“The fowl are in fact our enemy”

Abstract

The metamorphosis of Jewish identity portrayed by Aharon Appelfeld in his early stories and essays relates closely to the perspective of Jewish society in a process of assimilating, and in the sea change that the “Holocaust that descended suddenly” forced onto the “depleted Jewish consciousness” that characterized it, as Appelfeld describes it in First Person Essays, (1979): “All of their beliefs were as if overturned in a day. Nothing was left but Jewish bareness” (Appelfeld 1979, 10). Exposed with the appearance of the enemy, the “Jewish bareness” became a founding stone of the new Judaism, “reborn” in response to the rage of the oppressor. It is this central intuition that Appelfeld examines in the story “The Fowl.” Appelfeld's “The Fowl” is based on one of the lesser known texts of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, which appear together in the book Hayyei Moharan. This story, as portrayed in the essay, symbolizes a decisive shift in consciousness for Rabbi Nahman, a metamorphosis that, as in Appelfeld's story, reveals Jewish bareness symbolized by vultures.