They sucked on ‘black milk’ morning, noon and night, says Appelfeld of the Jewish children during the years of the Holocaust. How could they frame what had happened to them, they who were too young? How could they understand its historical, theological or moral significance, those who had only known the camps? But the children, hungry and tired, watched everything.
‘The war revealed to us, to our surprise, that even the most dreadful life was nonetheless life’: a man on the threshold of death still sews on a button; ‘little hopes’ were held by everyone: it was enough to enjoy a cigarette, or to drink coffee in the afternoon.
Litle hopes: the adult passes over these details, says Appelfeld. Adult survivors testified in chronicles, remembering names, places and dates; ‘their sensations and feelings were formed in general terms and without introspection’. For children, there were only ‘fears, hunger, colours, cellars, people who were good to them or people who treated them badly’. As such, for Appelfeld, ‘their recollections are tiny’.
Tiny recollections, and children will mobilise ‘fantasy, sensations and feeling’ to reconstruct their past. But for all this, their testimony is ‘closer to literature’.
Appelfeld finds intimations of such literature in the immediate aftermath of the war. Then he had wandered with masses of other children on the beaches of Yugoslavia and Italy, all of them transformed by the forests and the monasteries in which they had been hidden.
In the hurly burly of refugee camps, some of the children would stand on crates and sing, weaving together melodies from their Jewish homes and those they had heard on monastery organs. One, whose name was Amalia, Appelfeld remembers, mixed Yiddish songs with forest noises. There were child acrobats, too, who had learnt to climb along the highest, thinnest branches as they hid in the forest and child mimics who imitated the animals and birds. Adult managers would take these child performers from camp to camp.
Unlike the adults, who sought to forget what happened, Appelfeld observes, these children ‘moulded and refined their suffering, as perhaps can be done only in the folk song’. This is what led them to artistic expression. ‘There was a need for some kind of unmediated relationship – simple and straightforward – to those horrible events in order to speak about them in artistic terms’.
In this way, the Holocaust be brought down to the human realm. Suffering was rescued from anonymity; a person’s given and family name could be restored, and the tortured person could receive anew the human form that had been stolen from him.
It is in the child’s desire for ‘unmediated’ experience that Appelfeld sees the beginnings of a Holocaust literature, such as, one presumes, his own.
Now to the second essay in Encounter.
The Holocaust, for the adult survivor, Appelfeld says, is ‘a rift in life that has to be healed as quickly as possible, a horror that could provide no moral lesson, only a curse’. What the adult recounts he also conceals, says Appelfeld. This play of revelation and concealment is what is found in the ‘literature of testimony’, he continues, presumably meaning to distinguish it from another, fictional testimony.
‘The survivor’s testimony is first of all a search for relief, the one who bears it seeks also to rid himself of it as hastily as possible’. What is missing is a sense of the transformative power of of horror, Appelfeld suggests; the survivor wants to show he is the same person, ‘bound to the same civil concepts’.
‘Agonies of guilt’ and ‘reproaches against the heavens’ in such testimonies are only a side show, says Appelfeld. Although they are indeed, Appelfeld says, ‘the authentic literature of the Holocaust’, these testimonies cannot become what he calls literature, embodying too many ‘inner constraints’.
A desire for relief, a kind of ‘haste, inarticulateness, and the lack of all introspection’ marks survivors’ testimonies; ‘It is as if what happened only happened outside them’; what ‘spiritual reckoning’ there is concerns society at large, and not the transformation of an individual soul.
This is what leads Appelfeld to ask, ‘Why has no literature been written – or, if you will, yet be written – about the Holocaust?’ How is a spiritual reckoning to be achieved?
Troupes of entertainers appeared in the immediate post-war years, Appelfeld remembers. Singing, poetry recitation, jokes – only ‘certain grotesque features’ differentiated these troupes from those from before the war. Such entertainment – ‘cheap spectacles’, which many saw as ‘desecrations’ – answered to a more general desire to restore the round of life, protesting against suffering and sorrow.
It was also, Appelfeld judges, a kind of forgetfulness. ‘No one knew what to do with the life that had been saved. Sorrow and grief had passed the point of pain and had become something that could no longer be called sorrow and grief’. This is why entertainment was preferred to those actors who wanted to revive the classic Jewish repertory, in particular, tragic plays.
The regions we inhabited after the war were well beyond the tragic. Tragedy is distinguished by, among other things, conscious knowledge, by the hero’s wish to confront his fate directly: tragedy is manifest in the individual, in his well-defined personal suffering. The dimensions of our suffering could not be fully expressed in an individual soul. When the individual attempted merely to become aware of his own consciousness, he collapsed.
For Appelfeld, the troupes presage a new kind of expression, which mixes together the comic and grotesque. Alongside these entertainments, penitents rebuked and comforted the survivors. This was a time of ‘drunken hurly-burly’; ‘everything seemed like madness’. Above all, though, the desire to forget. Swim, lie about, be entertained. There was to be no mention of the war.
But artistic expression was discovered by children. Again he remembers Amalia, the singer. Again, the child is the one who seeks unmediated expression – to speak, simply, and in such a way that what happened does not become mythological and unreal.
‘Children sucked the horrors, not through their minds, but through their skin’, says Appelfeld in an accompanying interview, ‘they were not able to think, to re-think, to evaluate, to analyse’. It was sucked in; that was why, later, Appelfeld can say ‘Their body spoke to them’. ‘The legs, the hands’. ‘It was inside their body, all that darkness, and all the horror’. It was only later they tried to understand.
For Appelfeld, it is only much later, when he begins to write, that he is given back ‘my home, my parents, the environment, the love, the warmth’. But it was not personal testimony he wrote – that comes from the mind, he says, but fiction, which comes ‘from the totality of your being’. Memory with imagination, with feeling, with sensation. So did Appelfeld warm up Hebrew, which, when he was first exposed to it, was, he says ‘a stone language, a metal language’.
He began to remember again; he wrote, foregoing what he calls ‘the tragedy of my generation’, referring to the hundred thousand children who went to Israel in this time. Unlike them, Appelfeld would not build a new personality on top of the repression of the past. Through fiction, he says, he sought to recreate his home as a foundation upon which to begin. Later, he will say it is only when he writes that he feels whole.
When he writes: The Story of A Life recounts the broader narrative of how Appelfeld learnt to write, drawing again on the world he watched as a child. Features of his prose: a restrained, minimal style with emphasis on telling detail, a narrative simplicity that can come close to allegory. How does it recall, I wonder, the singing of Amalia? But this takes me beyond Encounter.
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