Category: Appelfeld

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.

Appelfeld will only write only of the effects of this event, of the Shoah, or of its premonition. No one, in his novels, is its contemporary; there is no contemporaneity, no presence. If there is ‘now’ in his novels, it is a ‘now’ displaced by what is to come, or what has happened.

I think of Greek tragedy, of the freedom into which the hero is set as necessity rises against him. What splendour! But when there is no such freedom? When you are marched into the railway cars through the streets of your own town – the same town, the same place as you lived, and your parents lived; the same town in which you converted or did not convert, in which you forgot your traditions or sought to remember them, it does not matter which?

No freedom. Perhaps that is one of the things Theo finds repulsive in his fellow refugees. They cluster together. They huddle. They do not stride out over the hillcrests. They will not allow themselves to scatter. Is this why Theo dreams of conversion, of chapels filled with music and the silence of a monastery. Freedom!

But something of Theo remains snagged; he also huddles with the others, he cannot help it. He receives coffee and cigarettes from others, and sometimes he dispenses them too. The superabundance of what was once forbidden: what luxury! To give and to receive – a minimal ritual. Nothing exchanged – a giving on both sides, each time singular, each time from the singular one to the singular other. What is more simple than this?

Then can one say simply, easily, that freedom does not lie in the hillcrests over which Theo would stride, but in a life lived alongside the sick, the dying. That freedom is to give coffee and cigarettes to those who need them? Too simple. Too simple!

Theo vacillates. Theo is not the woman with trembling hands who lives only to distribute coffee. He is not the educated woman who has learned to love each refugee and listen to each story with love. He is on the hillcrests and in the valleys. Only later, in the last pages, does he learn the hillcrests offer no escape. There is no simple abnegation in him – no holy fool (is that who Mendel is – one of Dostoevsky’s fools?).

To give out coffee and cigarettes – is that enough? It must be. There’s nothing else. Religious consolations have evaporated. Political consolation – the prewar communism of the parents of the protagonist of The Iron Rails – has likewise vanished. The ideologues of the new Israel have not yet appeared (though they are there among the refugees in Appelfeld’s memoir, The Story of A Life).

Now. There is only the now still snagged by the event. The now, the new day that is nearly pulled under by the undertow of the past. Serve those who suffer, even as you suffer. Give to them, the others, even as others have given coffee and cigarettes to you. No thought – do not think, act. It is the time for action, but an action without ground, without project.

How is such action different from simple spontaneity – from the cows who allow one of the characters to suck milk from their udders? How is it different from the growing of the trees in the green darkness of the woods? ‘After all, man is not an insect: phrase said by many of Appelfeld’s characters. Then it takes effort to give. To offer – and even to receive. Effort – even though there are some whom the war revealed as holy in their generosity, their sacrifice, as Appelfeld remembers in his memoir.

How many encounters are there in For Every Sin? How many gifts of coffee and cigarettes? Nothing happens, yet something has happened. How is it that Theo learns he has no homeland, not anymore, and that the language of his mother and father is no longer his? How is it he learns to stay with the other refugees and not to march away from them, over the hillcrests?

There’s no lesson. No learning. Only a kind of resignation. Theo is claimed in a new way by the undertow, the event. Freedom does not rise up against necessity. Is there glory in the woman with the trembling hands? In the educated woman who loves each refugee? It’s as if these small kindnesses were also part of necessity. That one has to give in to what occurred. To experience it as fate like the blinded Oedipus.

Oedipus looks only for a place to die. What would it mean to live? Fate, necessity: these words echo in a direction they cannot reach. The refugees do not live in the world of the Greeks, or of the Germans who, after Kant, would move tragedy to the centre of philosophical reflection. Then what words will do, instead? How will what happened let itself be spoken?

Are Appelfeld’s novels an answer? Not even that. There are ruins where an answer might be. The question insists in each clear, calm sentence. The sentences are clear and calm because of its insistence.

Appelfeld’s For Every Sin. A series of encounters, that’s all. We know the protagonist’s name – Theo – but not the names of those he meets. And we know what he wants: to pare down relations. To simplify. Even to achieve the absolute, the severing of relations, whether of dependency or trust.

And isn’t that what I want when I select a book to read from the shelf? I want, in the opening paragraphs, to be reduced – to what? Simplicity – a few simple sentences like a cup of water. And to read of others who would be so reduced. Why did I pick For Every Sin rather than To The Cattails or The Healer? Because it begins not with a family, not with mother said, or father said, but with a single character, a simple protagonist. And a merciful simplicity of prose, just one clean line after another.

But this is also a book in which such mercy is denied me. As if a book could be a retreat, a turning from the world. But unto what does this book turn me? Why, as I read, am I urging Theo the refugee on, urging him to make his way across the hillcrests, avoiding the valleys where there are others?

A series of encounters, one after another. And a series of escapes. Theo’s attempt to move, to free himself. And then, in the end, the lesson that such freedom is a lie, and that he belongs with the others. I feel the book is teaching me. I read it quickly enough, but it refused to settle back inside me. Refused – and so I couldn’t begin the next book I borrowed from the library.

I had to write, instead. How pitiful! To write – to follow again the course of For Every Sin. To follow it, just that, and then to learn. But what is this lesson? Appelfeld is the simplest of writers. And as I read, as I write of what I read, I feel I become the simplest of readers. Only one, now, who has not turned from the world in order to read, but the opposite: to read is to turn back to the world. To be turned, just as Theo had to redescend into the valleys from the hillcrests.

Continue reading “Hillcrests and Valleys”

Smooth the evening down around you; let the world settle. Intimacy of reading: he would make his way back home alone, in a straight line, without twists or turns. And then a little later: He rose to his feet, looked for a stick and found one, and he immediately thrust it into the soft earth. That would be his sign. ‘I shall no longer stray from my course’, he vowed to himself.

The book makes the silence around it. Sentences like the brushstrokes of a Zen calligrapher: sure, even simple – but that simplicity is at the service of a telling that moves like the unfolding of a destiny. It could not be otherwise: I shall no longer stray from my course, is written in the book; but that writing is already fidelity. In these opening pages, it is as though writing is redoubled – and writing itself is allowed to speak.

Tiredness and disgust. Then the book which in the midst of that same tiredness, that same disgust seem to stand straight up like the dorsal fin of a fish? It redeems nothing – still tiredness, still disgust, but now that standing up, that uprightness, and even a forward movement. No more listlessness; the book is moving. And it commands that you, too, must move.

He slept tranquilly and dreamlessly. The chill of the night seeped into his torn shoes, but he didn’t wake up. He had become used to sleeping in bitter cold. Toward dawn he roused himself and got up. The stick, he found, was still standing in place, and he was happy for it as though for a familiar sign of life.

Move – but where am I going? Into what am I leaning? The same tiredness, the same disgust. And like the narrator, I carry a stick and lodge it in the earth. The book is the stick. Or the stick is the pencil I use to mark where I am. But where am I? In truth, I am rereading, and discovering again the signs I wrote then as I read. What is that word? Reduction. My word. And that phrase? Everything pointed in the same direction. My phrase.

The reduction – what books are they that bring you back to the simple? I wrote the word, sacred, thinking now of what need makes of the starving and the desperate. Egotism without ego – whose phrase is that? The sacred – homo sacer – whose phrase is that? ‘People need poetry more than bread’ – obscene statement. Was it Mandelstam’s? But is there a poetry of need – a poetry of the homo sacer? Certainly there is a prose.

Appelfeld said writing Tzili unlocked something in him, the writer. He allowed that book to be subtitled in English, The Story of a Life. The same title the translation of his autobiography will bear. The Story of a Life: does it speak of a life now reduced to itself? That is only life, only living? But over and again, Appelfeld’s characters will say, ‘after all, men are not insects’. Not insects, which means more than bare life – or at least it is that insect-like life that must be resisted.

On page 27, I wrote sleep – pagan. Mina, a character, is sleeping. Soon she will show Theo, the protagonists, her wounds. I did not know that as I read, then. I wrote, sleep – pagan. She sleeps. later, he will go out in search of a doctor for her. When he returns, she is gone. Her loss haunts the novel. Where did she go? No resolution. Appelfeld will not permit that. She’s gone – and that is all.

Mina sleeps.

Mina was drowning in a long sleep which gre longer daily. Fatigue also tried to cling to him, but he decided: I will only sleep in moderation. Prolonged sleep is a disgraceful surrender.

Out goes Theo. When he returns, without a doctor, she is gone. The rest of the novel sees him wandering, sometimes alone, sometimes with the other refugees. He is going home, he tells others. He will convert to Christianity, he tells the others. He remembers his mother, who ended up in a sanatorium. And his father, a quiet, learned man, who died in the same labour camp as Theo.

Now, after the liberation, Theo wanders with the others, sometimes despising them – no more togetherness, he thinks. No more huddling. But sometimes drawn to them, to the others. He is going home, he tells them. Hundreds of miles, but nevertheless – home. And then to convert. What matters is movement, and he is moving. On the penultimate page, my pencil mark against this passage:

At that time it became clear to Theo beyond any doubt that he would never return to his hometown. From now on he would advance with the refugees. That language which his mother had inculcated in him with such love would be lost forever. If he spoke, he would speak only in the language of the camps. That clear knowledge made him dreadfully sad.

Theo is with a band of refugees. The novel ends with him drinking coffee, as he has done again and again – being offered a cup by others. Coffee – but it is also the gift of cigarettes that become, in the novel, a sign that human beings are not insects. Coffee and cigarettes with the others, the refugees. And he too, giver, recipient, a refugee with no destination.

What kind of ending is that? Theo’s mother, who loved Bach and Mozart and Salzburg, is falling away from him. She who took him off from school on trips across Germany, and who walked to the train a few days ahead of Theo and his penniless father, falls away.

Theo, of course, strays from his course. Such a course was never his; he was not to be alone. I admit it, I wanted him to move from the others, to walk across the hilltops, avoiding the valleys. I wanted him to move and to hear nothing of the others, and for writing, in that movement, to speak of itself. I wanted what reveals itself in Handke’s No Man’s Bay: movement, only that.

What of others? What of those others to whom cigarettes and coffee are to be given, and from whom they might be received? How dully does this book lead me right back into the world from which I would turn. Dully – no solitude. No solitude with writing. Not the striding away across hill-tops.

What is it I wanted when I read those first pages (the opening paragraph was enough)? To leave everyone; to read, and to depart by way of this reading. To take departure, then, to wander as my eyes pass over the sentences of For Every Sin. And isn’t this the surprise of the book, its wonder: that it refuses to depart thus?

Remain. You are with the others. With – but what does it mean to be with? To walk with, to drink coffee with, to smoke cigarettes with in the sun? With – not alone. You are with them even when you are alone. Unless to remain thus is not to remain – that the journey begins only when the dream of home falls away. Of home and the language of home.

But the novel is not an allegory. More than that, it resists those like me who dream of a writing reduced, that pares itself away until it is only itself. Sacred writing, where are you? Sacred writing, reduced to only to its need for itself, where are you? And it says, I vanished when the sacred groves vanished. Vanished with the deportations, even before the refugees from the camps started their long voyage.

1.

The light broke above her and poured into her head. A few solitary animal cries drifted through the valley and a loud chorus of barks immediately rose to join them. She sat and listened. The distant sounds cradled her. Without thinking she fell asleep.

After reading The Story of a Life, I wanted to be in the fields and the forests again. Not the real ones, though it is a beautiful day, but the ones in Appelfeld’s books. In the silent fields and forests. I open a book with the same subtitle (in translation at least) as Appelfeld’s memoirs, only this is a fiction, Tzili (Hebrew title: Kutonet veha-pasim – what would this be in English?).

Appelfeld tells an interviewer that Tzili was written at a time when he had become fascinated by what he calls naivete:

When I wrote Tzili, I was about forty. At that time I was interested in the possibilities of naiveness in art. Can there be a naive modern art? It seemed to me without naivete still found among children and old people, and, to some extend, in ourselves, the work of art would be flawed. [In Tzili] I tried to correct that flaw.

Then I wonder whether Tzili will give me the answer to a question I asked myself at the end of my last post. What was the meaning of silence in Appelfeld’s The Story of A Life? Why did the young man he was want to retreat back into the silence of the years he spent in the fields of the forests? Why was that silence – born out of his aloneness, his missing parents, and the savagery of the peasants for whom he worked – linked to writing?

Perhaps because it was also that silence that came forward in him when he heard the ideologues of the new Israel. The refusal of grandiloquence and pomp. He is on the side of the stutterers, says Appelfeld, remembering, perhaps, how Moses was said to stutter. And he is on the side of silence, or rather, it is from that silence that writing comes. That it would come. Out of silence, and writing itself according to a melody that was deep within him. That flowed through him just as it flowed, he said, through all true writing. A melody that was, in the end, religious.

Is that how one is to understand naivete? Let’s see.

2.

Tzili is in the forest. She is alone, a Jew, and these are the years of the Nazis.

She is the youngest of a large family. She grew up neglected, quiet, charmless and mute. Small and skinny, she was ignored by the others. She goes to school, but she is ineducable. The non-religious family employ a tutor to visit her to teach her her prayers.

Tzili feels an intimacy with the abandoned things in the old shed. It is also her hiding place; she spends most of her time out of doors. Then the Nazis come; her family flees; Tzili is left to look after the house. A feeble-minded girl to look after the whole house.

She runs away from the house and into the fields and the forests. She has not slept out of doors before. Now she sees the night sky and washes her face in the river.

She meets a blind man; he tries to rape her, she who knows nothing of sex. After that, she menstruates, she who knows nothing of menstruation. She thinks she might be dying.

3.

It is summer. She lives in the fields and the forest. Her memories of home are disappearing. She learns which berries can be eaten and which cannot.

Autumn comes. She finds shelter in deserted barns. She looks repulsive. She claims to be one of the daughters of Maria, a well-known local prostitute. This will be her alibi.

Winter through Spring she works for Katerina, a prostitute. She tells Katernia, too, she is Maria’s daughter. Katerina knew Maria back in the city. Perhaps she guesses Tzili is a Jew. No matter; she, like Maria, likes Jews. But Katerina, who is drink and given to violent rages, turns on Tzili. The girl flees.

In autumn, she shelters with an old couple. Again, she is Maria’s daughter. The old man lusts after her; the old woman sees this and beats Tzili.

4.

Amidst all this, there are times of contentedness . With the cows, in their warmth presence. In the meadows.

Her imagination did not soar but the little she possessed warmed her like soft, pure wool.

She thinks of Katerina. She learnt a great deal from her. How to carry out household chores. About men, and what men want. Tzili is fearful of men; Katerina had tried to prostitute her, but she resisted.

Winter passes at the house of the old couple. She is beaten, but the snows have melted and she can leave.

5.

One morning soon after, she wakes in a field. Then she sees him: Mark.

Mark asks Tzili, where are your parents? When she says she doesn’t know, he says, ‘So you’re one of us.

Mark had left behind his wife and children in the concentration camps when he fled. They were too fearful to flee; now he hides in a mountain forest.

Mark wears a suit and a hat. He tells her everyone can tell he’s a Jew; he can’t hide it. Tzili, he says, does not look like a Jew. He asks her how this is possible. She doesn’t know.

He has clothes – children’s clothes, his wife’s clothes. Tzili takes each item of clothing down to the villages and trades them for bread and sausage and vodka. A long time passes on the mountain. It is quiet there. Mark digs a bunker. For a time, he drinks too much, then, as the clothes begin to run out, he drinks less.

Then he tells her he loves her. She has never had anyone tell her that. In the darkness of the bunker, they lie together. She knows happiness in this intimacy.

6.

Then Mark decides to go down to the villages to look around. He needs to find out what is happening in the world. No doubt this educated man, who left his family behind, is too obviously a Jew; he disappears from the story. Now Tzili is alone again. She is alone and pregnant, and without many more clothes to trade. She must leave the forest.

Everything drew near and the last rays of the sun fell golden on the hillside. "I lived here and now I’m leaving", said Tzili, and she felt a slight twinge in her chest. The embryo throbbed gently in her belly. Her vision narrowed even further. Now she could picture to herself the paths lying underneath the blanket of snow. There was no resentment in her heart, only longing, longing for the earth on which she stood. Everything beyond this little corner if the world seemed alien and remote to her.

From now on, she will have visions of Mark. I find these very beautiful. We know Tzili through her actions, through her simple desire to survive and her fear when she hears the Jews cursed. Now we know her as the one who is addressed by Mark, her lover, the one who said he loved her. Now Mark is gone from the story, but another Mark speaks to her several times in the remaining third of the book.

For days she had not tasted food. She would sit for hours sucking the snow. The melted snow assuaged her hunger. The liquids refreshed her. Now she felt a faint anxiety.

And while she was standing transfixed by what she saw, Mark rose up before her.

"Mark", the word burst from her throat.

Mark seemed surprised. He stood still. And then he asked: "Why are you going to the refugees? Don’t you know how bad they are?"

"I was looking for you".

"You won’t find me there. I keep as far away as possible from them."

"Where are you?"

"Setting sail."

"Where to?"

But he has gone. She sees a flock of birds rise into the sky.

Tzili understood that he had only called her in order to take his leave.

He will call her several more times.

7.

When she learns she is pregnant, she thinks to herself, Mark is inside me. As though Mark was enfolded the embryo that was growing there.

Tzili thinks often of Katernia, of Maria, and more often still of Mark. These are the ones who have addressed her. They are her witnesses, the ones who knew her when she was on her own.

Eventually, she will meet up with the refugees. Close to giving birth, she is carried by them on a stretcher. She loses the baby. Does she lose Mark, too? He does not speak to her again. She has lost the baby, she has lost Mark. Perhaps she no longer needs him as a witness.

For a while, just before she met the refugees, she worked again for the peasants. When they beat her, she said, ‘I am not an animal, I am a woman’. This reminds us of some of the things Mark says – ‘after all, men are not insects’ – which Tzili repeats to herself. Only now she no longer needs to repeat them. She speaks in her own name, as a woman.

We might ask ourselves whether the whole story one of a rite of passage? After all, she first menstruates at the beginning of the book. Then there is her meeting with the old man. She wanders and then finds her way to the mountain where she hides with Mark. It is as though Mark has initiated her into something. True, she learnt something of adulthood and sex from Katerina. But Katerina tried to prostitute her. Mark said he loved her; they coupled; she was pregnant, and this pregnancy allowed Mark to live even though in all probability, he was dead. Then the child died and Mark disappeared. Is she now an initiate? But of what?

She finds herself among others; there are men and women; she is one of the women, no longer a child. She is fifteen; it is summer again. There are happy times by the shore with the other refugees. Then she sails off at the end with the others to Palestine. A new life.

8.

A new life. Tzili is not imaginative or intelligent; perhaps she is still devoid of charm. She is quiet. What does she carry with her to the new state of Israel? The silence of the fields and forests? The silence of the cows she used to tend? But also the ‘Hear, O Israel’ she recited when she was a child, covering her face.

I don’t know if what calls Appelfeld calls melody flows through her, but flows through the telling of the book called Tzili. A quiet book, yes, but with a strength in that quietness. A story is told; this is not a fairy story; Tzili is real and no archetype. She is real; what happens does so in a present like our own.

But it happens such that a simplicity makes itself present; an intimacy with the earth and the animals; a closeness with Mark, and then Tzili’s certainty that she is a woman. Tzili survives, and does not fear the future. She lives in the moment; she trusts it. So does the story. The trust that is her life, her naivete, is also that of the story.

9.

In an interview in the Observer, Appelfeld says we have, each of us, an elderly man, a child, a woman within us. ‘Everything. We have it in ourselves’. Everything: but what do we have? Naivete – which calls in turn for a telling of naivete. What does this mean? A kind of regression into fairy tale? Pastiche of outmoded forms?

Perhaps it is significant that Tzili is a novella, genre which lends itself to the simplicity of telling. No panorama of character or landscape here, only the forward drive of a narrative at once familiar (the passage into adulthood; expulsion and return) and new, since it is told in our present.

And by choosing an unprepossessing girl as his heroine? What happens because of that? Appelfeld writes of the one who survives, of a girl, a woman, who is weak and strong; who will draw on resources which awaken inside her and eventually fold them back until they stay with her.

This is no allegory. Tzili does not stand in for the children of Israel. She is barely observant. If she is close to the fields and forests, she is not secure there; her milieu is not the natural world. Sometimes, it is true, she remembers the little yard at home, and hearing her mother call ‘Tzili’. She would reply ‘here I am’. But only this is left of her childhood; only ‘the misty edge of the garden of Eden’.

And of the future? The child is dead; Mark does not return to speak to her in dreams. The future is the state of Israel, where she will go bearing her silence, her naivete and the strength of that naivete. Does the novella called Tzili not let speak that same silence Appelfeld wanted to discover? Not, now, that of the frightened child he was in the forests and the fields, but in the moments of safety and repose which gave themselves there, where the observer he was looked around him.

It is this same look that would allow him, later, judge the good from the wicked, to know that the army officer bellowing him was bellowing at his father or mother and not him. The same power of observation which set itself back in him, looking out with equanimity and calmness, eternal witness to the world.

Bringing that power to expression, writing in small and quiet words that would allow him to speak of what is small and quiet, Appelfeld finds his way to the witness that lives in each of us. But one must be careful. What sees, what witnesses, does not reside at our heart. Not unless we understand that same heart to be turned inside out and the inner – our inner life, our strength – reveals itself only against the streaming of the outside.

That streaming also bears Appelfeld’s prose. It is the silence that recedes in order to allow melody and religion to sing. It withdraws to allow the novella to come forward even as it streams in this same novella. Modern naivete is that art which allows what comes forward thus to resonate with that streaming. Tzili is the drama of the folding of the outside that allows a self to step forward.

Excellent interview here. Essay on Tzili here.

1.

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.

2.

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.

3.

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.

4.

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.

5.

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?

6.

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.

See also This Space, The Observer, Jerusalem Post.