“Where does my memory begin?” the author asks by way of incipit. It is with this interrogation of time and the origin of memory that this Histoire d’une vie (The Story of a Life)1 begins, a narrative its author presents as “fragments of memory and contemplation” and not as “a structured and precise autobiography.”
The narrative is constituted in four movements: Jewish society before the Shoah (Appelfeld was born in 1934 in Czernowitz), already worked upon by secularism and therefore by the question of the bond and of fidelity; the war and the wandering through the countryside after the death of his parents, who had been rounded up; then the crossing of Europe from Ukraine toward Italy by way of the transit camps, in the course of that Trêve (The Truce)2 that Primo Levi recounted; finally the after-rupture, the other life in Palestine, that “new world” where one must “build and be built” (page 141) while “no one knew what to do with his spared life” (page 105), except, for nearly all, to sink into oblivion in an attempt to survive.
In the preface, the author presents his work thus: “This book is not a summary, but rather an attempt, a desperate effort to connect the different strata of my life to their root.” To connect means to accept memory, to come out of the “buried, damp cellars upon which the forces of repression have set their seal.”
The Old World: “I Do Not Know How to Pray”
The striking figures of the narrator’s childhood, as he describes them, constitute a “group portrait” of the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, which were characterized, among other things, by a more or less loose bond to religion. The narrator’s family offers a range of the postures that marked Jewish society at the very beginning of the century, between tradition and secularism.
The grandparents live in the countryside in the observance of tradition. The maternal grandfather is a magnificent figure of a pious Jew, of whom the child says naïvely, “On the eve of the Sabbath, his face would soften” (page 19). The child’s regular stays with his grandparents in the countryside are the moment of all the discoveries proper to early childhood: horses, the Gypsies, “days filled with small magical happenings (…) In the village there is neither restaurant nor cinema, we sit out late in the courtyard and accompany the setting of the sun far into the night” (page 16).
But the discovery is above all that of the grandfather’s piety: “God,” he says, “is in the heavens, and there is no cause for fear.” With him, the child discovers “the little wooden synagogue” and the space of mystery: “the people remove their prayer shawls and a silent astonishment shines in their eyes, as if they had understood something previously inaccessible to them.” With prayer and ritual there opens to the child a world of fervor and certainty: “Grandfather says that one hurries toward the synagogue and moves away from it slowly.”
According to Abraham Heschel, faith makes of the faithful “Builders of Time,”3 a spiritual time that the Sabbath raises like an immaterial ark above real time; it is this temporality that the child discovers with each of the grandfather’s acts: “Early in the morning, he would go out to pray (…) Sometimes he studied the same book for days and sometimes he would change it, but there was never more than one book on his table.” This always-singular book thus refers to the One, in a play of mirrors in which the grandfather’s tranquility and certainty dominate. This certainty will preside over his death: when it knocks at the door, he tries to console his children with this simple faith: “The passage is simpler than we imagine. It is just a change of place, and the climbing of a step.” Faith and fidelity have the same root.
The other striking figure the narrator retains from his childhood is Uncle Felix, at once inscribed in modernity and very anchored in Jewish life. Fidelity is declined otherwise with this portrait of a man at ease in both worlds: he moves without difficulty in the modern world of agronomy, as a wealthy landowner who “owned fields, pastures, innumerable forests,” and through numerous articles on agricultural subjects that he writes in a very pure German and that are published in several Polish journals.
But like the grandfather, he inscribes himself in tradition: “All his life, he conformed to two daily commandments: prayer and the study of a page of the Talmud. His way of studying was also that of a pious Jew: he studied while humming. It was his intimate portion that few people knew, for outwardly he bore none of the signs of the pious Jew. He was dressed like most landowners.” (page 28)
If the grandfather studied a single book, Uncle Felix’s library is different: “He owned a library of philosophy, another of linguistics, and a few libraries of classical literature, not to mention the books on agriculture that I loved to leaf through.” (page 29)
Finally, the central figures of the world of before are of course the narrator’s parents, attached to secular modernity but without the bond that Uncle Felix manages to weave: “Papa does not go to the synagogue. Papa thirsts for natural landscapes, extraordinary buildings, churches, chapels, taverns where coffee is served in fine porcelain cups.” But if the father’s choice carries him with assurance toward rationalism (“We have nothing other than what our eyes see,” page 25), the loss is more keenly felt, more painful for the mother: “It is strange, Mama always looks sad near the Sabbath table. It seems to me that once she knew how to speak to God, but that, following a misunderstanding between Him and her, she forgot this language. This regret makes her melancholy on the eve of the Sabbath.” (page 22)
This melancholy, this acute awareness of “the absence of presence,” is relayed by the child and announces the lack from which he will suffer: “I am sorry that I do not know how to pray at this festive moment… I alone am mute.” (page 23)
All autobiographical writing is a rereading of the past and the relating a posteriori of events: in Histoire d’une vie, this muteness announces the adolescent’s quest, the aphasia and the stammering that will later characterize most of the survivors, until they are able to speak. This will also be his path as a man and a writer: to find his language, to be able to say, to write.
The War, the Camps: “And the Desire to Pray Left Me”
In the summer of 1937, the long march toward horror begins. Appelfeld’s writing becomes fragmentary, elliptical. It follows now clear memories, now a memory of trauma that alters it. The description of life in the ghetto, when it depicts the fate reserved for the mad and for blind children, surpasses what is bearable. The figure of the child then becomes the emblem of the unnameable, and in particular when he recounts the enclosure of the Kaltchund camp where, from the moment of their arrival, small children were given alive to be devoured by wolfhounds.
How to speak? Why speak? The testimonies seem torn from silence only to fall into the useless and the senseless: — If we are not witnesses, who will testify? — In any case, no one will believe us.” (page 89)
Silence is a recurring theme of the text, referring to the narrator’s aphasia: “This time again, I will not touch that fire. I will not speak of the camp, but of the flight, which took place in the autumn of 1942, when I was ten years old.”
There then begins the narrative of two years in the forests, in solitude and terror. Fear is omnipresent, and with it, insane hope: “I hoped relentlessly that my parents would come to find me. This mad hope accompanied me throughout all the years of war” (page 69). But his parents will not come to find him; other adults succeed one another, from the strange prostitute Maria who takes him in for a time to the “courageous and noble people” he will meet throughout the war, among whom the Rauchwerger brothers, figures of innocence whose generosity and self-abnegation illuminate the narrative: “When the round-ups began, one of them hid the orphans in the cellars and from there had them pass through the sewers toward farms and monasteries. After each passage, his face shone like that of a child.” (page 85)
After the war, the same whirlwind in which good and the worst are mingled: “Wicked, violent, and corrupt people assaulted us all along our road, from Ukraine to Italy (…) At the Liberation, we were hemmed in on all sides by wicked people, but there were others to whom the war had added a dimension of grandeur. (…) I saw beings who knew how to renounce, to give, to act with self-abnegation, and to die without grieving anyone.”
Appelfeld tries to tie the red thread that would bring him back near his grandfather’s village: he finally finds an adult who teaches him to pray. But he finds himself in the midst of beings who are despairing, disenchanted, or lost, for whom to pray is useless: “Why do you want to learn to pray? You are going to embark soon for Palestine. In Palestine, one works in kibbutzim and one does not pray.” Prayer then no longer forms a bond. Little by little, his desire dulls. The bond between the world of before and the world that awaits him, the emergence of a speech, will come later, but otherwise than through prayer.
This world of desolation is that of dereliction, a world in which the fate reserved for parentless children on the roads makes of them the forgotten ones of a society from which God himself seems to have absented himself: “During the war, no account was taken of children. They were the wisp of straw that everyone trampled.” (page 62) Traffickers, perverts, or “impresarios” close in on the children and snatch them from the surviving adults and from the instructors sent from Palestine to supervise them. “The Italian coast was strewn with transit camps and everyone was looking for distractions.” The gifted children will be abducted or lured by these “impresarios” who put them on display, exploiting in this one his extraordinary musical gifts, in that one his perfect knowledge of a great number of languages, and among them young Chiko, of prodigious memory; they will be used as fairground animals, amusing, dazzling: the reverse of the picaresque novel or the novel of apprenticeship, Histoire d’une vie blends the two genres against a background of despair and horror: will L’Homme qui rit (The Man Who Laughs)4 ever cease to grimace?
In Palestine: “Literature Is the Religious Music We Have Lost”
In Palestine a new life begins, with its watchwords implicit or asserted: silence covers over the horror and one speaks in a new language, Hebrew; several attitudes are then possible, and not all of them depend on the will. The choice of silence and of a new language is felt by nearly all as the only way out in order to go on living: “Among my friends, the adoption of Hebrew seemed simpler. They had broken with their memory and had built themselves a language that was entirely ‘here,’ nothing but here. In this respect, and in others, they were the faithful sons of those years: ‘We have come here to build and be built.’ ‘Build and be built,’ this project translated, for most of us, into the annihilation of memory, into a radical change and into fusion with this plot of earth. In other words, ‘a normal life,’ as it was customary to call it.” (page 141)
But what often do this return and its silence cover over? Appelfeld’s choice of a “writing of the fragment” does not unveil in this work what we find in the conclusion of Primo Levi’s narrative, where one reads, indeed, the intense difficulty of this return to “normal life”: freed from the camps, Primo Levi resettled in Turin after the war with his family, and reconstructed “a life”:
“It is a dream within a dream, and though its details vary, its substance is always the same. I am at the table with my family, or with friends, at work, or in a green countryside; in a peaceful and relaxed atmosphere, apparently devoid of tension and pain; and yet I feel a tenuous and deep anguish, the definite sensation of a threat hanging over me. And indeed, as the dream unfolds, little by little or brutally, and each time in a different way, everything collapses, everything comes apart around me, scenery and people, and my anguish becomes more intense and more precise. Then it is chaos; I am at the center of a grayish and murky nothingness, and suddenly I know what all this means, and I also know that I have always known it: I am once again in the Camp, and nothing was true outside the Camp. The rest—the family, nature in flower, the home—was only a brief vacation, an illusion of the senses, a dream. The inner dream, the dream of peace, is over, and in the outer dream, which continues and chills me, I hear resound a voice I know well. It utters only one word, a single one, with nothing authoritative about it, a brief and low word; the order that accompanied dawn at Auschwitz, a foreign word, awaited and dreaded: get up, ‘wstawać.’”5
In the period of reconstruction that Appelfeld depicts, the attempt to build a so-called “normal” life goes hand in hand with silence about the reverse side, that hollowed-out night and its nightmares, silence about the very language of the world of before, Yiddish; this will be impossible for Appelfeld. He is incapable of forgetting, of speaking only Hebrew, and, for example, of subscribing to the “socialist realism that flourished then in the newspaper Al Hamishmar” (page 140). Incapable of being done with the world of before: “I did not know how to ignore my past and its language, Yiddish, which symbolized then the diaspora, weakness, and laxity: everyone disparaged it, it had become an object of derision and sarcasm. But there was, in this contempt, something that made me choose it. Its orphan condition resonated with my status as an orphan” (page 176). The remainder of the work blends two parallel narratives: the anchoring in Israeli reality, with, among other things, the army that brings him back to the sources of his history and confirms him in his choice of fidelity to his past; and another narrative, that of his studies of Yiddish at the university, the history of his vocation, the beginnings of writing with his journal, then short stories, then the well-known texts.
It is, at bottom, this double anchoring that characterizes Appelfeld’s itinerary: far from cutting himself off from Israeli reality, he inscribes himself in it, but while refusing the logic of oblivion and silence that allows others to survive. His survival passes, on the contrary, through the construction of bridges with the past, or rather through the capacity to let the images and sensations of the past be reborn and live within him.
The choice of Yiddish will restore to him this past he does not want to bury, and with it, the archaic wish: to know how to pray. “Literature, if it is literature of truth, is the religious music we have lost. Literature contains all the components of faith: seriousness, inwardness, music, and contact with the buried contents of the soul” (page 140).
If the years of childhood and war form his “system of reflexes and sensations,” the university years will give him his “critical and expressive tools”: the substance and the form are there; the path is found, but how difficult it will be. At the heart of the novel, these lines: “Speech does not come easily to me, and this is not surprising: one did not speak during the war. Each catastrophe seems to repeat: there is nothing to say. He who has been in a ghetto, in a camp, or in the forests, knows silence physically. (…) I brought back from there a distrust of words. A fluid succession of words awakens my suspicion. I prefer stammering, in which I hear the friction, the nervousness, the effort to refine the words of all dross, the desire to hold out to you something that comes from within. Smooth, fluid sentences awaken in me a feeling of inadequacy, an order that would come to fill a void.” (page 124)
An “order”: an organization or an imperative to fill the void, not to leave it room and memory. To refuse this order is to take a position, and in this sense, Histoire d’une vie illustrates in part that definition the American writer Jonathan Franzen proposes of fiction: “to depict and embody the mystery, namely how beings avoid or confront the meaning of existence.”6
To merge into Israeli reality and accept the silence surrounding the Shoah was impossible for Appelfeld, save by effacing himself in this evasion. His choice is that of “living with” memory, of finding places in which memory is not lost. The last lines of his book are a tribute to the “club,” an association of survivors from Galicia and Bukovina where all the languages of before are spoken: there, at twenty, he found a fraternity and a family, and “amid the smoke of cigarettes and the steam of scalding coffees” a language and a voice.
From muteness and oblivion to writing, Histoire d’une vie can be read as the course of a fidelity to oneself and to the common history; where for others silence was the only means of survival, Appelfeld chose the path of “being able to speak.” In this sense, one may take up regarding him these lines (page 184) by which he salutes Agnon, who was his master and his friend: “If one starts from the principle that a writer is the collective memory of the tribe, then he embodies that.”
Notes
Éditions de l’Olivier / Le Seuil, 2004.↩︎
Primo Levi, La Trêve (The Truce), Grasset, 1966.↩︎
Abraham Heschel, Les Bâtisseurs du temps (The Sabbath), Éditions de Minuit, 1957.↩︎
The hero of one of Victor Hugo’s last novels, L’Homme qui rit (The Man Who Laughs), was abducted as a child by “comprachicos” who disfigured him through an operation, fixing on his martyred face a grotesque laugh in order to exhibit him at fairs; there he unleashes the inextinguishable laughter of all who look at him. Image of a human and social condition irremediably damaged by Evil, incarnation of a disenchanted reflection on appearance and injustice, the character lives and kills himself in a universe of dereliction where only the blind know how to see.↩︎
Primo Levi, La Trêve (The Truce), page 245, Grasset, 1966.↩︎
Jonathan Franzen, Pourquoi s’en faire (How to Be Alone).↩︎