A keen interest in Holocaust memoirs feels a bit ghoulish, like historical rubber-necking. I’ve read quite a few, from classics like If This is a Man by Primo Levi and Night by Elie Wiesel, to slightly obscure ones like All but My Life by Gerda Weissmann Klein, The Defiant by Shalom Yoran, and The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski. And though I’m affected by the horrors these books lay bare, no other genre of literature offers purer exemplification of mankind’s resilience. These are books told by survivors who are innate writers, who would have written books even if they hadn’t lived through the Holocaust.
Appelfeld grew up in Romania. The first few chapters he reminisces about vacations to his Grandparent’s village in the Carpathian mountains. He dwells on detail: The food, the tiny synagogue, and the touch and sight of his mother. This is all he has left of his family. By the time he is eight, his parents are dead and he has escaped from a concentration camp. For the next three years, he hid in the woods of the Ukraine, occasionally working for peasants, but mostly on his own – hiding, walking, foraging. In 1946, he sailed to Isreal and began keeping a diary, a mosaic of words in German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and even Ruthenian. I was not able to connect words into sentences, and the words were the suppressed cries of a fourteen-year-old youth who’d lost all the languages he had spoken and was now left without a language. (The book was translated from Hebrew.)
Appelfeld studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His unstructured childhood was still very much inside of him. Throughout my university years I wrote poems, but these were more like the howls of a wounded animal… Mother, Mother, Father, Father: Where are you? It wasn’t until Appelfeld gained a sense of belonging in his community – playing chess, attending social clubs, drinking coffee with other writers- that he could control his burning desire to dwell on the past, and begin to write with perspective.
In between narratives about his experiences, Appelfeld muses quite a bit about writing and language, and what it means for a survivor to write about these things. After he wrote his first book Smoke in 1962, I was labeled a “Holocaust writer.” There is nothing more annoying. A writer, if he’s a writer, writes from within himself and mainly about himself… Theme, subject matter- all these are by-products of his writing, not his essence… Only the right words can construct a literary text, not subject matter.
Appelfeld’s prose is powerful and spare, philosophical and elegant. I would recommend this book even to people who shy away from Holocaust memoirs, because to Appelfeld, the past may have constructed who he is, but that’s not only who he is. Above all, he is a writer.
