David Herman
Aharon Appelfeld

David Herman - Aharon Appelfeld

- This is the second of two talks on Jewish writers from Romania. As I said last week in my talk on the screenwriter, Emeric Pressburger, there are a number of reasons why Jewish writers from Romania are sometimes not as well known as they should be. One reason, of course, is that so many became refugees or immigrants and became best known in other countries and other languages such as Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of Dadism, the playwright, Ionesco, the poet, Paul Celan, spent most of their lives in France, Celan, and the Nobel Prize-winning author, Herta Muller, both wrote in German. Elie Wiesel, moved to Paris where he wrote “Night” in French, and then in 1955 moved to America. And Pressburger himself came to England where he wrote some of the great screenplays of the 20th century. And a second reason is that parts of Romania moved from one empire or country to another, largely because of the 1920 Peace Treaty of Trianon that followed the First World War and moved parts of Hungary to Romania. So people moved from Romania and parts of Romania itself moved. Just before we come to today’s subject, the great Israeli writer, Aharon Appelfeld, may I just come back to some questions that were asked last week about whether Emeric Pressburger, who was a friend of the Hungarian writers, George Mikes and Arthur Koestler. Just briefly, Mikes was indeed one of Pressburger’s closest friends. He once said, we admired Emeric very much. He had come to London a few years before us. He was generous, helpful, and a wonderful cook. He invited us for magnificent dinners and gave us mountains of food, which terrified us twice.

First when we saw that pile on our plates, and second, when we realised that we’d eaten it all. Mikes dedicated one of his books, “To my dear old friend, Emeric Pressburger.” But strangely, he barely appears in the main biography of Pressburger by Kevin Macdonald. Arthur Koestler was indeed a friend, a neighbour of Pressburger’s, but also barely appears in Macdonald’s terrific biography, so I hope that has resolved that. Aharon Appelfeld was one of the great Israeli writers, but he was born in Bukovina in what was then in 1932, part of Romania. He’s perhaps best known for two very early books, “Badenheim 1939,” published in 1978 and “The Age of Wonders,” also published first in 1978. And there are also two extraordinary books that he wrote much later that I’ll come back to later. “The Story of a Life: A Memoir,” published in 2003, and “The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping,” published in 2010. Appelfeld was born Ervin Appelfeld, an only child near Czernowitz in Bukovina. Czernowitz was one of the great literary centres of Jewish 20th century writing. It was the home of Itzik Manger, the great Yiddish poet, Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Gregor von Rezzori and Norman Manea. The Appelfelds were assimilated upper middle class Jews. Appelfeld’s father was a wealthy landowner and his investments were land, woods, and mills. “My parents,” he later wrote, “Were assimilated non-practicing Jews. My father was very anti-religious when he was young.

It was a kind of revolt against his father.” His father, Appelfeld’s grandfather, was very religious, very tough and religious. “Our home was without Torah and without religious observance. My parents both knew Yiddish, of course,” he said. “But their orientation was towards the world. They spoke Austro-Hungarian, German, because every province had a dialect. Ours was a Jewish province,” he said. The Jews spoke a softer German than the normal German. “It was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire,” he said in an interview. “Then it became a part of Romania, and now it’s a part of Russia.” Now, in fact, since that interview has become part of Ukraine. “I was born in a Jewish, what we call assimilated family of intellectuals, and we were surrounded by Ukrainians.” Yiddish was the main language for 75% of the Jewish population. In the 1920s and ‘30s, Czernowitz was a scene of lively and diverse Yiddish cultural, literary, and political activities. There were 20 Yiddish periodicals published in Czernowitz, which is good indicator of this, and Czernowitz boasted the largest in the world number of titles of Yiddish periodicals per capita of the Jewish population, 3.9 per 10,000 of the population. “Every summer,” he later wrote in “The New Yorker,” “Every summer, we visited one of the cities that encircled my childhood, Vienna, Prague, Budapest. My birthplace, Czernowitz, had belonged to the Habsburg Empire, and in many ways it was like its more famous sisters, only smaller and less distinguished.” “In the Carpathians,” he later said in an interview, “There was still something, I don’t know if innocence is the right word, but there was still some innocence.

They would wake up in the morning to pray for an hour and eat some breakfast and go to the work with the peasants. There was something, you know, a special silence that continued from the prayer to the work. How much I absorbed of that? I don’t really know. Grandfather tried to show me a prayer book, but I received it too late.” He was asked by this interviewer, “In plenty of your book says, an attempt to convey the feelings that resulted from the radical severing of the emotional, the personal links between the old world and this world. What remains from the old world are these fragments of feelings, stray objects, the kiddish cup or the man who says the blessing after meals to himself? These things are no longer part of a whole of an integrated relation to anything, but these fragments are still lodged in individuals like shrapnel.” And Appelfeld replied, “Yes, yes, it’s true, it’s true. It was already a disintegrated life. My parents, they were Jewish people. They’ve never denied they were Jewish, but then they were somewhere else. It was not even an openly critical stance.” They said, “Leave me alone. I cannot go to the synagogue. I cannot pray. Leave me alone. It was painful for both sides because my grandparents were tolerant people. They loved their children and their grandchildren, and they did not want to impose on them things they do not like, they do not want, and so on. But those long summers on the farm are imprinted in me, the trees, the flowers, the waters. In our house, there were books everywhere.

There were books on the table, on the bed, under the bed, under the table, all kinds of books you are reading, you’re not finishing, and so on. At Grandfather’s, there was just one book on the table. So I asked Grandfather, why only one book on the table?” And he answered in Yiddish, “This is a book you should read and repeat and repeat reading because it’s a book that is worth to read and to reread. This is a book that you have to read slowly every day. You cannot jump from one book to another book. Books demand your soul.” So this was his answer. “Everything in his life, there was a meaning to it. My parents were people with a split, maybe many splits in their lives from one side, they were devoted to the German language, German culture. Both of them completed the Latin gymnasium, so they could read Latin and Greek. They were rooted in the history of that. But on the other side, they also wanted to be rooted somewhere in Jewishness.” Bukovina, which is a little known place these days, especially here in the west, was under Austrian rule until it became part of Romania, and it was ethnically mixed, predominantly Romanian in the south, Ukrainian in the north, with small numbers of Hungarian, Slovak and Polish peasants, and Germans, Poles and Jews in the towns. Romanians were present in all settlements of the region, but their number decreased as he got further north. “My mother tongue,” Appelfeld told Philip Roth, “was German. My grandparents spoke Yiddish. Most of the inhabitants of Bukovina where I lived as a child were Ruthenians, and so they all spoke Ruthenian.

The government was Romanian and everyone was required to speak that language as well. When the second World War broke out and I was eight, I was deported to a camp in Transnistria. After I ran away from the camp, I lived among the Ukrainians, and so I learned Ukrainian. When I finally reached Palestine in 1946, my head was full of tongues. But the truth of the matter is I had no language.” Roth mentions a photograph of Appelfeld when he was six. “A portrait photograph that I’ve seen of Aharon Appelfeld, an antique looking picture taken in Czernowitz in 1938 when Aharon was six and brought to Palestine by surviving relatives, shows a delicately refined bourgeois child seated alertly on a hobby horse and wearing a beautiful sailor suit. In 1941, when Aharon was nine years old, his mother was killed. The Romanian army retook his hometown after a year of Soviet occupation. And his mother, then only 31, and his grandmother were both murdered by Romanians and Germans. "I didn’t see her die,” Appelfeld told “The Paris Review,” “but I did hear her one and only scream.” Appelfeld was deported with his father to a Nazi concentration camp in Romanian-controlled Transnistria. “I remember her,” he said later, “but I would not say that this would be real because in losing your mother in childhood, you’re trying all the years to reconstruct her. So it probably would be a different mother that than she really was. My feeling is that I remember her, but how much I really remember, this I cannot know. I was too young to be conscious.” At the concentration camp in Transnistria, he was separated from his father.

“We were separated,” he wrote, “and I had not seen him for 20 years. He escaped. He was in Russia. And then after 20 years, I met him in Israel, not knowing each other.” Appelfeld himself escaped from the camp in 1942. “I was wondering for three years,” he said, “there was no peace. The peasants, if they knew I was Jewish, they would probably have killed me. So I had to be very alert, very careful.” And some of his best writing, both novels and and short stories and parts of his memoirs are stories of the Holocaust. “In the forest,” he said, “a group of criminals adopted me. So I was living for two years with this group of Ukrainian criminals. They didn’t know that I was Jewish. I was a poor animal, a poor slave doing what they ordered me to do. I survived in the fields and forests. Sometimes I worked as a shepherd or taking care of horses. I lived with marginal people during the war, prostitutes, horse thieves, witches, fortune tellers. They gave me my real education.” In 1944, the Russians recaptured Ukraine and Appelfeld joined the Russian army, becoming a junior cook and working in the field kitchens in Ukraine. And then at the end of the war, between 1945 and '46, he travelled through Europe, through Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and arrived in Italy where he lived in a camp for displaced persons. He was later asked at this time, age 13, “What was your sense of self?” “Very disoriented,” he replied. Disoriented and disorientation are words Appelfeld uses a lot, deeply disoriented.

“I’d never attended school in my life, just the first grade, which I’d started but not finished, knowing a lot of languages, but really not rooted in a language. My home language was German, but I’d spoken many other languages. My grandparents spoke Yiddish. The maids in my home were Ukrainians, so I spoke Ukrainian. The regime was Romanian, so I picked up Romanian and then I was in Russian and picked up Russian, then Italy and picked up some Italian. So I came with a bunch of words, different languages, but still very deeply disoriented. It’s taken many years for me to get oriented, who I am, to whom I belong, this was a very deep effort.” And then in 1946, he travelled to Palestine. “I came to Israel,” he said, “to a big refugee camp, Jews from all over Europe, many refugees, many orphans. So it took many years to communicate who I am, what I am in Palestine, when I wasn’t born there, where were my parents? In the big rush, I couldn’t understand it. It took me years to reconstruct myself as a person.” He joined the Aliyat Hano'ar Youth Movement and then went to an agricultural school at Ein Kerem, then to another agricultural school and then army service. And then in the early 1950s, the Hebrew University, he signed up for courses in Yiddish. And it was an extraordinary time at the Hebrew University. It was the time when Martin Buber was teaching there, Gush Shalom, Yehezkel Kaufmann were among those who taught at the university. And the big question I suppose that one should always ask about Appelfeld is what kind of writer was he? Was he an Israeli writer or a central European writer?

There are of course two kinds of Israeli writers. Those Israeli writers born in Israel, Yehoshua, Amos Oz, David Grossman, Etgar Keret. Yehoshua, who was a longtime acquaintance of Appelfeld, said in a radio interview that although he lived in Israel for most of his life, Appelfeld could not be characterised as an Israeli writer because he did not write about Israel. The second group are Israeli writers born in Europe. Bialik, born in Volhynia, Agnon born in Galicia, Benjamin Tamuz born in Russia, Yehuda Amichai, born in Wurzburg in Germany, Dan Pagis born in Czernowitz, and Appelfeld born in Czernowitz. And throughout Appelfeld’s best novels, there are references to the great modern central European writers. In one of his breakthrough novels, “The Age of Wonders,” we find this passage, “I said, father, irrelevantly I’m an Austrian writer. German is my mother tongue. I have no other language. In German, I’ve composed six novels, six collections of short stories, two books of essays. Haven’t I brought honour to Austria?” I love the word irrelevantly here and Appelfeld, the devil is always in the detail. When father says something irrelevantly, we should pick up our ears at once because what follows is going to be very important. On numerous occasions in “The Age of Wonders,” we’re told that Bruno, who’s the central character, that his father was a friend of Stefan Zweig and Max Brod, Martin Buber and Schnitzler.

Above all, “He was a sworn devotee of Franz Kafka.” Kafka’s few published works, at this point in the novel, it’s 1937, had converted him completely. He knew them all by heart. In his wonderful autobiography, “The Story of a Life,” Appelfeld writes of the two great central European Jewish writers he discovered as a young man in the 1950s. The first and by far the most influential was Kafka. “I discovered Kafka here in Israel during the 1950s.” He writes, “Like many of my generation at the university, I devoured the writings of Kafka and Camus. I got enmeshed in the dreams and in the vagueness, and I didn’t see that Kafka’s mist was shaped by detailed descriptions, by precise sensations. And the other is Shmuel Agnon from Galicia, who knew Czernowitz, the nearest big town to Appelfeld’s home in Bukovina. And Appelfeld wrote, "I was thrilled to encounter the names of people, towns and villages that I vaguely recalled from home. It was from Agnon that I learned how you can carry the town of your birth with you anywhere and live a full life in it.” And this is the twist in Appelfeld’s writing. He wrote in Hebrew, but his best books are set in Central and East Europe. “Badenheim 1939,” “The Age of Wonders” takes place in Austria. His “Memoir: The Story of a Life” has one foot in Bukovina, another in Palestine. But the part in Palestine always looks back to Bukovina. His best late books are a constant dialogue between the past and Central and East Europe, and the present in Palestine or Israel. So why write in Hebrew? Why not write in his native German? This is what Clive Sinclair, the British Jewish writer asked him in their conversation in Sinclair’s book, “Diaspora Blues.”

And this is what Appelfeld said, “There was somewhere a temptation even for me to become a German writer. But see how tragic it would be that I, a victim of the Germans, should write in the language of the murderers. It would be more than irony.” Gabriel Josipovici, one of the outstanding writers and critics of our time, is a enormous fan, a very influential admirer of Appelfeld. And he wrote, “His work, Appelfeld’s work is thus strikingly different from that of Amos Oz, Yehoshua, and David Grossman, the best known of his contemporaries. Though Oz and Grossman have roots in Eastern Europe, they were both born in Israel and their concerns are Israeli ones. Appelfeld is a European whose language happens to be Hebrew. His novels are closer in feeling to the work of other Israeli writers born in Europe such as Yehuda Amichai and Dan Pagis than to that of a native Israeli like Oz. In Appelfeld’s work, as in that of Celan, one hears the distinctive voice of Jewish European culture, the strains of Holderlin, and Kleist and Kafka, as well as the Bible and Talmud. Appelfeld’s relation to the writers of Central and Eastern Europe wasn’t just a literary issue or an issue of language, it was a question of home, identity, belonging. It was a question of reconstructing himself as a person. "I cannot be an Israeli writer,” he once said. “My biography is a different biography. Yes, life was a permanent kind of permanent attempt to understand myself, to observe the surroundings, and to think about my parents. And because I was not born in Israel, to think about the country where I was born, there were all kinds of puzzles I had to solve.

I come from a different world from Israel,” he told an interviewer, “a different geography. I come from a world that suffered terrible catastrophe. And this experience requires a different language, a different tone. I came to Israel when I was 13 and a half. I was without friends, without a family, without parents. I knew a lot of languages, but I didn’t possess a written language. Hebrew became my stepmother tongue.” It’s a wonderful phrase, a stepmother tongue. This is the heart of Appelfeld. Where was he from? What happened to him there? How did he come to Israel, then still Palestine? And what kind of writer did he want to become? What kind of voice did he find? What places images and words spoke to him? The crucial point is that the places and images that resonate in his best writing are not in Israel, though he became a passionate Zionist. They are many miles away many years ago in the fields, the forests, the small towns and villages of East Europe, so near and yet so far from Vienna and Prague, which is characters constantly talked about. During the late 1950s, he wrote in his memoir, “I gave up my ambition to become an Israeli writer and made every effort to become what I really was, an emigre, a refugee, a man who carries within him the child of war, who finds talking difficult and tries to speak with a minimum amount of words. This effort culminated my first book, which appeared in 1962 called "Smoke.” I was attacked a lot for not doing that. Why is he always bringing us the old Jews? So I was called too Jewish, preoccupied too much with the Holocaust. Not speaking during the Holocaust, I could not speak.

I could understand Ukrainian because the maids were Ukrainian, but my accent would give you a way. So I didn’t speak. After the war, I could not utter a word because my muscles had atrophied. After wandering with the Russian army and with the refugees, Jewish refugees, speech came back to me very slowly. I was stuttering. Throughout my university years,“ he later wrote, "I wrote poems. But these were more like the howls of an animal who’d been abandoned and for years thereafter was trying to find his way home. Mother, father, father, father, where are you? Where are you hiding? Why don’t you come? Why don’t you pull me out of this misery? Where is my house and where is the street? And the strip of land that have cast me out? These formed the essence of my cries and I loaded all the weight and pain upon words like loneliness, longings, wistfulness and darkness.” And then he wrote, “Crows save me from the sentimentality.” And this is the other thing, the other great thing about Appelfeld, which distinguishes him from so many other great Holocaust writers, even the best ones. In some of his best writing, he divides the world into two, before the Holocaust and after the Holocaust. Take “The Age of Wonders,” which is divided into two books, before and after. We know almost nothing about what happens to Bruno and his parents in between, during the years of the Holocaust. Mother’s death is mentioned only in passing. And in part two, we are briefly told that the father had probably died mad in Theresienstadt. “They said,” Appelfeld writes in “Age of Wonders,” “that he had died half mad in Theresienstadt. And that before that, before he had died, he had tried to convert to Christianity. Another rumour said that he’d never been sent to Theresienstadt but to somewhere near Minsk where he’d been seen a number of times in the slaughterhouse. And that was not the end of the rumours.”

So not only before and after, but uncertainty, rumours. The key word that describes Appelfeld’s childhood, his formation and his writing, his division, or perhaps opposition. Constantly, one thing is set against another, one kind of place against another, one kind of language against another, faith against lack of faith, one kind of ethnic group against another. Take these two quotations. One is from an essay called the Kafka Connection in “The New Yorker” by Appelfeld, “Every summer, we visited one of the places that encircled my childhood, Vienna, Prague, Budapest. Czernowitz had belonged to the Habsburg Empire, and in many ways, it was like its more famous sisters, only smaller and less distinguished.” And then a quotation that I read earlier, “In the Carpathians, there was still something, I don’t know if innocence is the right word, but there was still some innocence.” So on the one hand, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, on the other, the peasants and the Carpathians and Appelfeld’s grandparents. We’ll take this quotation about the languages he heard. “My mother tongue was German. My grandparents spoke Yiddish. Where I lived as a child, we’re Ruthenians.” And so, they all spoke Ruthenian or take this without religion. “Our home was without Torah and without religious observance. But his grandparents were deeply religious. People who were religious, people who were without religious observance.

And when he comes to Palestine, he immediately finds more oppositions and divisions between those born in Israel and the orphans, refugees from Central and East Europe, those who already spoke Hebrew and those like himself who must learn it. He doesn’t fit our idea of an Israeli writer at all and the world he belonged to, Czernowitz, the Carpathians, doesn’t connect with us in the way Israel does. But there’s a much bigger point. And the point is this, ultimately, very soon, these divisions and oppositions in all his books will lead to disaster. What these divisions will lead to is catastrophe. The people who belong to one ethnic group and speak one language will murder those who don’t speak the same language, belong to the same group, believe in the same God, or live in the same villages and forests. In an extraordinary, restrained, quiet prose, this is what Appelfeld will find out, what his characters will find out. They don’t know yet, but they will find out. And this is what they will find out. Here is the last paragraph of his masterpiece, "Badenheim 1939.” “Their amazement was cut short, an engine coupled to four filthy freight cars emerged from the hills and stopped at the station. Its appearance was a sudden as if it had risen from a pit in the ground. 'Get in,’ yelled invisible voices and the people were sucked in. Even those who were standing with a bottle of lemonade in their hands, a bar of chocolate, the head waiter with his dog, they were all sucked in as easily as grains of wheat poured into a funnel. Nevertheless, Dr. Pappenheim found time to make the following remark. ‘If the coaches are so dirty, it must mean that we have not far to go.’”

Or take the opening and the end of “The Age of Wonders.” It begins and ends with two train journeys. “Many years ago, mother and I took the night train home from the quiet little known retreat where we’d spent the summer. And it ends with the same boy now grown up. His eyes focused vacantly on the blinking railway signal, waiting for the brass plate to fall and the whistle of the engine to pierce the air.” And in between, at the end of book one, we have another train journey that gives meaning to both of these. “By the next day, we are on the cattle train, Birkeland South.” This is what the characters of “Badenheim 1939” and the central character, Bruno, in “The Age of Wonders” don’t know but will find out. And this restraint, this pattern of train journeys, these silences, what we’re not told, what they do not know, but we’ll find out. That is what makes Appelfeld one of the great writers of our time. I was going to say, he was one of the great post-war writers. This is true but it’s also not true because of course he is one of the great post-war writers, that is true. But what he really is, he’s one of the great post-Holocaust writers. Philip Roth knew it. Primo Levi knew it. Clive Sinclair knew it. They knew the difference between being a post-war writer and a post-Holocaust writer. Primo Levi said, “Among us the writer survivors, Aharon Appelfeld’s voice has a unique, unmistakable tone, eloquent through innocence. And the key word here is perhaps innocence.

The innocence of a child, certainly. And few have written better about how children experience the world, the closeness of mothers, the distance of fathers, the smells of forests and fields, the importance of grandparents. But also, innocence as opposed to experience, that gap between a child and a night train who knows nothing. And a man many years later at a railway station who knows so much. And the world of after is not just unclear and uncertain, it is fragmented, it is full of pieces. Not fluency, but silence and stuttering. The job of the survivor as in his last masterpiece, the man who couldn’t stop sleeping, is to connect, is to try and bring things together, bring together things which have been shattered almost beyond repair. The central character in the book is shot in the 1948 war in Israel. His legs are shattered. Can they be connected? Can the bones be healed? Can anything be connected in his life? Bring together the world of his childhood, Yiddish, the smells and memories of fields and forests, a far away landscape with a new language, Hebrew, a new name, Aharon, a new landscape. His first poems were published in newspapers in the early 1950s. And then in the mid 1950s, he described what prompted him to take to storytelling as opposed to poetry. "It was the middle of the 1950s, I was alone in the fields of the Judaean Hills, I thought, is this my landscape? Is this my language? This was a moment of despair.” He told Philip Roth, “The fifties were years of search for me.” And during the late 1950s, he wrote in his memoir, “I gave up my ambition to become an Israeli writer and made every effort to become what I really was, an emigre, a refugee, and this effort culminated in my first book.”

And that was published in 1962. And then his first novel appeared in 1971, but his breakthrough came in 1978 with “Badenheim 1939” and “Age of Wonders.” “Badenheim 1939” is considered a classic of Holocaust literature. The book depicted a Jewish resort near Vienna at the onset of the war. Nazis are not mentioned by name, but Appelfeld’s idyllic bourgeois world is slowly turned into a nightmare as the town’s Jewish residents are forced to register in a golden book, barred from leaving the community. And then at the novella’s close, ushered into the four filthy freight cars without realising their final destination. “The Age of Wonders” is more a literary book. It is the story of a Jewish Austrian writer and his family in provincial Austria in the late 1930s, seen from the point of view of his 12-year-old son and the return of the son, Bruno, now living in Jerusalem in a childless and loveless marriage, 30 years later, a ghost in a town haunted by its past. What has changed and what remains the same? It tells the story of Jews in Austria, Jews, Austrians, and antisemitism. And those are I think his two most famous novels. But perhaps one of his greatest books is his memoir Translated in 2005, “The Story of a Life,” and one of his last novels, “The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping,” which is very remarkably similar to his memoir, and the character at the centre of the novel is very, very similar to himself in his memoir. “At the end of the war,” says the central character in the novels opening sentence, “I became immersed in constant slumber.

Everything passes in a dense dreamless sleep.” The narrator, Irwin, and Holocaust survivor, only 16 years old, is so traumatised by what he’s lived through that he cannot deal with it. “I was trapped in thick sleep.” He can’t stop sleeping, the central character. And then he reaches Naples and travels to post-war Palestine where he joins a group of other teenage boys. And as time passes, he decides he wants to become a writer. He changes his name from Irwin to Aharon. He starts to speak and then to write in Hebrew, just like Appelfeld. He’s no longer a Jew from East Europe. He becomes an Israeli with a new homeland. He’s become a completely different person. A new name, a new home, and a new language. And Aharon tells a very complicated story about changing identity in a deceptively simple prose. He repeats key words and phrases. We follow his journey from Europe to Israel. But Appelfeld offers us glimpses of the boy’s life before he arrives in Naples, his home with his parents, ghettos, forests, and camps. Very different from the familiar world of concentration camps, barking dogs, barbed wire, and Nazi guards. He’s created a new unfamiliar world free of cliches, without sentimentality, without false piety. At the end of the war, Irwin is quite alone, but manages to get to Palestine. He can’t stop sleeping. It is his way of dealing with the traumas he’s lived through.

His life has become a story of three landscapes, the world of his childhood in the Carpathian Mountains, blurred memories of the war, ghettos, camps, hiding in forests, and then Palestine, a kibbutz, a military hospital, and Tel Aviv. Let me go back to that word landscape. In one interview, Appelfeld described what prompted him to take to storytelling. “It was the middle of the ‘50s. I was alone in the fields of the Judaean Hills. I thought, is this my landscape? Is this my language? If not this landscape, which one?” And Appelfeld came up with two answers. Central Europe in “Badenheim 1939” and “The Age of Wonders,” and moving between a landscape in Bukovina, East Europe and Israel. Not just the landscape, of course, because these become books about landscapes certainly, but also time, memory, identity, displacement and loss. Let me finish with with a passage which I hope will give you a flavour of Appelfeld. Just before this passage from his “Memoir: The Story of a Life,” comes this sentence which begins, “No one knew what the next day would bring. By now, these words should alert us to this. The next day, will bring us something truly terrible.” And this is from his “Memoir: The Story of a Life.” “On October the 13th, 1942, the director of the Institute for the Blind was ordered to bring his children to the railway station.

The children dressed in their Sabbath vest each put a book in Braille in his backpack, along with a plate, a mug, a fork, a spoon, and a change of clothes. Gottesman explained to them that the road to the railway station was not a long one, and they would make five brief stops on route. At these stops, they would sing classical songs and Yiddish songs. When they reached the railway station, they would sing their anthem. The children were excited but not frightened. Their eyes widened with anticipation. They understood that from now on they would be called upon to do things that had not yet been required of them. The first stop was the Emperor’s well. It was famous in the town for its excellent water. Orthodox Jews, however, did not use it since it was used by the towns folk and the owner of the inn and the non-Jewish butcher would draw from it. At this first stop, the children sang songs by Schubert. There was a strong wind near the well and the children seemed to raise their voices. No one was there apart from them. And their songs sounded like a prayer. Gottesman was usually careful not to criticise the children outside the confines of the institute. This time, however, he contravened his own rules and said, 'The song is sacred. And even under trying conditions, none of its notes should be overlooked.’ At the second stop in Labour Square, there was also no one waiting for them.

The children sang a song from Bach and Gottesman was satisfied with their rendering. It was at this Square on the first day of May that Jewish communists would gather. The assembly never lasted more than a few minutes for the police would spring out, swinging their clubs at the demonstrators to disperse them. This time, however, there was not a soul in the Square, except for some Ukrainian youths who had climbed the trees that surrounded it and threw stones as they shouted, ‘Jews to the cattle cars.’ At the third stop, women brought the children water and slices of bread spread with oil. The children were happy with this warm reception and sang Yiddish songs. When they finished singing, the women didn’t want to let them go. ‘We won’t give you our children,’ they shouted. Gottesman intervened and said, ‘We’ll go along with everyone else. We are no different from anyone. Whatever happens to everyone will happen to us as well.’ One woman could not restrain herself and yelled, ‘Communist.’ At the fourth stop, next to the ghetto’s fence, many emotional people were waiting for them and showered them with gifts. One man on a balcony shouted the top of his voice, ‘We love you children, and soon will meet again. We’ll, never ever forget how you sang. You were the angelic choir boys of our ghetto.’ By turns, the children’s sang classical songs and folk songs, even part of a Verdi opera. Here too, women surrounded the children and didn’t allow them to continue on their way.

But now they were no longer on their own. The soldiers posted alongside the ghetto’s fence began swinging their clubs. And all at once, the sort of singing stopped. On the narrow road to the railway station, the children halted and again broke into song. The guards must have been taken by surprise and let them sing at first, but not for long. They immediately set up upon the children with their clubs and the children who are holding one another’s hands trembled as one body. ‘Don’t be afraid, children,’ Gottesman whispered. And they managed to overcome their pain. At the railway station, they still managed to sing their anthem in its entirety before being pushed into the cattle cars.” And this is from his “Memoir: The Story of a Life.” And now, let me see if there are some questions and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: Frida says, “In one of his books, Appelfeld wonders about the phenomena of provincial city, the Czernowitz, with such good university and very rich intellectual life. Can you tell us if it is something special in Czernowitz that such high numbers of great people were born there?”

A: That is a fantastic question, Frida. I can’t explain why Czernowitz produced so many great writers and had such a great literary culture. It perhaps has something to do with the mix of languages, the mix of people. It was one of the great Yiddish cultural centres. It kept moving from Romania, to now it’s in Ukraine. It has a different name, Chernivtsi, and is right in the westernmost corner of Ukraine. Just as it was previously, the easternmost part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And it is true, it was home to many great writers. And I wonder if it has something to do with the mix of languages, German, Yiddish, Romanian, Ukrainian, whether somehow that created a sort of ferment of languages. It is of course, where the great 1908 Yiddish conference took place, which was one of the turning points in the history of Yiddish culture as well as of the Yiddish language. I’m sorry, I don’t think that’s a very convincing answer, but I think that’s the best I can come up with. I think it has to do with this mix of languages and cultures, not just in Czernowitz itself, but throughout Bukovina, throughout that whole area of Eastern Europe. And that created these writers who grew up speaking different languages and just were like Appelfeld, never quite knew who they were and became, many of them, immigrants and refugees. So some like Itzik Manger, who was born in Czernowitz, a great Yiddish poet, one of the great Yiddish poets, then moved to Poland, then came to Britain, then moved back to Israel, or moved to Israel. And this constant sense of movement, there was a description in an obituary of Manga when he died, describing him in London during the Second World War in Edgware Road Tube Station, where he’s trying to translate from Shakespeare into Yiddish. And he has an enormous English dictionary, and he’s an enormous German dictionary, and he’s an enormous Yiddish dictionary. And he’s just trying to work his way to translate this extraordinary English language into his Yiddish language. And the person who wrote the obituary happened to be there at Edgware Road Tube Station and describe the scene. And I think it sort of captures a sense of these people who live between places and between languages. I hope that gives you some kind of answer, Frida.

Q: Romaine asks, “Is there any insight as to how he could integrate his thinking so brilliantly with this history of trauma?”

A: Hmm… I think one answer is that like many Holocaust survivors, he experienced terrible things. Mother murdered, grandmother murdered, separated from his father, living and hiding in the forests. But as I hope that passage that I read right at the end about the blind children conveys, he… There’s a kind of understatement, and he describes how in the early 1950s when he starts writing these rather wild and passionate poems, that he then discovered a kind of restraint through prose. And I think that is how he integrated it, that he integrated his thinking with his history of trauma, that he found a way of… Found a language of restraint, an extraordinary language of restraint. And maybe he learned that in part from Kafka, maybe in part from Agnon. But it was his greatest gift, I think as a writer, that he didn’t just let it sort of pour out the emotion. He managed to control the emotion in his writing, in his best prose writing. And he moves between time and landscape. And that is also one of his great gifts as a writer, that he doesn’t just have a very straightforward, kind of, setting for his books. He moves back and forward in time. And these images, the constant sort of use of metaphor, like for example, about the broken bones of the legs of this young teenager, that it sort of absolutely captures the sense of how difficult it is to make things connect in this young man’s life. And the broken leg somehow comes to stand for everything else that’s broken in his life and that won’t heal and that he can’t repair. And he never says, “I can’t repair this, I can’t heal this, I can’t fix this.” It is just clear that this broken leg stands for all the other things that are broken.

Monty says, “Check out a Jewish writer called Der Nister.” Thank you very much.

And Ruth says, “Thank you. I met him just before his death. He was a fascinating man, a gentleman.” Everybody who knew him and Philip Roth interviewed him in his wonderful book of interviews with writers called “Shop Talk.” And what sort of emerges is the gentleness of Appelfeld. Not the bitterness, not the anger, not the rage, but the gentleness of him as a person, the kindness. And I do recommend the Roth interview, Philip Roth’s interview with Appelfeld in “Shop Talk.” It’s a wonderful book of interviews, including with Primo Levi, including with Ivan Klima, including with a number of other people, which is incidentally an absolute revelation if you’re thinking about how did Philip Roth become the writer he became, how did he discover European writers and what did these European Jewish writers mean to him? And I think one of the things, sorry, if you don’t mind just changing the subject for a moment. One of the things that mattered that shook Roth to his foundation when meeting people like Klima, when meeting people like Appelfeld, is he thinks to himself, I grew up playing baseball in Newark, New Jersey. And when I was that age, when I was growing up playing baseball in New Jersey, these people were running for their lives, like Appelfeld hiding in the forests, or like Klima, they were in concentration camps. And this discovery for Roth absolutely shook him to his foundations, I think, and changed the way he thought about writing and changed the way he thought about literature and modern European literature and what literature mattered and changed the way he thought about Jewishness. End of that lecture.

Q: Bob says, “I did not know of the author you’re reading, was so wonderful. Thank you. His writing is heart-wrenching. What is the name of his autobiography?”

A: His autobiography is called “The Story of a Life.” It’s very short. It is… I will tell you exactly, less than 200 pages. And then, it is very close. It’s a sort of sibling book, if you like, to this novel, which was what his last novel to be translated in his lifetime, “The Boy Who Wouldn’t Stop Sleeping.”

Q: And Lucy Huberman asks, “Would he have met Agnon in Palestine Israel? It is said that Agnon is hard to read for the next generation. Do you think they talked?”

A: Agnon was an enormous influence on Appelfeld, Lucy, he was because of these echoes of Central and East Europe. Agnon and Kafka were both hugely influential on him, huge influences on him and something… I was very struck when I first read that line, that sentence that I quoted from Yehoshua. I’m a huge fan of Yehoshua. I liked him as a person, I like him as a writer. But I was quite struck by that sense, that he conveys that Appelfeld wasn’t really an Israeli writer because he didn’t write about Israel. Yehoshua, of course, goes back generations in his roots in Palestine and Israel. But there was something about this, that Appelfeld doesn’t really belong with us. He doesn’t belong to us. He doesn’t share the same sense of our landscape and about Hebrew. And, you know, because by the time he learned Hebrew, it was his fifth, sixth, seventh language. So that’s why Agno mattered to him, because he was another of these great Israeli writers, but someone who came from Central and East Europe.

And Lorna, I hope that answers your question, Lucy. I don’t know exactly how well they knew each other, I’m afraid and there isn’t yet a biography, but I hope there will be. But Lorna says, “Shakespeare and the Yiddish sounds a hoot.” Well, it really does. But that’s the thing, you know, that if you are now in England as Itzik Manger was, and you’re trying to learn English, how better than to try and translate between Shakespeare and Yiddish? And there is now, I’m glad to say, a great revival of interest in Itzik Manger. And indeed later this year, there is a book of his poetry, which will be published by Pushkin Press in the English translation. And he was, by all accounts, an extraordinary figure. But it’s… I was trying, using that story to try and convey this constant movement between languages and memories and places that kind of haunted these people and that they were so constantly on the move and Appelfeld as much as anyone really.

Q: Sol Rosenberg, Thelma Rosenberg, I beg your pardon. “Did he really reconnect with his father and did they have a good relationship?”

A: It’s not clear that they had a good relationship. They were separated for 20 years. And when they got reunited… I would say that they met, met again rather than that they reconnected. And I wouldn’t say that they had a good relationship. It must have been an extraordinary moment. And some of the most moving accounts, I think of Kindertransport children. I’ve just been reading a book by Andrea Hammel, a German scholar who’s just written a book about Jewish refugees in Wales. And she describes, so a child who came on the Kindertransport and then after the war he gets reunited with his parents. But by now he speaks English and they don’t speak English and it’s a terribly difficult situation. And he felt he never really reconnected. There is in “The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Sleeping,” there is a fantastic set of images. The boy sleeps, but he also has terrible nightmares. And this is what his nightmares are. His nightmares are that he’s visited by his parents who he knows are dead. But they come to visit him in his dreams and they say, “You’ve changed your name. You are no longer Irvin. You are now Aharon. You’ve changed your language. You used to speak Yiddish with us and now you speak Hebrew and we can’t speak to you.” And this is just the most haunting description that I’ve come across of somebody’s sense of wanting to be close to their parents, but being totally unable even in their dreams to reconnect with them. That they don’t… The price of learning Hebrew, the price of coming to safety in Palestine, the price of changing his name in order to fit in, is that he is now further than ever from his parents, his home, his landscape, his family. And I think that was a way of saying how very difficult it was to reconnect with his father.

Q: Abigail asked, “Did he ever marry?”

A: Yes, he did, and he had at least one son, possibly more, I’m afraid. I don’t know the exact details. And he wrote a book about his favourite cafes in Jerusalem and his son illustrated the illustrations of the cafes.

Q: And Judy says, “Many Israelis have a difficult relationship with the Holocaust. They want to be a different kind of Jew from the victimised European Jews. How did Appelfeld fit into Israeli literary culture?”

A: Well, this is the thing. I don’t… I think he was something of an outsider within Israeli literary culture, because there were so many great Israeli writers who were born in Israel, Palestine or Israel, grew up speaking Hebrew, Oz, Grossman, Keret, Yehoshua. And of course there are great writers who came from Central and East Europe as refugees or immigrants. And I think, there was this feeling among… Well, certainly for Appelfeld, certainly for Appelfeld, I can’t speak for Dan Pagis, I can’t speak for Amichai, they just didn’t really fit in even though he came as a teenager to Palestine, that he just… and learned Hebrew and wrote in Hebrew. He did not write in German for the reasons he gave, but that he just never really belonged. That of course, one speaks of an Israeli writer, and of course it is one of his great subjects. It’s not just that he writes about the Holocaust. It’s all about loss. It’s displacement. It’s not speaking the right language. It’s not being able to hold onto memories of your landscape, of your family. So I don’t think he did fit him.

Abigail says, “Shakespeare was performed in Yiddish in New York City.” Certainly. Yes, absolutely. And she says, “I know this from an anecdote related to me where someone at Columbia University discovered that Shakespeare was actually English after having seen it in Yiddish.” That’s a wonderful story.

Ed Tega says, “We knew his son in London, an artist indeed. And he came to the New London, the sort synagogue at St. John’s Wood. I think it’s a liberal synagogue, actually. But I may not be right about that. And yes, no, his son was an artist, that’s always an artist. that’s right. And in one of his books… Oh no, sorry, we’ve dealt with this or tried to deal with the question about Czernowitz.

Ruth says, "Thank you. I met him just before his death. He was a fascinating man, a gentleman. Well, yes, that’s the thing that people do say that he was the most gentle and kind of men despite this terrible, terrible experience in his childhood and in his teens. And despite the sense of not really fitting in and belonging.

And now, forgive me, it is six o'clock. I’ve kept you too long already. Thank you for your fascinating questions. Thank you for coming. I don’t know who the next writers will be that I’ll be talking about, but I do hope you can join me then. And thank you again for your time and your patience and your generosity.