By Aharon Appelfeld (1932-2018), this was published in Hebrew in 1999. The English translation I read, by Aloma Halter, came out in the United States in 2004, but wasn't published in Britain until 2024.

Given I'm supposed to be logging this stuff these days, it's embarrassing that I haven't the slightest recollection how it came onto my radar... But it does fit very well into two themes I enjoy pursuing: What it means to remember; and authors who write in languages other than their mother tongue.

Appelfeld warns us in the Preface that a) this will not be a blow-by-blow account of his life; and b) memory is a tricksy thing -- "elusive and selective".

And it's certainly not as though his is an easy life to remember. He was born to Jewish parents in Bukovina (then part of Romania, now part of Ukraine). It wasn't an entirely rosy childhood, as he was bullied at school, but he does offer us idyllic memories of staying with his grandparents (farmers in the Carpathians). After that, though, it's tragedy upon tragedy. He hears (though does not see) the shot that killed his mother; is subjected to life in the ghetto (where "all the social frameworks had collapsed"), and then to a forced march, with his father and others, to a detention camp; and is then separated from his father, but manages to escape the camp in 1941.

From this point he intermittently lives with people who provide shelter in return for work, but often he's alone in the forest, fending for himself, and fearful of everyone. Eventually, he makes it to the Italian coast, then the Yugloslav coast. It's ironic that he's still not safe, even when the war was over: The Displaced Persons' camps are lawless, "like battlefields", and children are routinely exploited in a variety of ways.

Finally, he makes it to Haifa, and has to start to adjust to an entirely different language and reality.



It is extraordinary what this child, and others like him, had to deal with, and then digest. Talk about post-traumatic stress disorder... When he arrived in Israel, he was still only 14... At one point, the son of an acquaintance who had also lived ferally for a while comments: "'Two children in the forest, it's unbelievable'... And so it was, unbelievable. Whenever you speak about those days, you are gripped by a sense of how UNBELIEVABLE it all is. You relate it, but you don't believe that this thing actually happened to you."

He lingers on little of this, however, and it's hard to pinpoint whether this reticence is due to artistic sensibility or psychological incapacity. As he says: "Sometimes things I'd seen during the war would slip throught from the walled-in basements of memory, demanding the right to exist. But they did not have the power to bring down the pillars of oblivion and the will to live. And life itself said then: Forget! Be absorbed! The kibbutzim and the various youth villages were veritable greenhouses for cultivating oblivion."

Although the narrative is broadly chronological, there's lots of back and forth as various memories present themselves. Some episodes are presented in detail, as though a spotlight has illuminated them. For other tracts of time, however, there's no information. (As Brendan Wolfe puts it, "His elliptical style... can be rather like a narrative form of Swiss cheese.")

Even the vilest stories are told with a curious restraint. For example: "On the deportation march, for the entire length of the long route through the heart of the Ukrainian steppes, Uncle Felix helped to bury people so that they wouldn't become carrion for birds of prey. He himself died of typhus in a barn, and Father, who wanted to bury him, couldn't find a spade. We laid him upon a pile of hay."

The story of the blind children who sing on their way to the train that will take them to their death is also told simply, its inherent emotional import left to make its own mark: "At the railway station, they still managed to sing their anthem in its entirety before being pushed into the cattle cars."

Although he admits that his inborn suspicion of people was vastly heightened by all that befell him, he takes pains to tell us about the good people he meets along the way. War makes people behave unpredictably. Formerly decent people turn bad; others, in turn, become devoted to improving the lot of their fellow-humans.


The Jewish Quarter, Budapest, 2023

***

What he has to say about memory is very interesting. First, its physicality:

"More than fifty years have passed since the end of the war. I have forgotten much, even things that were very close to me... and yet I can still sense those days in every part of my body... Memory, it seems, has deep roots in the body."

The first person to shelter him is an alcoholic and mentally disturbed sex worker. When her hut is practically destroyed in a storm, and she starts to threaten and pursue him, he runs for his life: "I got to my feet and ran... More than fifty years have passed, and that fear is still within my legs."

And, more mundanely: "I say 'I don't remember', and that's the whole truth. The strongest imprints those years have left on me are intense physical ones. The hunger for bread. To this very day I can wake up in the middle of the night ravenously hungry. Dreams of hunger and thirst haunt me almost on a weekly basis. I eat as only people who have known hunger eat, with a strangely ravenous appetite."

Second, he points out the elusiveness of memory:

"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. Sometimes I felt that it wasn't I who was in the war, but someone else, someone very close to me, and that he was going to tell me what exactly occurred, for I don't remember what happened or how it happened...

"During the course of the war, I was in hundreds of places -- in railway stations, in remote villages, on the banks of rivers. All these places had names, but there's not one that I can remember."

And third, he points out the cruelty of forcing another person to remember, just to gratify your curiosity. He tells us about Helga, a girl on the boat to Haifa, whose right leg had been amputated:

"'Helga, my dear, don't you remember anything?' A tall woman knelt down before her, astonishing everyone.
"Helga smiled. 'I remember the rain,' she said...
"'And what happened after the rain?'
"'I don't remember,' said Helga in a clear voice...
"Then, for some reason, people expected the girl to tell her story. Helga hung her head and uttered not a sound. The light in her face seemed to fade..."

This review gets it right, I think: "This is a book of memory, more than of memories, of how the mind -- this mind, subject to so many awful experiences -- is affected and how it preserves and recollects. The scenes are vital, and powerful in their relatively simple presentation, but it's the connexions, the memory-tapestry that defines identity, that is of greatest interest."

We have to read later interviews with Appelfeld to fill in some more of the detail. Here, for example, we learn that his mother and grandmother were shot by Romanian and German forces in the summer of 1941; and he managed to escape from the camp before they installed electric fences. And here, we're told that his father did not, as he had originally thought, die in the Transnistria camp. When the Russians liberated it, they took him to Russia. It wasn't until the 1950s that Appelfeld met him again in Israel.



***

I was fascinated by Appelfeld's musings on language.

First he deals with its counterpart, silence: "War is a hothouse for listening and for keeping silent. The hunger for bread, the thirst for water, the fear of death -- all these make words superfluous... It was only after the war that words reappeared... Words are powerless when confronted by catastrophe; they're pitiable, wretched, and easily distorted. Even ancient prayers are powerless in the face of disaster."

When he arrives in Israel, in 1946, he feels he has no language at all. To survive, he has spoken as little as possible. Speech no longer comes naturally. Additionally, his polyglot heritage is dwindling. At home he had spoken German with his parents, Yiddish with his grandmother, Ukrainian with the maid he spent time with as a child, and also Romanian, as Bukovin had been annexed to Romania after WWI. But these languages have started to dissolve within him. He starts to learn Hebrew on the ship, but he feels it's a tongue that's been forced on him: "The effort to preserve my mother tongue amid surroundings that imposed another language upon me proved futile... My mother and her language were one and the same. Now, as that language faded within me, it was as if my mother were dying a second time."

And he arrives in an environment that is not interested in its citizens' memories and languages... Onwards and upwards is the slogan. Put away the past; all that matters for the "New Jews" is the future.

Interestingly, Appelfeld gains his connection to Hebrew via Yiddish: "From [teacher Dov] Sadan I learned something that was not much talked about in those days: that most Hebrew writers were bilingual, that they wrote simultaneously in the two languages. This was a sensational discovery for me. It meant that the 'here' and the 'there' were not cut off from each other, as the slogans proclaimed... Their Hebrew was connected to places with which I was familiar, to landscapes I remembered, and to forgotten melodies that came to me from my grandparents' prayers. The Hebrew of my youth-village days and of the army had been a language unto itself, unconnected to my previous language or life experience."

Definitely not easy... As he says: "The attitude at that time regarding language was overwhelmingly functional: 'Build up your vocabulary and you've got a language!' This approach tried to uproot you from your world and implant you in a world you could barely grasp. One must admit that, on the whole, it succeeded, but, alas, at what price -- a memory that had been eradicated and a soul that had been reduced to superficiality."

And yet, despite such unpropitious circumstances, he went on to be an award-winning author in Hebrew... He feels very free in Hebrew, he says, perhaps because it's not his first language. This feeling of freedom is often expressed by authors writing in a second language (eg, Jhumpa Lahiri and Nino Haratischwili).



***

During the Yom Kippur War, Appelfeld serves as a lecturer in the Education Corps. Some of the Israeli soldiers tell him they resent their survivor parents' reticence about the past (shades of Khue Pham's Wherever You May Be...): "They resented the fact that their parents had kept their previous lives hidden from them for years, cutting them off from their grandparents and from the language of their grandparents, creating an artificial world around them, as if nothing had happened. I tried to defend myself and their parents. Holocaust survivors had faced excruciating choices, the main one being whether to continue living with the memory of the Holocaust or to start a new life... They had wanted to spare their children the memory of suffering and the shame; they wanted to raise them to become free men and women, without that dismal legacy."

And, as we've seen, the prevailing feeling in Israel at the time was that people should put the past behind them...

The final section talks about the New Life Club, which was established in 1950 by survivors from Galicia and Bukovina, and became a kind of home for Appelfeld: "Sometimes it seems to me that all my writing derives not from my home and not from the war, but from the years of coffee and cigarettes at the club." But here, too, members are divided over how we should recall and recount the Holocaust.

A rich and thought-provoking book, then, by an author who would definitely merit a revisit.