Reference Type: Book
Author: Appelfeld, Aharon
Year: 2004
Title: The Story of a Life
City: New York
Publisher: Schocken Books
Number of Pages: 198
Language: English
Keywords: Jewish minority, memoir, Antonescu regime, holocaust, holocaust survivors, persecutions, emigration, refugees, antisemitism, recollection
Abstract: (En1) In spare, haunting, almost hallucinogenic prose, the internationally acclaimed, award-winning novelist shares with us-for the first time-the story of his own extraordinary survival and rebirth.
Aharon Appelfeld's childhood ended when he was seven years old. The Nazis occupied Czernowitz in 1941, penned the Jews into a ghetto, and, a few months later, sent whoever had not been shot or starved to death on a forced march across the Ukraine to a labor camp. As men, women, and children fall away around them, Aharon and his father (his mother was killed in the early days of the occupation) miraculously survive, and Aharon, even more miraculously, escapes from the camp shortly after he arrives there.
The next few years of Aharon's life are both harrowing and heartrending: he hides, alone, in the Ukrainian forests from peasants who are only too happy to turn Jewish children over to the Nazis; he has the presence of mind to pass himself off as an orphaned gentile when he emerges from the forest to seek work; and, at war's end, he joins the stream of refugees as they cross Europe on their way to displaced persons' camps that have been set up for the survivors. He observes the full range of personalities in the camps-exploitation exists side by side with compassion-until he manages to get on a ship bound for Palestine. Once there, Aharon attempts to build a new life while struggling to retain the barely remembered fragments of his old life (everyone urges him simply to forget what he had experienced), and he takes his first, tentative steps as a writer. As he begins to receive national attention, Aharon realizes his life's calling: to bear witness to the unfathomable. In this unforgettable work of memory, Aharon Appelfeld offers personal glimpses into the experiences that resonate throughout his fiction.

(En2) Like a series of luminous paintings discovered in the darkness of a vaulted church after the bombs have fallen, this memoir evokes a wonder which is on the other side of language. Its scenes need to be contemplated, tasted, savoured. There is so little "aboutness" about it, so little of the explanation with which others might surround these shards of memory distilled from terror.
Consider, for example, these two scenes. In one, it is spring. A young Ruthenian girl carries a circular wicker basket on her head. The strawberries are tiny and red and alive with the scent of the nearby forest. The mother sprinkles sugar on the berries, adds cream. The family eats and eats, but still there are berries. Later, the child - this is one of Aharon Appelfeld's first memories - sees how the glorious berries have turned greyish and shrivelled up. But the basket remains, poised in his memory on the head of the girl. In the second, the children in the Institution for the Blind sing. They sing folk-songs, Schubert, Verdi. They sing all the way to the deportation trains. After being clubbed by the guards, they sing again before being pushed into the cattle cars.
Appelfeld was eight when the second world war broke out. A native of Czernowitz, one of those central European border-towns whose surrounding nation has changed with each marauding army, he was born in what is now Moldova, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire where the German language and a secular "modern" existence were an aspiration for educated Jews. His mother was murdered in the Nazis' first thrust eastward.
His father and the young Appelfeld were deported to a labour camp from which the boy managed to escape to scrape some kind of existence in the thick forests of Ukraine. Occasionally there was work - for a longish time as a household drudge to a drunken prostitute. Towards the end of the war, Appelfeld laboured in Russian army field kitchens; he made his way through Italy and Yugoslavia, eventually to find passage in 1946 to Palestine.
After years of feral silence, the teenage Appelfeld was all but mute. The land of asylum was hardly hospitable: it wanted to know as little as possible of the experience of the displaced European refugees who arrived, their psychic scars still raw. For them, too, it was easier to push all that dark, bitter matter into oblivion. Survival depended on a kind of forgetting. It is a psychological tactic I know well from my parents' experience.
"Of the war years I remember little, as if they were not six consecutive years. It's true that sometimes images surface from the heavy mist: a dark figure, a hand that had been charred, a shoe of which nothing was left but shreds. These pictures, sometimes as fierce as the blast from a furnace, fade away quickly ... But the palms of one's hands, the soles of one's feet, one's back, and one's knees remember more than memory."
Where Appelfeld's book is unlike any others that have come from this heinous chapter in our history is that when the blast from the furnace comes, it burns into the consciousness of the reader, so spare, so pared away to an oracular simplicity are his scenes and images. He is not interested in the discursive, the journalistic, even the historic narrative. The Nazis are barely present. Like the child he was, he gives us violence, brutality, kindness and, above all, wonder - a sense of awe that existence is so rich in its particularities, so manifold in its horrors as well as its goodness.
The disquiet of this double emotion is already there in his brilliant early fiction, Badenheim 1939, which Penguin has just reissued as a modern classic. In that fable-like novel, Appelfeld takes us to a beautiful spa town, where only gradually do we realise that the population is Jewish and that the Sanitation Inspectors who have arrived - along with the spring influx of people, an overflow of pastries and good weather - are interested in only one particular form of cleansing. Put like this, the book might sound like a satire on wilful blindness, but Badenheim is more than that, since the "home" from which the spa-visitors are about to be exiled when the trains arrive is already lost in the mists of an abandoned Jewishness.
Appelfeld's memoir also contains a dialogue with the mixed legacies - religious, cultural, historical - that Jewishness contains, especially in its relationship to Israel. The later story of the difficult adaptation Israel necessitated and his literary apprenticeship into a language unrelated to the several the past had given him is both poignant and provocative. Appelfeld's memoir is unique, but its very distinctiveness offers up truths about children at war everywhere.
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