David Herman
Aharon Appelfeld
Summary
David Herman discusses the lesser known life and work of novelist and Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld, as well as why his work is not better known.
David Herman
David Herman is a freelance writer based in London. Over the past 20 years he has written almost a thousand articles, essays, and reviews on Jewish history and literature for publications including the Jewish Chronicle, the Jewish Quarterly, Jewish Renaissance, the Guardian, the New Statesman, and Prospect. He has taught courses on Jewish culture for the London Jewish Cultural Centre and JW3. He is a regular contributor to Jewish Book Week, the Association of Jewish Refugees, and the Insiders/Outsiders Festival on the contribution of Jewish refugees to British culture.
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.
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.
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.