Aharon Appelfeld: Jewish Writer, Israeli Citizen

By Judy lash balint 

Most Israeli authors are renowned outside Israel more for their political views than for their literature. On the foreign lecture circuit, Amos Oz, David Grossman, and A.B Yehoshua discourse heavily on their leftist Israeli perspectives. Aharon Appelfeld, 72, on the other hand, rarely speaks about Israeli politics and considers himself a Jewish, not an Israeli writer.

Given his Central European background, it’s not altogether surprising. It’s that extraordinary personal history that Appelfeld wants readers to understand as they read his work. I caught up with the unassuming-looking Appelfeld after a lecture to a Jerusalem audience. He’s diminutive and bald with a remnant of white hair and thick, rimless glasses.

Appelfeld, the author of forty books, remembers his idyllic early childhood in Czernowitz, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  The only child of cultured, wealthy parents, Appelfeld reminisces about the beautiful buildings and parks of the largely Jewish university town. (Today it belongs to Ukraine.)

"But we never mingled with Jews, we never used the word 'Jew,'" he says of his deeply assimilated family.  All that changed in 1940 when Nazis occupied the region and along with their Romanian collaborators, rampaged from house to house murdering as many Jews as possible.  Appelfeld's mother and grandmother were included, and the eight-year-old and his father were driven from their spacious home into a crowded room in the ghetto.

The inevitable ghetto liquidation took place, and father and son joined one of the death marches toward a concentration camp.  Of the 2,000 Jews who started out, only 200 survived, says Appelfeld.

Separated from his father in the camp, the young Appelfeld decides he's going to die anyway, so he might as well escape.  Having just completed first grade, he manages to fend for himself over the next three years by attaching himself to various marginal characters living on the peripheries of peasant villages.  Horse thief and prostitute's errand boy are just two of the jobs he finds in his quest to survive.  A stint as kitchen boy with the Russian Army takes him to Yugoslavia and then Italy, where he meets members of the Jewish Brigade who encourage him to leave Europe behind and head for Palestine.  The people he encounters during his extraordinary childhood wanderings would later become the characters in his stories.

Appelfeld arrives in Palestine as a 13-year-old in 1946. Completely alone and lacking in formal education, the boy who has already observed and absorbed so many facets of human behavior in his young life ends up on kibbutz where he studies Hebrew and works for his keep. It's here, as a deeply disoriented immigrant, that Appelfeld finds his writer's voice.

At the end of every lonely day, he transcribes onto paper a few sentences in Hebrew about his feelings and questions about his existence. "The papers became my friends," he recalls. "They became my happiness every day--and still to this day," he chuckles.
Perhaps those experiences explain the spare prose of his writing. At the end of the war, Appelfeld says, he was mute.  He had avoided speaking with people for six years, because of the danger of his true identity being discovered. No matter, Appelfeld, says, "The unsaid in art is more important than that which is said.

In Palestine, "I came with my experiences and a small, meaningless, strange story--and here was this heroic country," he continues.  "I repressed my memories and tried to build a new personality." Ultimately, Appelfeld realizes that if you repress your memories "you live a superficial life, not a real life."

"You can't hide and be a writer," he says.

Appelfeld makes an intriguing observation about Israeli literature. The common Israeli experience, Appelfeld claims, is the immigrant experience.  Even today, one out of every two Israelis is not native born. It's that disorienting experience shared by most Israelis, says Appelfeld, resulting in "feelings [that] are not absorbed in a proper way." Yet, because of the difficulty of immigrants to express themselves in Hebrew, even for those in the country many years, literature is almost exclusively in the hands of sabras.  "But the real experience of Israel is the immigrant--he is the main hero," Appelfeld asserts.

Appelfeld considers himself fortunate that he writes in Hebrew. "It means you're directly bound to the common Jewish soul," he explains. "I write about all kinds of Jews--they're all dear to me--and about 100 years of Jewish loneliness," he says.

"I feel myself a religious person," he notes, "but I'm not speaking of God as a central figure." His observance of Jewish tradition is based on the idea that what was good enough for so many generations of Jews "is good enough for me." The only time he feels pious is when he writes about pious people.

In a final comment about the writing process, Appelfeld, who may be seen every day writing longhand in a Jerusalem cafe, explains that "writing has nothing to do with ideas.  It's the senses that lead to something. " Just as music and art rely completely on hearing and sight, literature "begins and ends with the senses."

He describes his one return visit to Czernovitz, three years ago. The town is dilapidated and neglected; it's Central European identity almost obliterated. "What can you learn from it--nothing," says Appelfeld. "We learn from things inside, not from the external. I couldn’t find my parents there, but my longing for them, that's important."