Lars Iyer's Blog

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.