David Herman
Aharon Appelfeld: Writings on the Holocaust

David Herman | Aharon Appelfeld: Writings on the Holocaust

- Hello, my name is David Herman and today I’m going to be talking about one of the great Israeli writers, Aharon Appelfeld, in the second of a three-part series. Next Thursday I shall be talking about Amos Oz, and last week I was talking about A.B. Yehoshua. Back in an interview in 1984 with one of my favourite British writers, Anglo-Jewish writers I should say, and critics, Clive Sinclair, Clive was asked about the Israeli and Eastern European writers he most admired, and he said, “One envies the writing yet at the same time, you don’t envy the history that has created that writing. These are writers who are writing on the edge of existence.” Writing on the edge of existence is a very powerful phrase, and there is no writer that this is more true of than Aharon Appelfeld. And it brings us to two subjects straight away that are at the heart of Appelfeld’s life, and at the heart of his writing. First of all, Israel, and secondly, perhaps even more important, the Holocaust. Appelfeld died in January 2018, six years ago, aged 85. There was an immediate response in America and in Israel. Serious, thoughtful pieces, as well as obituaries. In Britain, not so much. Why not? Appelfeld was one of the great, not just one of the great Israeli writers, but he was also one of the great modern Jewish writers. Where were the obituaries and tributes in Britain? It is in part a problem bound up, I think, with Appelfeld’s relation with Israel. There are two kinds of Israeli writers, of major Israeli writers. First of all, there are the Israeli writers born in Israel. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, David Grossman, Edgar Caret, and particularly many of the younger writers today.

And then secondly, there’s a second group of Israeli writers born in Europe who later came to Palestine or to Israel. Bialik, born in Volhynia, Agnon, born in Galicia, Benjamin Tammuz, born in Russia, Yehuda Amichai, born in Wurzburg in Germany, Dan Pagis, born in Czernowitz, and Appelfeld, born near Czernowitz. Now in Ukraine, of course. Yehoshua said that although he lived in Israel for most of his life, Appelfeld could not be characterised as an Israeli writer because he didn’t write about Israel. This isn’t quite true, but compared to Yehoshua, I can see his point. Gabriel Josipovici, another of my favourite Anglo-Jewish writers and critics, once wrote about Appelfeld, his work is the strikingly different from that of Amos Oz, A. B. 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, their concerns, are Israeli ones. Appelfeld, by contrast, is a European whose language happens to be Hebrew. Really interesting distinction. Elsewhere, Josipovici wrote about Appelfeld, his novels are closer in feeling to the work of other Israeli writers born in Europe, such as the poets Yehuda Amichai and Dan Pagis, than to that of a native Israeli like Amos Oz. In Appelfeld’s work, as in that of Paul Salam, one hears the distinctive voice of Jewish European culture, the strains of Holderlin and Kleist and Kafka, as well as the Bible and the Talmud. 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, am 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 one particular word here, the word irrelevantly. In Appelfeld, the devil is always in the detail. When father says something irrelevantly, we should prick up our ears at once, because what follows is going to be very important, very relevant indeed. On numerous occasions in “The Age of Wonders,” we’re told that Bruno’s father, Bruno’s the central character of the novel, that Bruno’s father was a friend of Stefan Zweig and Max Brodt, Martin Buber and Schnitzler. Above all, he was, writes Appelfeld, a sworn devotee of Franz Kafka, as was Appelfeld himself. Kafka’s few published works, and this is 1937 that Appelfeld is talking about in “The Age of Wonders,” 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 Israel in the 1950s. First, Kafka. He said, I discovered Kafka here in Israel during the 50s. Like many of my generation at the university, I devoured the writings of Kafka and Camus. I got enmeshed in the dreams and the vagueness, and I didn’t see that Kafka’s mist was shaped by detailed descriptions, by precise sensations that strip the mist of its haze. The other Central European writer who was hugely important for Appelfeld was Shmuel Yosef Agnon from Galicia, who knew Czernowitz, the nearest big town to Appelfeld’s home in Bukovina.

I was thrilled to encounter the names of people, towns and villages that I vaguely recall from home, wrote the young Appelfeld. It was from him that I learned how you can carry the town of your birth with you anywhere and live a full life in it. This is the twist in Appelfeld’s writing. He wrote in Hebrew, but his best books, his greatest books, are set in Central and East Europe. “Badenheim 1939,” “The Age of Wonders,” take place in Austria. His memoir, “The Story of a Life,” has one foot in Bukovina, another in Palestine. But the part set in Palestine always looks back. His novel “Katharina” is set in Ruthenia. I should just say I mentioned last week at the end of my talk that Penguin Modern Classics have just republished three of Appelfeld’s greatest works in Penguin paperback. The novel “Katharina,” the memoir, “The Story of a Life,” and perhaps his best-known novel, “Badenheim 1939.” So, they’re all now available in the UK in Penguin Modern Classics. I’m not sure if they are yet in the U.S., but just to let you know. So, the part set in Palestine in his memoir always looks back. His best late books are a constant dialogue between the past in Central, and Eastern Europe, and the present in Palestine or in Israel. So, why write in Hebrew? Why not write in his native language? This is what Clive Sinclair asked him in their conversation in his 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 I am. Appelfeld’s relations to the writers of Central and East Europe wasn’t just a literary issue, or even an issue of language. It was a question of home, identity, belonging. It was a question of reconstructing himself as a person.

“I was disoriented for so many years, he later wrote. I came to Israel 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. I cannot be an Israeli writer, he said in an interview later. My biography is a different biography. I came from a different world, from Israel he means, a different geography, another crucial word for Appelfeld. I come from a world that suffered a terrible catastrophe, and this experience requires a different language, a different tone. I came to Israel when I was 13 and a half, almost 14. 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. Fascinating phrase, a stepmother tongue. Yes, life was kind of a 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 was mute, never attending a school, never learning. This is the heart of Appelfeld’s life and his writing. 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 his characters so often talk about. Appelfeld was born in 1932, Aharon Appelfeld.

He was born near Czernowitz in the book of Ina, which was home to the great Yiddish poet Itzik Manger, the great German poet, German-Jewish poet, Paul Celan, Dan Pargis, Gregor von Rezzori, and the Romanian writer, Norman Manea. The key word that describes Appelfeld’s childhood in the 1930s and 40s, his formation and his writing, is 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. This is from a piece he wrote in the New Yorker in 2001 called the Kafka Connection. 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 said, 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, this is his parents, his grandparents rather, sorry, to pray for an hour and eat some breakfast and go to work with the peasants. There was something, you know, a special silence that continued from the prayer to the work. How much of that I absorbed, I don’t know. So, on the one hand, Vienna, Prague, Budapest. On the other, the peasants and the Carpathians and Appelfeldts, devout grandparents. Or take this quote about the languages he heard. My mother tongue was German. My grandparents spoke Yiddish. Most of the inhabitants of Bukovina, where I lived as a child, were Ruthenians, so they all spoke Ruthenian. Or take this about religion. Our home was without Torah and without religious observance.

He’s talking now about his parents’ home. But his grandparents were deeply religious, what he called mythological. 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 Eastern Europe, and those who already spoke Hebrew, and those who must learn it. Perhaps this is why his death has gone largely unnoticed in Britain, he didn’t fit our idea of an Israeli writer. And the world he belonged to, Czernowitz, the Carpathians, doesn’t connect with us in Britain 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, and believe in one religion, 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 extraordinarily 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.” But their amazement was cut short. An engine, an engine coupled to four filthy freight cars, emerged from the hills and stopped at the station. Its appearance was as 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 don’t have far to go. That is the end of “Badenheim 1939.” I’ll take the opening and 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 had 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 these two passages of our trains, at the end of “Book One,” we have another train journey that gives meaning to both of these other passages. By the next day, we were on the cattle train, Erkling South. This is what the characters of “Badenheim 1939” and the central character Bruno in “The Age of Wonders” don’t know, but we’ll find out. This is what the readers of Appelfeld’s two masterpieces don’t know, but we’ll find out. And this restraint, this pattern of train journeys, these silences, what we are 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. Not just one of the great Israeli writers of our time, but one of the great writers of our time. It won’t stop. I was going to say he’s one of the great post-war writers. This is true and not true. Of course, he’s one of the great post-war writers, but what he really is one of the great post-Holocaust writers. Philip Roth knew it. Primo Levi knew it. Clive Sinclair knew it. They knew the difference. Primo Levi said, among us, the writer-survivors. Aharon Appelfeld’s voice has a unique, unmistakable tone, eloquent through innocence. The key word here is 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.

In “The Age of Wonders,” that gap between a child on a night train who knows nothing and a man, many years later, at a railway station who knows so much. In 1941, Aharon Appelfeld was nine and a half years old when his mother was killed. The Romanian army retook his hometown after a year of Soviet occupation, and his mother, who was then 31, and his grandmother were murdered by Romanians and Germans. I didn’t see her die, he told an interviewer, but I did hear her one and only scream. Appelfeld was deported with his father to a Nazi concentration camp in Romanian-controlled Transnistria. In 1942, ten and a half, he escaped the camp and didn’t see his father again for 20 years. I was wandering for three years. 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. In the forest, he later told an English newspaper, 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. In 1944, the Russians recaptured Ukraine. He became a cook in the Soviet army and worked in the field kitchens in Ukraine. And then, 1945-1946, he travelled through Europe after the war, through Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, arriving in Italy, where he lived in a camp for displaced persons for several months. He was asked, at this time, aged 13, what was your sense of self? Very disoriented, he said, 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, of course. My grandparents, they spoke Yiddish. The maids in my home were Ukrainian, so I spoke Ukrainian. The regime was Romanian, so I picked up a bit of Romanian, and then I was in Russia 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. In 1946, he went to Palestine. And from 1948 to 1950, he was at agricultural school at Ein Kerem, then Hannah Maisel Agricultural School, and then army service, and then from 1952 to 56, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I signed up for courses in Yiddish, he said. In the early 1950s, Martin Buba, Gershon Sholem, Ernst Simon and Yehezkel Kaufmann were among those who taught at the Hebrew University. During the late 1950s, he writes 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, “Smoke,” which appeared in 1962. I was a child during the war. This child grew up, and all that happened to him and within him continued into his adulthood, the loss of his home, the loss of his language, suspicion, fear, the inhibitions of speech, the feelings of alienation in a foreign country. It was from these that I wove my fiction. I come from a different world, meaning from Israel, a different geography. I come from a world that suffered terrible catastrophe, and this experience requires a different language, a different tone. Not speaking during the Holocaust, I could not speak. I could understand Ukrainian because the maids in our home were Ukrainians, but my accent would give me away, so I didn’t speak. After the war, I could not utter a word because my muscles had atrophied.

After wandering with the Soviet army and with the refugees, Jewish refugees, speech came back to me very slowly. I was stuttering. Yes, life was a 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 problems I had to solve. Throughout my university years, he told another interview, 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. Prose saved me from the sentimentality. This is the other great thing about Appelfeld, which distinguishes him from so many other Holocaust writers, even the great ones. In some of his best writings, he divides the world into two. Before the Holocaust, after the Holocaust. Take “The Age of Wonders” again, which is divided into two books. Before, after. We know almost nothing about what happens to Bruno and his parents during those years. Mother’s death is mentioned only in passing, and in part two, we are briefly told that the father probably died mad in Theresienstadt. They said, writes Appelfeld, he had died half mad in Theresienstadt, and 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. Rumour. And the world of after is not just unclear and uncertain, it is fragmented, 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,” published in America and Israel, but still not in Britain, is to connect, 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 faraway landscape, with a new language, Hebrew, a new name, Aram, a new landscape. In one interview, Appelfeld described what prompted him to take to storytelling. It was the middle of the 1950s. I was alone in the fields of the Judean hills. I thought, is this my landscape? Is this my language? This was a moment of despair. And if not this landscape, which one? Appelfeld came up with two answers. Central Europe in “Badenheim 1939 and The Age of Wonders.” Moving between a landscape in Bukovina, in Eastern Europe, and Israel. Those were his two landscapes. Not just a landscape, of course. These became books about landscapes, certainly, but also time, memory, identity, displacement, loss. These became his subjects.

And the way Appelfeld found this distinctive literary voice is worth paying tribute to. He published his first short stories between 1959 and 1971. His first story appeared in the journal Gazit in 1959. And then around 1960, he was reunited with his father after finding his name on a Jewish agency list. The father had been sent to a refugee camp in Be'er Tuvia. The reunion was so emotional that Appelfeld has never been able to write about it. In Israel, in the first years every day, there were refugees arriving and their names were always put in the paper. So, every day I studied the paper to see if perhaps my father was one of them. And one day I saw his name. The paper said he was in a kibbutz in such and such a place. So, I took a bus and went there. When I arrived and asked what they looked at there and asked, they looked at their list and they said he’s picking the fruit in that field over there. So, I went to that field, and it was full of fruit trees and in each tree a man. I walked down the rows and looked in each tree and then I came to one. And there was my father. Appelfeld’s breakthrough came in 1978 with these two great novels, “Badenheim 1939 and Age of Wonders.” Badenheim 1939, according to one of his obituaries, was considered a classic of Holocaust literature. The book depicted a Jewish resort near Vienna at the onset of World War II.

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 onto four filthy freight cars without realising their final destination. Rather clear childhood memories underlie Badenheim 1939, Appelfeld told Philip Roth. Every summer we, like all the other petit bourgeois families, would set out for a resort. Every summer we tried to find a restful place where people didn’t gossip in the corridors, didn’t confess to one another in corners, didn’t interfere with you and, of course, didn’t speak Yiddish. Many years after the Holocaust, he said, when I came to retrace my childhood from before the Holocaust, I saw that these resorts occupied a particular place in my memories. Many faces and bodily twitches came back to life. It turned out that the grotesque was etched in no less than the tragic. In Badenheim I tried to combine sites from my childhood with sites of the Holocaust. My feeling was that I had to remain faithful to both realms. As for “The Age of Wonders,” also published in 1978, Gabriel Iesovici writes in his preface to an early English translation, this is a book about continuity in discontinuity, the continuity of memory in the body, of the body in time and of humanity through the generations.

Yet the book is clearly about Runeau’s own attempts to bring together the scattered and repressed parts of himself. With this book, indeed, post-war writing has come of age, for it has grasped and made palpable for us the relation of the great modernist tradition of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Proust and Kafka to the crucial events of modern times. And then, soon after these two books were published and then translated in 1980 and 1981, comes an extraordinary critical breakthrough in the 1980s. The first review in the New York Review of Books is of Badenheim 1939 and 1981. And then comes Al Alvarez’s review on “The Age of Wonders” in 1982 in the New York Review of Books. Ruth Visser reviewed his books in commentary in 1983. He meets Philip Roth in 1984. Josipovici writes the preface in 1985, and interviews Appelfeld for the PN Review in 1986. Clive Sinclair interviews him in 1987. Philip Roth wrote about Appelfeld in 1988 for the New York Times and the London Review of Books. Dennis Donoghue reviewed him for the New York Review of Books in 1989. John Bailey for the New York Review of Books in 1992. Appelfeld appears in Roth’s novel Operation Shylock in 1993. Suddenly, in barely a decade, he has become a major writer, acclaimed by major British, and American writers, and critics. Philip Roth interviewed him for the New York Times in 1988, an interview republished in Roth’s book of interviews, “Shop Talk,” in 2001.

And he writes, describes Appelfeld, at 55 Aharon is a small bespectacled compact man with a perfectly round face and a perfectly bald head and the playfully thoughtful air of a benign wizard. He’d have no trouble passing for a magician who entertains children at birthday parties by pulling doves out of a hat. It’s easier to associate his gently affable and kindly appearance with that job than with the responsibility by which he seems inescapably propelled, responding in a string of elusively portentous stories to the disappearance from Europe, while he was out witching peasants and foraging in the forests, of just about all the continent’s Jews, his parents among them. I should say, in passing, that Roth’s encounter with Appelfeld, along with his encounters around the same time also all published in “Shop Talk” with Primo Levi, and Ivan Klima, and Milan Kundera, and many other great Central East European writers, transformed Roth. They had a massive effect and impact on Roth’s writing and his thinking about the world. Even though he wrote about America, his writing about America cannot be understood without these encounters with Jewish Holocaust survivors and writers. Then in 1999, Appelfeld published a third great novel, a third great book, I beg your pardon, The Story of a Life, a memoir, which was translated in 2005. A recurring word in the is observer. Appelfeld watches and writes down what he remembers, like Primo Levi is one of the great witnesses. He is suspicious of fluency and as he finds his voice as a writer, he recalls how his early writing was more about holding back than about flowing.

He’s suspicious of people who talk too readily about their experiences of the Holocaust or those who write too easily. Memory is hard and returns as fragmented images. A dark figure, a hand that had been charred, a shoe of which nothing was left but shreds. This is not only the compelling story of a life told without sentimentality or sensationalism, it adds greatly to our understanding of the Holocaust. It reminds us of a different landscape, not of ghettos or death camps, but forests and fields where the young Appelfeld spent the summers living on berries and fruit, seeking shelter in the cold winters with peasants. None of this is romanticised and it’s in these stories, it is the stories of children which are the most powerful and the most unforgettable. Children being eaten alive by wild dogs, anti-Semitic Ukrainian children, the feral children of the DP camps, gangs of young thieves and hooligans, Appelfeld himself on the forced march to the camp being sucked into the deep mud. Let me finish 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 and by now these words should alert us to this, the next day will bring us bring something truly terrible and it 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.

I should just briefly interrupt to say that of course as soon as you hear the word railway station you know it is going to be terrible. The children, dressed in their Sabbath best, each put a book in Braille in his backpack along with a plate, a mug, a fork, a spoon and a change of clothes. Gotharsmen explained to them that the road to the railway station was not a long one and that they would make five brief stops en 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 all the townsfolk and the owner of the inn, and the non-Jewish butcher were drawn from it. At this first stop the children sang songs by Schubert. There was a strong wind near the well and the children strained to raise their voices. No one was there apart from them, and their songs sounded like a prayer. Gotharsmen 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 Gotharsmen was satisfied with their rendering. It was at this square on 1st 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 from 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. Gotharsmen 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 at the top of his voice we love you children, and soon we’ll meet again. We’ll never ever forget how you sang. You were the angelic choir boys of our ghetto. By turns the children 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 singing ceased. 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 upon the children with their clubs and the children who were 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. So, I hope, I very much hope, this was a kind of introduction to Aharon Appelfeld’s life and to his writing and I do believe that he is one of the great writers of his time, of our time, and had an extraordinary life also. Now I see that already some questions so let me do my very best to answer.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: Romain Stanger, a lovely familiar name, he spent his early childhood on the run, he honours observation in his writing. Does he link the two in talking about his writing?

A: Absolutely, Romain, he does. You’re absolutely right to say he spent his early childhood on the run, years on the run, hiding in the fields and the forests which is why they become such dominant images in his later writing, and he is a great observational writer. That image of the well, for example, in that passage from his memoir, and yes, he does link observation with talking about his writing, and with talking about his childhood on the run. So yes, he does, that’s very very good perception.

Sheila Chist says the story of my life is the memoir, or is the memoir, no the memoir, sorry, that I’ve given to innumerable friends and students. Good for you, I agree. Most powerful book for me and I’m someone who began studying the Holocaust at the Hebrew University in the early 80s then at Yad Vashem again, MA in Holocaust Studies at UCL in the 2000s. Thanks so much for this lecture. Thank you, Sheila. I’m so glad you share my view of this extraordinary memoir, which became later in later years the basis for his novel, “The Man Who Could Not Stop Sleeping,” which is a wonderful novel in its own right, but it is very closely based on his memoir.

And let’s see, thank you Madeleine Vilmos and Romaine, thank you both for your very kind emails.

Naomi Capa, Appelfeld’s short story Kitty was part of my A-level modern Hebrew course in 1981 and I’ve never forgotten its haunting quality. What a wonderful way of being introduced to a great writer. I was introduced to the writing of Saul Bellow with Herzog in 1975 and it changed my sense of Jewish-American writing, introduced me to not just Bellow but to Jewish-American writing also, so there’s a lot to be said for A-levels.

Rita, I listen intently. Oh, thank you, Rita, for your very, very kind message. And you mentioned that you’re the daughter of your beloved late parents, both Holocaust survivors. Thank you for sharing that.

Erica Mitsidis, thank you for your kind words. I’m very touched.

And thank you, Myrna Carlebach also.

Q: Jill Murray asks, do we know which writers of his time he admired?

A: Which is a very interesting question, Jill, thank you. Not so much of his time, I wouldn’t say, but Agnon and Kafka were two writers who mattered to him enormously. Agnon, because he knew and wrote about Czernowitz, which was the nearest big city to where Appelfeld grew up, and Kafka, I suppose what they share above all is not so much a biography, because, of course, Kafka grew up and spent most of his life in Prague, whereas, of course, Appelfeld spent his childhood in rural Bukovina, not far from Czernowitz, a very different Jewish world from Kafka’s Prague. But I suppose what they share is an extraordinary simplicity of prose, which is all the more powerful for its simplicity. And if you read, perhaps not so much the novels as the great short stories, “Metamorphosis in the Penal Colony,” “The Judgement ,” which are my three favourite Kafka short stories, it is the simplicity of the prose which is so astonishing. And I think that had a big impact and big influence on Appelfeld. I should say that for anyone who is unaware of this, this June was the centenary of Kafka’s death, he died in June 1924, and of tuberculosis.

In a sanatorium in Kieling. And there is a wonderful exhibition in Oxford, under the auspices of the Bodleian Library, which has the largest collection of Kafka manuscripts in the world. And part of the Bodleian Library is the Weston Library, W-E-S-T-O-N, which is next door to Oxford’s famous bookshop Blackwell’s. And there’s a really excellent exhibition at the Weston Library about Kafka, including many original manuscripts, which is fascinating to see his handwriting and to see how often he crossed things out. And there’s also a fascinating video of an interview with his niece, who describes how many of the Kafka papers ended up at the Bodleian Library, and she tells the story. And she was herself a refugee who came to England. And refugees actually played a huge part in the lives of Kafka’s, not so much members of his family, because, of course, his three sisters were murdered by the Nazis, and his parents had died before the Holocaust. But many of his circle managed to escape to Palestine, including, of course, Max Brodt, who wore with him a suitcase full of shoeboxes, which were in turn full of the manuscripts of many of Kafka’s great writings. So, refugees and Kafka is an interesting story. Anyway, I do recommend the exhibition. It’s running till September. So, if you are anywhere near Oxford in the next couple of months, do please go if you have a moment. Carol, thank you so much for your kind message.

Nick, thank you also. Badenheim is massively haunting. I couldn’t agree more. The relaxed picture slowly disintegrates to a chilling hideousness. That’s a very, very good description, because it is about a summer holiday resort, which turns into, of course, a complete nightmare. Josie Adler, thank you so much for your very kind words.

Rachel Mellor, thank you for your kind words. I’m ashamed to say I’ve never heard of this writer, but she’ll go and find the books you recommend now. Thank you, Rachel. Yes, do. And as I say, I’m sorry to keep repeating myself, but three of his greatest books have just, just been republished by Penguin Modern Classics. Possibly they’re not out till September, maybe. That’s when I’m reviewing them for the TLS, so that may mean that the books themselves aren’t coming out till September. But do look out for them in September. It’s his memoir, “Badenheim 1939,” his most famous novel, and a novel called “Katerina,” which is very little known, but it’s absolutely haunting about the relations between Jews and anti-Semites in Ruthenia.

Nina Sweet. Roth was dedicated to, and then it’s, you say, INTR. I’m not quite sure what that means, I’m afraid. I mean, yes, Philip Roth was a great admirer of Appelfeld. Yes, he did interview him for this paperback. Well, originally for the New York Times Book Review, but it was republished in the paperback “Shop Talk,” which is a fantastic book of interviews with so many great post-war writers, many of whom were victims of Nazism or Communism. And the interview with Appelfeld is extremely good and moving. And as I say, these interviews collectively changed Roth’s life and changed his writing in a way that hasn’t been properly assessed, I would say. So, it’s called “Shop Talk,” and do look out for it. It is available in paperback.

Q: Erica Mitsidis. Could I have your email, please? I feel I have to write you a brief thank you. I will certainly read Applebaum’s books.

A: Thank you. Yes. Yes, let me just quickly do that now.

So, I hope that’s turned on Q&As. Ah, Nina has retyped her message. Thank you, Nina. Roth was dedicated to introducing Eastern Europeans to America. Absolutely right. This is one of, again, repeating myself, but this is one of the most important things about Roth’s life and work in the 80s and 90s. He became editor of a series of books, published by Penguin, called “Writers from the Other Europe.” And these were all Central and Eastern European writers, apart from Primo Levi, who, of course, was Italian, but writers like Milan Kundera, Josie Kaczynski, I think. Well, Appelfeld, of course, Ivan Klima, the Czech writer. And there were about between a dozen and twenty of these books were published. Another great Polish Holocaust writer, Bruno, no, not Bruno Schultz. Oh, Bruno Schultz as well. Yes. But another as well. Tadeusz Borowski. Anyway, Roth was the editor of this series, and it had an enormous impact in introducing these really obscure writers from what was then communist East Europe in most cases, or in the case of Borowski, of course, they were already dead. And it introduced these writers and their experience of the Holocaust or of Soviet communism to a whole generation of British and American readers. And it was, I cannot tell you how influential it was. And do look out for these titles from the Writers from the Other Europe series. Many of them, I’m sure you’ll be familiar with. There may be one or two that perhaps you’re not.

Rhonda Bulguch. I’m very pleased that you’re highlighting these wonderful writers. Thank you. Rhonda’s in Toronto. Thank you so much for joining us from Toronto. That’s very kind of you. Thank you, Lina, for your very kind message.

Q: Did Appelfeld, Sue Melmed asked, did Appelfeld write any books for children?

A: No, he didn’t. No, not that I know of anyway. I don’t believe he did. I don’t know quite why not, because there was a sort of innocence about his writing, which Roth captures very nicely when he talks about him as looking like a magician at a children’s party. So, I don’t know why he didn’t, but he didn’t. Perhaps he felt his subjects were just too dark for children.

Rachel Mellor says, we’ll wait for those three Appelfeld books published by, republished by Penguin in September. I do hope you enjoy them.

Q: Gene Hurwitz, please, would you repeat the two places in Oxford for the Kafka exhibition?

A: Yes, Gene, certainly. The exhibition is under the auspices of the Bodleian Library, but it’s not actually held at the Bodleian Library, rather confusingly. It’s held at the Weston Library, W-E-S-T-O-N Library, and that is next door to Blackwell’s, right in the centre of Oxford. And it is a fascinating, quite a small exhibition, just a couple of rooms. There’s also another video as part of the exhibition of an unbelievable ballet production of Metamorphosis, which is just astonishing. Yes, so do, do go if you have a moment.

Erica Lewis, my family came from Czernowitz, so I can relate. Thrilled to learn about him. How wonderful. I know somebody else whose mother came from Czernowitz, and indeed we have staying with us for the last year, and probably for quite a bit longer, a very kind Ukrainian refugee artist who is from Czernowitz, which is the Ukrainian name for Czernowitz.

Q: Rhonda, Rhonda again asks a very interesting question. Are these great writers studied in Israel?

A: Well, I assume they must be, but I don’t know that for a fact, and it’s a very, very interesting and good question, but I assume they must be, because there’s such huge names in Israel, particularly Oz and Yahashua. Applefeld, as I say, perhaps a little bit less so.

Gloria, the Penguin editions are published on August the 15th, 16th, sorry. Thank you, Gloria. Thank you so much for clarifying that. So, they’re out in August. You won’t have to wait till September, and do treat yourselves and your dear and loved ones.

Q: Jean asks, which company is doing the ballet? I live in America, but will be in London later August.

A: I’m sorry, it’s not on now. This was something recorded some years ago, but you can see about 20 minutes of the ballet at the Kafka exhibition. So, if you do have an afternoon or a morning to nip down to Oxford on the train, or the bus, do go and see it. It’s an extraordinary production of metamorphosis.

And let’s see. Carol Newman, thank you so much for your kind words.

Yes, is he studied in Ukraine, Jill Murray asks. Now that’s a fantastic question. Now here’s an interesting thing. I recently interviewed someone who teaches Ukrainian literature at University College in London, and he described to me in this interview how Ukraine, in Ukraine, they have been setting up lots of institutes, cultural institutes, to preserve the memory of Jewish writers and of Jewish culture in Ukraine. So that is a dramatic, dramatic change in Ukrainian culture and history.

Forgive me, I know there are many, many more questions waiting to be answered, but I must sadly finish here. It is now 6:00, 6:02 in London. My apologies, I have to leave you in peace for your evening. Have a wonderful evening. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for your fascinating and informative questions as always. And next Thursday will be the last of this trilogy of talks on the great Israeli writers, and it will be about Amos Oz. Be well. Thank you so much.