Aharon Appelfeld, a contemporary Israeli writer, was born in 1932 in Czernowitz, where German is his mother tongue. He learns Hebrew at fourteen, upon his arrival in the Land of Israel. A major figure of Israeli literature, he situates himself nonetheless outside the inner circle of writers who depict the states of mind of an Israeli society in permanent mutation. Appelfeld endeavors to retrace the lived experience of Central European Jewry in the first half of the twentieth century. Thanks to Yiddish, the language of the grandparents, matrix of the Jewish memory of Central Europe, he manages to throw a bridge between his Europe of origin and his country of welcome. He then has at his disposal a new asset: the Hebrew language, since it incarnates, together with Yiddish, one of the two great languages of European Jewish literature from the end of the nineteenth century. Appelfeld molds Hebrew at will and fashions in it new literary languages: he makes himself a sculptor of the language, in its fullnesses, but also in its lacks.
The quest for the memory of a vanished world occupies a preponderant place in this writer’s work. This quest is incarnated time and again through Appelfeld’s languages. Hebrew is, of course, the first of them, since it is the direct instrument of transmission. But the author endeavors, by means of this Hebrew learned in adolescence, to bring back to the surface the memory of the languages of his childhood: the grandparental language, Yiddish, and the mother tongue, German. Both form an intrinsic part of the Jewish memory of Central Europe, and Appelfeld brings into relief the passionate bond that unites them to their speakers. Through these languages that they bear in the deepest part of themselves, the latter evoke the multiple facets of a Jewish life that the writer never ceases to restage in the original version. And if the word “original” designates the primary sources, it also refers to Appelfeld’s very personal approach of making two languages “speak” by the intermediary of a third. Even in the forgetting of German and Yiddish, when they are constrained to adopt the Ukrainian peasant dialect, the characters remain indefectibly bound to the language of childhood and of love.
The thread of Jewish memory that Appelfeld unwinds is declined in two stages: that of harmony and that of the burn and of forgetting. In the time of harmony — or at the least of what seems to be a harmony between the Jews and their land of welcome — Yiddish appears first of all as the mother tongue par excellence. It must be recalled here that such is its affectionate nickname: “language of the mother.” It is also considered a sacred language, since it is thanks to it that the Hebrew of the Pentateuch can be transmitted. Yiddish thereby acquires its “paternal” letters of nobility insofar as it aligns itself with Hebrew, the language of the Law. Finally, Yiddish is not the exclusive prerogative of the Jews, since a Ruthenian servant adopts not only the Jewish family that employs her but also the Judaism that permeates the house and its inhabitants, and first and foremost the Yiddish language, which she masters to perfection.
The mamè loshn, the language of the mother
“My grandmother spoke Yiddish and her language had another sound (than German), or more precisely another ‘taste,’ since it always evoked for me the fragrance of prune compote.”1
Yiddish represents for Appelfeld the vital bond between the generations that succeeded one another in the Jewish world of Central and Eastern Europe. Like Kafka, with whom Appelfeld feels many an affinity, the ancestral language is the true umbilical cord that links him to the Jews of the East, those Ostjuden, the true depositaries, in his eyes, of an authentic Judaism. In the famous “Discourse on Yiddish,” Kafka writes:
“For Yiddish to be entirely close to you, it suffices that you meditate on the fact that, beyond your knowledge, there are still forces that are active, relations of forces that render you capable of understanding Yiddish by feeling it (…) And once you have been moved by it — for Yiddish is everything, the word, the Hasidic melody, and the profound reality of this Jewish actor himself — you will no longer recognize your former calm.”2
As though in echo, Appelfeld answers him in one of his novels set at the beginning of the twentieth century, in German-speaking and Catholic Austro-Hungarian Bukovina. The hero, Karl Hübner, freshly converted to Catholicism, is gnawed at by the memory of his parents. The latter, natives of a small village in the Carpathians, kept within themselves the vivid and spontaneous Yiddish of their origins, and this despite their desire for assimilation into the German-speaking milieu where they chose to live.
“Is it not marvelous? Not only does their face change in appearance, but their very language is modified. The German they are accustomed to employ daily breaks off all at once, and another language, slightly similar, appears and comes alive in their mouth. For Karl, it is clear that this is their own language and that through it alone can they express the feelings of their heart.”3
Appelfeld here joins Kafka in the perception of Yiddish as a language intimately bound to the senses and the feelings.
And it is to that language that Appelfeld pays homage. In the most remote regions of Central Europe of the first half of the twentieth century, traveling salesmen, delegates of the Zionist movement, innkeepers, and other conscripts have as their sole rallying point the Yiddish language. It bears recalling that yiddish means “Jewish” and that consequently the Yiddish language represents, specifically for the Jews of the East, the Jewish language, their language.
In Kfor ’al ha-’aretz, Gel sur la terre (Frost on the Earth), a traveling salesman, exhausted by the snowstorms, ends up in an inn. There he meets another Jew, a professional matchmaker by trade: “He speaks to you in your mother tongue,”4 that is to say, Yiddish. Appelfeld has translated into Hebrew the well-known Yiddish expression mamè-loshn, literally “language of the mother,” and imbued, in the original language, with a great tenderness for these two reunited components that are the mother and the language.
In the same story, the author continues to evoke the difficult conditions of existence of these traveling salesmen, always far from their home, wandering in the frozen steppes:
“Destructive time had had no hold on the ardent nostalgia they felt for a Jewish word, a Jewish dish, a burning stove.”5
It goes without saying that the term “Jewish” is here the exact translation of yiddish. Appelfeld alludes to the sensuality of the language, which one assuredly finds again in its lexicon and its syntax but which goes so far as to permeate even the taste of foods. The child Appelfeld, moreover, perceived it perfectly when he compares the savor of the Yiddish language to that of prune compote. One finds this same attachment to Yiddish again in Ha-bessora, La bonne nouvelle (The Good News), where the narrator is a delegate of the Zionist movement charged with collecting funds for Palestine and with bringing Jews there. The first thing “his audience expects of him is that he pronounce a Jewish word, that he bring good news.”6
Proustian language, sacred language
However, the Yiddish language does not convey solely the memory of the mother tongue. It associates itself also with Hebrew as a sacred language.
In the story Mi-merom ha-dumiya, Du haut du silence (From the Height of Silence), the narrator is the guardian of the Jewish tradition bequeathed by his father and symbolized by a small sanctuary erected on a height dominating a lake. A strange guardian in truth, who cannot accede to the mystery of Hebrew writing. Only the oral teaching, in Yiddish, of an old blind man manages to instill in him the knowledge of the sacred language.
“From the darkness of his opaque gaze, he makes the verses file past. How sweet the commentaries are to the ear in his mother tongue! The melody awakens memory in him. Without the music, he would remember nothing.”7
Thus, thanks to Yiddish, the guarantor of a Judaism on the way to extinction — the transmission is made by a blind man — accedes to the ancestral language. On the other hand, the osmosis that establishes itself between Yiddish and music is not fortuitous: by the grace of the Jewish melody, the nigun, the traditional commentary droned out during childhood resurges as though by enchantment on the lips of the old blind man. Moreover, the allusion to the “sweetness” of the language — matok means at once “sweet” and “sugary” — evokes the ancient Hebrew wooden primer with letters coated in honey: the child could thus delight at once in the sweetness of the golden nectar and in that of the sacred letters. The “taste” of the Yiddish language has already been evoked above, and if one adds to it this musical note, it appears clearly that Yiddish is a language that solicits the senses and is linked to them by channels as tenuous as they are mysterious. Through sensual pleasures that recall young Marcel’s madeleine and Vinteuil’s little phrase that haunts Swann, a prune compote or a forgotten melody make a whole universe surge forth: that of the Yiddish language.
Finally, having Yiddish play this role of “transmitter” of tradition considerably burnishes the escutcheon of the language, which was long considered a vulgar jargon: here, Yiddish is the key to sacred knowledge and, by that very fact, the language raises itself to the level of Hebrew. In other words, the mamè loshn, “language of the mother,” rejoins the language of the Patriarchs, Hebrew, so long frozen in its status of solitary omnipotence, and shares with it its sacred function.
The language of the non-Jews
Yiddish can also be the language of the non-Jew when the latter becomes the depositary of Jewish memory. Such is the case of Katerina, the Ruthenian servant of the eponymous novel, who conceives a boundless affection for her Jewish masters, Rosa and Benjamin, as well as their children. After the murder of the parents during a pogrom, Katerina takes in the two orphaned children and swears to transmit to them not only the Jewish tradition but also the Yiddish language. Taking refuge with them in a Ruthenian village, she notices that Meir and Abraham speak the local dialect between themselves. But Katerina “answers the children in Yiddish, advising them (…) not to forget their own language, the risk being very great here.”8 Thus, nourished by Judaism and by the Jewish language, Katerina in turn takes up the torch of tradition, to the point of naming her son — conceived with a Jew — Benjamin, of having him circumcised, and of speaking to him in Yiddish:
“One morning, Benjamin spoke for the first time. ‘Mama!’ he said in Yiddish, bursting out laughing. ‘Say it again.’ He repeated it, laughing. Yiddish would therefore be his mother tongue. This discovery filled me with joy. The idea that my son would speak the language of Rosa and Benjamin breathed a new hope into me…”9
During this same period when Yiddish is the language of the heart of the Ostjuden, the Jews of Eastern Europe, the regions of Central Europe — that is to say, the Empire of Austria-Hungary — are strongly Germanized. And quite naturally German too occupies a place of the very first order among the assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie of Central Europe, which maintains with the language of Goethe a quasi-passionate relationship. This is often the case among Appelfeld’s characters evolving in a bourgeois society with which they wish entirely to identify themselves, both by language and by culture, which signifies at the same stroke a total severance from traditional Jewish culture.
But when these same Jews, survivors of the Shoah, find themselves in Israel after the war, their relationship to the German language has, it seems, become more intense still. The disappearance of everything dear to them contributes to focusing on the language all the memories of yesteryear; it is the language that makes the engulfed Jewish street surge forth, its smells, its inhabitants.
German and the Jews: a passionate relationship
In the novel Tor ha-pela’ot, Le temps des prodiges (The Age of Wonders), the narrator’s father represents well this assimilated Jew of Mitteleuropa, all the more attached to German culture as he is himself one of its most active “militants”: he is a writer of renown whose works appear regularly in this year 1938 and who is still extolled by the greatest Viennese critics. Nevertheless his favorite writer is none other than Kafka, to whom he devotes a boundless admiration, while one of his best friends is quite simply Stefan Zweig. Thus the father of Bruno, thinking thereby to accede to an authentic Germanic culture, quite naturally finds again the path of his ancestral roots, which he otherwise strives so hard to eradicate.
Marek, the fugitive escaped from a camp whom Tsili meets in the forest (Ha-kutonet ve-ha-passim, Tsili), makes to the young girl an astonishing account of the love his father bore for the German language:
“My late father had a boundless love for German and particularly for the irregular verbs. He knew them all. He watched over me, he demanded that I pronounce correctly. I remember the German lessons as a nightmare. I always made confusions and he would flare up, he showed himself without indulgence. (…) A grammatical mistake drove him mad. (…) If my late father knew what these pillars of culture are doing, he would say: — It isn’t possible! It isn’t possible!”10
This morbid passion for German is all the more moving in that Marek had earlier recounted to Tsili that his father proclaimed everywhere that he was a “free man” with respect to the Jewish tradition from which he wished to be totally emancipated. Now, we learn that this same man is enchained, subjugated, bound hand and foot to the implacable syntax of a language. He who left his roots has become, one might say, the slave of a language that one must obey grammatically if one wishes to be understood by its speakers.
German at the sources of a lost Judaism
German nonetheless remains the favored vernacular for Jews of Central Europe settled in Israel. In the story Ba-meqomot ha-nemukhim, En des lieux très bas (In Very Low Places), survivors of the Shoah find themselves in winter at a spa resort on the Dead Sea. The narrator, for his part, is a native of the Carpathians, and if he manages to integrate himself into the German-speaking group, it is thanks to his parents, who had him given German lessons in his childhood so that he might, later, study medicine at the university. Although he does not master the language of Schiller to perfection, he feels close enough to his vacationing companions in the evocation of memories.
“You feel close to them, even if you have never been to Strasbourg, nor to Freiburg, nor to Hochburg, nor to other towns that one finds on the map of the heart. The music of the language has charmed you and awakened in you images of childhood. (…) Each one hears here his own language, and his language alone, which is reborn, quite concrete, without any foreign sound mingling with it. Each one knows that it is the language he spoke in his childhood, and it is in this language alone that he can sit and be silent, sit and speak.”11
This love for the German language, language of childhood and of a lost world, is conjugated here with the exigency that this same language carries within it of being spoken to perfection. Thus, the characters of the story consider German as the language, unique and absolute.
Their very names are charged with a meaning that is not innocent — one would say they came out of a Strauss operetta: M. Spielmeister (the master of the game), Mme Fledermaus (bat), M. Stahlhaus (house of steel). Viennese lightness would not be far off if the Sea of Salt, as it is named in Hebrew, were not also the Dead Sea, and if the allusion to the vanished Jewish world of Central Europe were not all too eloquent. The subjects of conversation scarcely vary: a town whose inhabitants have disappeared and whose streets have been effaced. Only their memory is capable of evoking this town, the name of its streets, its smells. Each one, in his own way, is bound to the tenuous thread of a vanished Judaism: Doctor Spielmeister, formerly a rabbi at Karlsruhe, organizer of cultural centers and active in an ecumenical association, rereads the texts of Rabbi Nahman12 and of Martin Buber,13 striving to find again in them the nigun, the lost melody. As for Doctor Stahlhaus, once a lawyer, he now devotes himself to the history of his people in order to find again the spiritual paths of the Rhenish pietists, a Jewish religious movement of the Middle Ages. Madame Fledermaus is the only one who lets herself be won over by emotions: her physical contact with this desert place manages to awaken in her sensations already lived, but she remains a prisoner of her memory and does not succeed in escaping the flood of memories that assail her.
Equation: language = music = mother
It appears that German as a mother tongue becomes very difficult to handle in the aftermath of the Shoah. Appelfeld, himself also raised in German culture, was constrained, during his years of wandering, to bury his mother tongue in the deepest part of himself. For him, German is indefectibly bound to the maternal figure:
“My mother tongue was German. My mother loved this language and cultivated it with care. Pronounced by her, the words sprang forth, limpid, as those exotic little crystal bells know how to chime.”14
Like Marek’s father, Appelfeld’s mother maintains the German language with a quite particular care. In the memory of the child Appelfeld there remained vivid the musical connotation between his mother and German. This evokes, of course, the triad mother-lullaby-child that leads inexorably to the separation between mother and child, softened by the maternal melody whose memory remains engraved in the childhood memory.
“In vain did I strive to preserve my mother tongue in a milieu where I was forced to learn another language. My mother tongue frayed away from week to week, and at the end of the first year, it was reduced to ashes. This pain had a double signification: my mother had been assassinated at the beginning of the war, and during all those years I carried her image within me, with the faith that, in the end, I would find her again and we could resume our existence as before. The language of my mother and my mother became confounded. Now that this language was dying out, I felt my mother die a second time within me.”15
One reads clearly through these lines the death of that German language that we have already evoked: the death of a language of culture and civilization of which nothing remains but ashes, an image indicating well that the Germans above all assassinated their own language, the one of which the Jews made themselves precisely the heralds. At the same time as German, it is therefore the maternal figure that disappears, and at the same stroke the whole of childhood that finds itself annihilated, effaced. Appelfeld, who has already experienced the throes of loss, relives them at this definitive putting to death of his mother tongue, since this language-music is inseparable from his mother.
Thus, the Jews made their own each of these two languages, one of which draws its very marrow from the very roots of the other. Indeed Yiddish, born on the banks of the Moselle in the eleventh century, is composed for the greater part of medieval High German, onto which is grafted the Hebraic and Aramaic component, among others. This is to say the proximity of these two languages. Now it is striking to observe the community of destiny that touches them from before the Shoah: both become languages of forgetting and of pain.
Yiddish, a forgotten language
The story Ha-guèrush, L’expulsion (The Expulsion), stages a Hasidic community driven from its village at the beginning of the twentieth century. On the road of wandering, the expelled meet a troupe of Jewish actors who have renounced their origins the better to flagellate and mock them through their spectacles. One of the actors turns out to be a native of the village of the Hasidim and addresses the group: bilshonénu diber: “He spoke our language,” which is the literal translation of the Yiddishism undzer loshn: “our language,” in other words the language par excellence, the one that needs not be named in order to be designated.
“— You are the expelled, he said, and the mocking mask of his face began to deform itself. He was one of us, we had indeed noticed it, but he had sworn an oath to the head of the troupe as well as to himself never to return home. — ‘You are from Zaptse,’ and one felt clearly that this name was familiar to him to the point of pain.”16
The Yiddish repressed at the bottom of himself, with all the traditions that accompany it, rises brutally to the surface when the young renegade meets his own kind. The language serves not only as a means of recognition and communication but acts as a powerful catalyst that lays bare the profound suffering of the young rebel, moved to the point of pain at the mere utterance of the name of his village.
Sometimes too the Jews are constrained to part with their language: such is the case of the Jew forcibly enrolled in the army and then sent to Siberia, whence he returns after thirty years. He then realizes that he has become a stranger in his village and that all reject him. He tries to find again the sound of his mother tongue by strolling about the marketplace: “I stood near the stalls to hear the language of my mother.”17 We find here again the mamè-loshn, the affective range of this expression, its bond to childhood and to the maternal figure. A little later, the character of the story meets another former forcibly enrolled man, like himself: “I was quite happy to find someone who speaks my language.”18
During the Shoah: the “language of no one”
But Yiddish is also the annihilated language, the “language of no one,” to borrow the term of Rachel Ertel.19 It is the language of the fugitives in Appelfeld’s work, but it is above all the language they no longer speak, or rather that they forbid themselves to speak. Ha-hishtanut, La métamorphose (The Metamorphosis), is the account of a couple who find refuge in the forest and transform themselves, over the course of the seasons, into creatures of nature, half-men, half-beasts. They speak less and less, “as though they had been born without words.”20
Sometimes, during rare moments of relaxation, after a bath in the river, the man finds his language again, Yiddish, to express his well-being to the woman:
“At midday, they would lie down on their backs and dry themselves. ‘What do you say?’, he would sometimes find his language again. She laughed in the manner of the peasant women during the days of gathering in the plantation.”21
In the Hebrew text, Yiddish is so to speak personified since, literally, his language is the subject of the verb “to come back”: the Yiddish buried in the deepest part of beings and of their memory asks only to spring forth and to live in spite of the destructive atmosphere surrounding them. Thus, when the man gets drunk, he lets Yiddish words escape, and his companion fears that he might thereby betray himself.
“She feared this state of drunkenness in which he intermingled words of our language.”22
Another story likewise broaches the theme of metamorphosis, but this time, not so much physical as spiritual: the character of Ha-beriha, La fuite (The Flight), has not only taken on the outward appearance of a non-Jew but has adopted his way of life and his language. He is “saved” since the peasants have adopted him as one of their own, but at the same time, he senses that “his Jewishness is there, lying at his feet, as the autumn leaves lie at the foot of the tree.”23
Now, one evening, he is struck to hear once again the voices of Jewish children learning the Pentateuch under the rod of an old master; Hebrew first, then the Yiddish translation afterward, as had been practiced until then at the heder, the village school, for hundreds of years. This resurgence, unexpected to say the least, of the Jewish languages in which he certainly grew up — Yiddish and Hebrew — grips the character like an ancient prayer. But when, in the early morning, he meets three Jews in flight, he cannot speak to them in “his mother tongue”:
“I am one of yours, he said in the language of the Gentiles. (…) He expressed himself in an unknown mixture of Yiddish and local dialect, incapable of making the link between the two. Like those non-Jews who serve in Jewish houses and learn a few words of Yiddish.”24
This time, the character is indeed dispossessed of his mother tongue, since other Jews consider him a Ukrainian peasant. Thus, even if the body is not physically destroyed, the language, for its part, is already on the way to extinction: the Jew has become a Ukrainian peasant and has lost the attributes of his Jewishness. As for the fugitives who still manage to survive, the sound of their voice is so faint that it seems indeed that both the voice and the language are gradually dying out:
“At nightfall… a song arose. A murmur such that one had to be quite close to hear it. All night, the song was strung out: one would have said inner voices that lull only the one who sings. At the first glimmer of dawn, the melody ceased.”25
However, even if the Yiddish song, as tenuous as it is, can rise only at night, out of reach of the forces of destruction, one notes, once again, the age-old bond between music and language, the one appeasing the other and reciprocally, since the singers themselves lull their anguish with the music of their inner voice: Yiddish melody and language are once again reunited.
The German language likewise undergoes, among Appelfeld’s characters, an abandonment and a forgetting comparable to those undergone by Yiddish. The causes of it are, to be sure, different, but it will be fitting to establish a parallel between two languages so close and so distant at the same time, struck by the same loss. The adolescent Appelfeld feels paradoxically the burn that the German language inspires in him and the carnal bond he has with the “language of his mother.” Likewise, several characters German-speaking by birth experience a spiritual and physical malaise both in abandoning their mother tongue and in continuing to practice it.
The unbearable burn of the language
Thus, Appelfeld’s relationship to German remains placed under the sign of duality. In the Essais à la première personne (Essays in the First Person), he writes:
“More than anything our mother tongue burned us. In this language, the odor of death was still smoking.”26
Ever animated by this ambivalence that underlies his relationship to German, Appelfeld wonders “how to speak once again in a language steeped in the blood of the Jews?”27 while immediately giving the answer:
“This dilemma, however grave it might be, in no way undermined my certainty that my German was not the language of the Germans but the language of my mother. It was clear that if I found her again, I would speak to her in the language of my childhood.”28
The triad evoked above is therefore reconstituted in the imaginary of the child Appelfeld: mother, language, and child are indeed reunited as in the period of the author’s childhood. The term used here by the writer is moreover much more significant in Hebrew than in French: yanequt refers in fact to earliest infancy, the root of this term designating nursing. It is therefore indeed a question of this period of idyllic symbiosis between mother and child, placed under the sign of nourishment at once material — gift of vital energy — and spiritual — transmission of music, namely, language. Appelfeld specifies, moreover, as though to corroborate this assertion, that his relationship to language has always been bound to the senses:
“Since my childhood, I detested pompous and bombastic words. I preferred to them the small, quiet words, those that evoke fragrances and sounds.”29
The young Appelfeld, freshly immigrated to Eretz Israel, is nonetheless forced to observe that the process of the loss of German is ineluctable:
“Deprived of language, I am like a stone. (…) Deprived of language, I will wither slowly, in ugliness, as in winter withers the little garden behind the house.”30
The absence of language has heavy consequences, since it amounts, for Appelfeld, to being deprived of the capacity to feel. Indeed, such a deprivation attaches him either to the mineral kingdom, from which all thought and all sensation are banished, or to the vegetal kingdom in winter, when death seizes all vegetation.
Ambivalence: such is indeed the essential characteristic of this painful relationship that Appelfeld’s characters maintain with the German language. On the one hand, one is in the presence, after the war, of a murderous language, with a lexicon led astray from its original meaning. The signifiers are amputated of their original signifieds, which gives rise to a total loss of linguistic landmarks for the speakers. The language becomes a kind of “anti-memory,” since the memories one has of it can be attached to nothing concrete. Germany, the mother-fatherland, then becomes a foreign land, and this paradoxical situation rebounds equally upon the language.
Germany, mother-fatherland and foreign land
Madame Traum, in the story Pisuyim, Réparations (Reparations), incarnates, she too, a figure of a German Jewish woman haunted by her past. Still a very young woman at the time of the war, she was able to escape the executioners, but her husband was assassinated and she lost her two-year-old baby, who died of pneumonia shortly before embarking for Eretz Israel. Settled in Jerusalem, she lives in an apartment where everything is covered with fabric: carpets, curtains in profusion, anything will do to smother a past she wishes to extirpate from her memory.
But the era is one of reparations that Germany has committed itself to paying to the survivors of the Shoah. Prey at once to attraction and to repulsion with regard to such a step, Madame Traum goes to see Doctor Fromm, charged with constituting her medical file and with insisting, as much as possible, on the gravity of the patient’s physical and psychological state. She will therefore undertake a journey to Germany, to her native town, Hochburg, to go there and plead her cause. From this encounter with the places and persons of her youth, Madame Traum will not emerge unscathed.
Hochburg appears at once as a familiar and a foreign place.
“The road that led to the hotel was not lit. Madame Traum tried in vain to recognize the streets; everything was foreign and new to her.”31
Paradoxically, in the very place where she grew up, Madame Traum feels herself a stranger. She has the sensation that her town turns its back on her and refuses to evoke the past with her. The signification of the characters’ names is once again particularly eloquent: Madame Traum — dream —, Monsieur Rauch — smoke —, Madame Fledermaus — bat — indicate well, through this ungraspable, almost unreal bond, the irreversible fracture that exists between the speakers and their mother tongue.
After the war, these same characters preserve their language-memory in an obsessional manner: thus Madame Traum and her impeccably arranged wardrobes filled with memories are the sign of this indefectible attachment to the language. The latter is moreover considered the only good that remains to the German Jews in Israel, since they have lost their family and their fatherland.
Thus, for Appelfeld himself, German is intrinsically bound to the music of the maternal voice. Consequently, not only does the mother tongue simultaneously evoke the figure of his vanished mother, but moreover, a symbiosis operates between the two. The writer thus ends by dissociating his German and the language of the Germans: he expresses himself solely in “the language of his mother.”
This constant duality of German in Appelfeld’s work leads the characters and the author himself, first and foremost, to a linguistic impasse. To be sure, German remains for them the idiom dear to their heart, but the imperatives of the very young State of Israel constrain them, willy-nilly, to bury the mother tongue in the deepest part of themselves and to adopt the renewed ancestral language.
But it is perhaps precisely because he uses Hebrew to evoke Yiddish and German that Appelfeld manages to reopen the doors of the languages of childhood. Unlike the latter, which underwent the double ordeal of forgetting and of the burn, the Hebrew language did not suffer in its quintessence: neither deformed nor assassinated, it is entirely able to “testify” in a language unencumbered by a memory made of pain and that can express itself only in a cry. Thanks to Hebrew, a Hebrew that he fashions and molds like a tool of art, Appelfeld pays homage to the languages of his childhood. But above all he gives flesh again to the vanished speakers thanks to the true resurrection of the Hebrew language: the one that allows him to bring back to life a vanished Jewish world.
Paris, December 2002 Michèle TAUBER
Notes
Aharon Appelfeld, Histoire d’une vie (The Story of a Life), Keter, Jerusalem, 1999, p. 100.↩︎
Franz Kafka, “Discours sur le yiddish” (“Speech on the Yiddish Language”), in: Préparatifs de noces à la campagne (Wedding Preparations in the Country), Gallimard, Paris, 1957, p. 374.↩︎
Aharon Appelfeld, Abîme (Abyss), Keter, Jerusalem, 1993, p. 28 (trans. M.T.).↩︎
Aharon Appelfeld, Gel sur la terre (Frost on the Earth), in: Gel sur la terre, Massada, Givatayim, 1965, p. 87 (trans. M.T.).↩︎
Ibid., p. 48.↩︎
Aharon Appelfeld, La bonne nouvelle (The Good News), in: Gel sur la terre, op. cit., p. 95 (trans. M.T.).↩︎
Aharon Appelfeld, Du haut du silence (From the Height of Silence), in: Gel sur la terre, op. cit., p. 93.↩︎
APPELFELD Aharon, Katerina, Gallimard, Paris, 1996, p. 55 (trans. S. Cohen).↩︎
Ibid., pp. 121–122.↩︎
Aharon Appelfeld, Tsili, Belfond, Paris, 1992, p. 43 (trans. A. Pierrot).↩︎
Aharon Appelfeld, En des lieux très bas (In Very Low Places), in: Gel sur la terre, op. cit., p. 131 (trans. M.T.).↩︎
Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav (1772–1811), founder of a famous Hasidic doctrine in which the nigun plays an essential role in divine revelation.↩︎
Martin Buber (1878–1965), philosopher and theologian, born in Vienna, died in Jerusalem. His encounter with Hasidism made him discover a living spirituality in which religious feeling prevails over institutional religion.↩︎
Aharon Appelfeld, Histoire d’une vie (The Story of a Life), op. cit., pp. 99–100.↩︎
Ibid., pp. 101–102.↩︎
Aharon Appelfeld, L’expulsion (The Expulsion), in: Gel sur la terre, op. cit., p. 62 (trans. M.T.).↩︎
Aharon Appelfeld, Pélerinage à Kabtsansk (Pilgrimage to Kabtsansk), in: Au rez-de-chaussée (On the Ground Floor), Daga, Tel Aviv, 1968, p. 112 (trans. M.T.).↩︎
Ibid., p. 127.↩︎
Rachel Ertel, Dans la langue de personne (In No One’s Language), Le Seuil, Paris, 1993.↩︎
Aharon Appelfeld, La métamorphose (The Metamorphosis), in: Tsafon, no. 37, Lille, 1999, p. 160 (trans. A. Pierrot).↩︎
Id.↩︎
Ibid., p. 59.↩︎
Aharon Appelfeld, La fuite (The Flight), in: Au rez-de-chaussée, op. cit., p. 7 (trans. M.T.).↩︎
Ibid., pp. 15 and 18.↩︎
Ibid., p. 13.↩︎
Aharon Appelfeld, Essais à la première personne (Essays in the First Person), Ha-sifriya ha-tsiyonit, Jerusalem, 1979, p. 63 (trans. M.T.).↩︎
Aharon Appelfeld, Histoire d’une vie (The Story of a Life), op. cit., p. 103.↩︎
Id.↩︎
Ibid., p. 104.↩︎
Ibid., p. 102.↩︎
Aharon Appelfeld, Réparations (Reparations), in: Fumée (Smoke), Akhshav, Jerusalem, 1962, p. 31 (trans. M.T.).↩︎