. Died: 4 January, 2018 in Petah Tikva, Israel, aged 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.
As someone whose mother was killed at the beginning of the Second World War, and who escaped a labour camp to hide among hostile peasants, 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.
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,” 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.”
He was a major figure in a constellation of world-class Israeli writers that included Amos Oz, A B Yehoshua and David Grossman. Roth called him a “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.”
Appelfeld, an elfin, roundface man with what Roth described as “the playfully thoughtful air of a benign wizard,” was born on 16 February, 1932, in a town near Czernowitz, in what is now Ukraine but 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 internalised all the evil they attributed to the Jew, and, through them, I did so too,” he told 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 neighbours were suddenly shut, and we walked alone in the empty streets.”
He and his father endured a forced march through thick mud to a labour camp in Ukraine. He escaped the camp and spent the next three years working as a shepherd for various peasants, always concealing his Jewish identity, then joining the Soviet Army as a cook’s helper. It was the kind of anxious vagabond existence 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 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.”
“No one knew what to do with the lives that had been saved,” Appelfeld wrote. In the Roth interview, he said of the Holocaust that it 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”.
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 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 married and had children, and struck visitors as a happy man, not overtly damaged by the war.
He is survived by his wife and three children.