The Fields and the Forests

I was ten years old and I lived in the forest.

Aharon Appelfeld is wandering in the fields and forests. He is ten years old; he has escaped from a concentration camp. His heard his mother die, but he still dreams of her with love. Perhaps his father is dead, but he dreams his parents will save him. He dreams, too, of God – the same God who sat between the lions on the Holy Ark he saw with his grandparents.

Surely God will save him. Surely his parents will return for him.

The child passes through the fields and the forests. Sometimes he stays with peasants. He does not tell them he is a Jew. He works for them, but then he leaves for the fields and the forests.

Wandering he is like a wary animal. When he comes close to a house, he places his ear to the ground. He listens. He will hear whether they are good or they are wicked. When he meets human beings, he does not listen to what they say, but looks at their hands and their faces.

He is a wary animal. An animal like the others in the fields and the forests.

Over time I learned that objects and animals are true friends. In the forest I was surrounded by trees, bushes, birds, and small animals. I was not afraid of them. I was sure that they would do nothing harmful to me.

Sometimes it seemed to me that what saved me were the animals I encountered along the way, not the human beings. The hours I spent with puppies, cats, and sheep were the best of the war years. I would blend in with them until I was part of them, until forgetfulness came, until I fell asleep alongside them. I would sleep as deeply and as tranquilly as I had in my parents’ bed.

Propitious forgetfulness, propitious silence.

There are other kinds of silence. ‘ Starvation reverts us to our instincts, to a kind of language that precedes speech’. Hunger, says Appelfeld, has no need of speech.

The hunger for bread, the thirst for water, the fear of death – all these make words superfluous. There’s really no need for them. In the ghetto and in the camp, only people who had lost their minds talked, explained, or tried to persuade. Those who were sane didn’t speak.

Most are silent. The wicked are silent – ‘evil prefers concealment and darkness’; the good are silent – ‘generosity doesn’t like to trumpet its own deeds’. In the face of terrible catastrophe, events that defy explanation, words seem superfluous.

Words are powerless when confronted by catastrophe; they’re pitiable, wretched, and easily distorted. Even ancient prayers are powerlesss in the face of the disaster.

Later there will be time for speech, but not now.

Israel, the late 1940s. Rivers of words had started to flow. Testimonies.

The silence is gone. Everyone is writing and talking.

The really huge catastrophes are the ones that we tend to surround with words so as to protect ourselves from them. The first words that I wrote were a kind of desperate cry to find the silence that had enfolded me during the war. A sixth sense told me that my soul was enveloped in this same silence, and that if I managed to revive it perhaps the right words would come.

How will he find this not writing in writing? How will he be able to find a way to write of silence? He lacks the capacity for testimony; he has forgotten much of what happened:

I could not remember the names of people or places – only gloom, rustlings, and movements.

This gloom, these rustlings and movements do not assemble themselves into discreet memories.

Only much later did I understand that this raw material is the very marrow of literature.

Then literature bears upon what is not yet hardened into personal memory. It bears upon what is forgotten, and what forgets itself in you, leaving only the traces of gloom, of rustlings and movements.

This is what is lost in the Israel in which Appelfeld is trying to write. He is surrounded by people who speal in elevated words and slogans. Appelfeld, marked out as an observer of life before the Nazis came, prefers small, quiet words that respond to what is small and quiet in scents and sounds.

The socialist newspapers are full of social realism. Appelfeld, instead, reads Leib Roichman, a Yiddish writer with whom he becomes close friends. They read Hasidic classics together, written in a Hebrew different to that spoken in the Aliyat Hano’ar Youth Movement of modern Israel.

"Work" meant worshipping God, "providence" meant Divine Providence, "security" was not the defence of small villages but the security of faith in God.

He reads Dov Sadan, who would have Hebrew and Yiddish coexist. For Sadan, Jewish life has passed through a rupture; the fragments of Jewish life that had splintered off must be joined together once more. A new Jewish life had to be created from Hasidism, its Lithuanian opponents, the Jewish Enlightenment and the Jewish rebirth in Israel.

Instead of the ideologues who surround him, demanding that Jews give up what they call their Diaspora mentality, their bourgeois outlook and their egoism, Sadan guides Appelfeld to heed the legacy he bears within him. It is from this legacy he will live and write, remembering his life before the Nazis, and knowing how that life flowed from a deeper current of Jewish life, epitomised by his Yiddish speaking grandparents.

The first words that I wrote were a kind of desperate cry to find the silence that had enfolded me during the war.

Appelfeld keeps a diary; he writes of his longing for silence, for the fields and the forests. Then, he was silent and alert. Then he was close to animals. He played with them and slept beside them as he once slept beside his parents.

In modern Israel, everyone talks; in the 1950s, books were full of vibrant evocation of landscapes and people. But Appelfeld uses words sparingly; if his work is flawed, as his critics say, it is not because it is unpanoramic. He learns to listen to himself and not his critics; he trusts his voice, his rhythm. The voice and rhythm that are his, that belong to him. In which resounds what he calls a religious melody.

Literature gathers within it all the elements of faith: the seriousness, the internality, the melody, and the connection with the hidden aspects of the soul.

Writing, he would bring what happened into the present. He would make it live in the present.

The mid 1950s. Appelfeld is at university. He reads Yiddish literature and Hebrew literature; he studies with Scholem and Buber; he seeks what he calls ‘an authentic form of Judaism’; he is not religious, but loves the synagogues for a spirituality which connects him to the world of his grandparents.

He is writing, trying to give voice to what he calls ‘the soul of all poetry and prose’: the melody. His poems are, he says, howls of an abandoned animal. They are full of abstract words like ‘darkness’ and longings’ and ‘loneliness’; they veer into sentimenality. Prose saves him, he says, because of its concreteness; gone, now is that miasma of the vague and the dreamy; from Kafka and Camus lessons of precision and from the Russians how the symbolic aspect of literature arises out of description, of fidelity to the real.

Yes, yes, but as I read I want to know: what of the fields and the forests? What of the silence that filled him as a child? What of the time when he did not grasp death was an end, and he thought his parents would come and collect him? What is the relationship between silence and melody? Between silence and the animals with whom the child-Appelfeld found peace and kinship?

After the war, orphans were seduced by perverts and criminals. Abused children were silent; they never cried. The hungry were silent; the good and the wicked are silent.

These are silences different to that of the fields and the forests. Hunger and abuse give nothing, but take speech. They do not bear speech but steal it. Appelfeld is writing from details, from what is real. He is writing with small and quiet words. They let speak the melody inside him, he says. True religion. But in what way are they linked to the silence of the fields and the forests?

The Story of a Life seems to take this question into its body and close itself to me. Perhaps I have read the wrong book. Perhaps I should read it again.

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