Aharon Appelfeld Research Articles

The Life of a Story: Aharon Appelfeld’s Double as a Mode of Holocaust Representation

The Life of a Story: Aharon Appelfeld’s Double as a Mode of Holocaust Representation

The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature by Neta Stahl

Reviewed by: The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature by Neta Stahl Chen Mandel-Edrei Neta Stahl. The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature. London: Routledge, 2020. 212 pp. Neta Stahl's The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature provides us with fresh terminology with which to consider modern Hebrew literary historiographies and constitutes a call for new scholarly frameworks within the field of modern Hebrew literature. Stahl argues that despite challenges to the established critical narrative of secularization in modern Hebrew letters, the binary categories of religion and secularization still dominate. Stahl claims that this binary system is ineffective for reading the various and complex forms by which divinity appears in modern texts and seeks to go beyond and against this limited framework. As was illuminated by Gershom Scholem, Hannan Hever, Shachar Pinsker, and others, the divine is embedded in the Hebrew language despite attempts to repress or secularize it, a condition that in the Zionist context might be culturally destructive. Acknowledging this, Stahl works to illuminate a broader spectrum [End Page 447] of representations of the divine while extending our understanding of their literary and cultural functions. Fundamental to this literature, Stahl writes, are three religious-philosophical tensions that challenge the act of representing divinity. The first is the biblical prohibition against representing God, which, developed by Maimonides, allows a merely rhetorical representation of a transcendent and bodyless entity whose intentions are concealed. The second is kabbalist perceptions according to which divinity resides in language itself, posing representational problems. The third is a historical tension that questions the assumption that modern Hebrew writers worked to depart from tradition. Here, Stahl adopts Shraga Bar-On's suggestion to understand modern literary projects through the concept of quest in which God is present and absent simultaneously. In the first chapter, which is dedicated to pantheism, Stahl reads canonic works from the turn of the twentieth century (by Aḥad Ha-ʿam, S. Y. Abramovitsh, Ḥ. N. Bialik, Shaul Tchernichovsky, and M. Y. Berdyczewski) and validates the well-established claim that these writers did not seek to secularize Judaism but to extract God from the limited halakhic world to a national sphere, which is natural and universal. The second chapter focuses on the relation between images of man and God as described by Y. H. Brenner and Avraham Shlonsky. Here, "theomorphism" and its nuances (mainly anthropomorphism) are the center of discussion. Stahl shows that in Brenner's writing, the world-without-God forces man to embrace godly powers for redeeming humanity, a move that fails and leaves man in what Aharon Appelfeld has called "distress of religiosity" (43). In Shlonsky's late poems, God provides utopian dimensions to the national labor of the pioneer, who then becomes "a divine creature whose own hands re-create God's world" (52). The third chapter is dedicated to Uri Ẓvi Greenberg and presents a complicated image of his transition from a world filled with "the God of mother-father" to a broken world (seemingly) devoid of God. Stahl shows how Greenberg's response to World War I was to split God into two entities; while rejecting the universal God of the arts that his contemporaries embraced, Greenberg elevates the local God whose divinity is realized through the open wound of the poet. Greenberg's response to World War II in Reḥovot ha-nahar (1951) is read by Stahl through the notion of hester panim and the dynamics of theodicy that help illuminate the poet's justification for violence. Focusing on S. Y. Agnon, the fourth chapter examines providence and punishment. Discussing various works, Stahl claims that Agnon depicts divine order through negative theology and criticizes it using what she calls "theo-narration" (103). The fifth chapter deals with Dahlia Ravikovitch and Yehuda Amichai's antiwar poetry. Stahl points out that in Amichai's poems, humans are presented as victims of violence that results from a distanced divinity; a structure that is incompatible with the secular world and that overlooks human accountability. She explains that this antitheodicy rhetoric allows Amichai to remain loyal to the victims by graphically depicting the results of violence without "tainting" them with politics. Juxtaposing Ravikovitch with Amichai, Stahl shows that Ravikovitch emphasizes what...

The Contribution of Monuments to Educating About Holocaust Commemoration in Israel

“After the death of the last witnesses the memory of the Holocaust must not be left to historians alone, now is the time for works of art” Aharon Appelfeld.
 
 This study focuses on the role and contribution of monuments to educating about Holocaust commemoration in Israel. Holocaust monuments are located throughout Israel, from north to south, and over the years memorial centers have been added, which contain additional monuments commemorating the story of the specific place and/or personal stories. Many of the latter have original displays from the period of the Holocaust and, according to definitions that will be presented below, these too can be defined as “monuments” and their place as a commemorative site. Commemoration of the Holocaust is an important value in the education of the young generation, as a lesson and as a call to always remember that which happened. The educational system has a very significant role in providing instruction on the memory of the Holocaust and it must teach this complex topic using interesting visual means such as monuments, which have a meaningful role in the story of the Holocaust, similar to journals, letters, films, and drawings. The study explores the role of monuments as meaningful, reliable, and historically valid sources of information, which serve as a visual text for Holocaust instruction. This is with the purpose of examining the meaning of monuments as a source of information in learning about the Holocaust.
 
 The research method: Qualitative research based on observations of a case study consisting of an educational program dealing with remembrance based on monuments and on a catalogue of monuments. The catalogue, built specifically for this study, is unique in its scope and categorizes and charts monuments from different locations throughout Israel, providing a venue for educational activities studying the memory of the Holocaust and its commemoration.
 
 The research findings show that there is at present no organized study program encouraging schoolchildren’s visits to monuments in Israel, and these remain abandoned, with no visitors. In many cases they are displayed in open public spaces, and those passing by do not stop to learn their story. Hence, the contribution of the educational program based on the catalogue and on the visit to the monuments will have an effect on all learners, encouraging learning based on experience, i.e., learning outside the classroom. The program blurs the distinction between social classes and sectors and lets each and every student embark on a journey that includes touring, learning, experiencing, and leading.

Language Memoir: A Return to Hebrew

Language Memoir:A Return to Hebrew Sheila E. Jelen Review of: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans) ( Seattle, University of Washington, 2018), edited by Naomi B. Sokoloff and Nancy E. Berg In compelling essays that range from literary meditations to pedagogical prescriptions, from literary analysis to personal memoir, What We Talk About When We Talk About Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans) presents itself as the fruit of a new discursive community, one that is unique to Americans in the field of Hebrew studies. This volume brings together a group of contemporary scholars, novelists, and poets to speak to the question of how to re-engage Americans – children as well as college students, synagogue goers as well as secularists – in the study of Hebrew. What We Talk About is an invitation to Americans, like myself, who have straddled countries and languages, have found themselves teaching materials in American classrooms that don't always match up with the in-depth research they are doing in Hebrew, to tell their stories and to brainstorm future directions. In her own contribution to What We Talk About, Sokloff points to memoirs by "multi-lingual individuals who come to terms with incorporating more than one language into their lives," such as those authored by Richard Rodriguez, Eva Hoffman, Alice Kaplan, and Aharon Appelfeld.1 She encourages those whose native tongue is not Hebrew, but who have followed a Hebrew path, emotionally, academically and spiritually, to write "language memoirs" as well. In that spirit I would like to begin this review with my own, abbreviated, language memoir. All four of my grandparents were Holocaust survivors who had chosen to move to the United States instead of to Israel in the years after the war because [End Page 445] they felt that they had suffered enough. Subsequently, a generation later, I was born in the United States, but when I was about a year old, we moved to Israel. My brother was born just after the Yom Kippur war and my parents decided to leave Israel and return to Chicago, where I was raised. Whatever Hebrew fluency I had obtained in my day care environments in Israel was soon lost. When I pronounced Hebrew with an Israeli accent at my orthodox Jewish day school in Chicago, the children laughed at me, so I retrained myself to speak with an American accent. My education was profoundly Zionist – with many summers at Camp Moshava, a Bnei Akiva camp in nearby Wisconsin, and half a day from kindergarten through 12th grade dedicated to Hebrew and Judaic Studies. I remember the first Hebrew conversation I learned to conduct: Teacher: Shalom, Mah Shmekh? [Hello, What is your name?] Me: Shmi Shulamit. [My name is Shulamit] Teacher: Me'ayin at Shulalmit? [Where are you from Shulamit] Me: Ani Mi-America. Me-Ayin Ata? [I am from America. Where are you from?] Teacher: Ani Mi-Yisrael [I am from Israel] My formative Hebrew language experience took place in high school at Ida Crown Jewish Academy where my teacher, Mrs. Bass, refused to call me by my actual name (Shulamit) for all four years; instead, she called me Yocheved. In Mrs. Bass's class I read Agnon for the first time ("Tehilah" and "ha-Mitpahat"); I read Bialik ("El ha-Tzipor" and "ha-Matmid,"); I read Tchernichovsky ("ha-Adam Eino Elah"); I read Yizhar ("Efraim Hozer la-Aspeset"). I learned to conjugate verbs in every declension with every exception and to insert vowels into Hebrew texts. I took the Bechinah Yerushalmit. I joined my close friends at Camp Ramah the summer after high school but since I hadn't attended that camp as a camper, I didn't really have a natural peer group there. Instead, I became close to the group of Israelis who were dispatched by the Jewish Agency to work at the waterfront and in the woodshop, to lead religious services and Hebrew sing-alongs. I learned in one particularly awkward conversation that there is a difference between "lehitkaleah" (to shower) and "le-hitlakeah" (to burst into flames). I learned, as well, that "mah nishma" does not mean "what is heard...

La guerre est fini y/o ¿La guerra ha terminado?: El film de Alain Resnais y Jorge Semprún y su papel en la exposición permanente del Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

This article analyzes the ambiguity in the film La guerre est finie ([The War Is Over] 1966, director Alain Resnais, screenwriter Jorge Semprún) whose declarative title becomes a question in the title of the permanent exhibit at the Reina Sofía National Museum in Madrid: Is the War Over? Art in a Divided World (1945-1968). The works invite the viewer to question the nationalism that catapulted the Spanish Civil War, whose victory marked the first triumph for European fascisms and concomitant genocides. While the film entirely lacks symbols of irrefutable national identity, the paintings incorporate and subvert certain icons of (regional, Francoist, Nazi or Fascist) nationalism, as well as emblems of the Spanish Republic and Spain. The artworks respond in theme and form to nationalist ideology and esthetics. Although the film—whose screenwriter Jorge Semprún had been imprisoned in the Nazi camp at Buchenwald—limits itself to implicit allusions to the eradication of the domestic enemy on Iberian soil and the so-called stateless undesirables exiled in foreign lands, the exhibit explicitly references Nazism and other 20th-century genocides. The collection of works exemplifies Aharon Appelfeld’s assertion: that only art has the ability to redeem suffering from the abyss. The film and the plastic works respond not only to nationalist ideologies and concomitant lived and witnessed experiences, but also to nationalist art. Through the visual counternarratives that give voice to myriad victimizations, these works make manifest and denounce, in theme and form, the anti-intellectualization and the fervent sentiment of political zeal.

‘The Detours Required’: Sarah Kofman and the ‘Black Milk’ of Hidden Children

Sarah Kofman’s belated memoir, Rue Order, Rue Labat, narrates the experiences of a hidden Jewish child in Paris, living out the war in a vexed relationship with two mothers – her biological mother, a Polish immigrant and wife of an Orthodox rabbi, on the one hand; and a Catholic French woman who saves them, on the other. Reading the memoir alongside literary reflections by other child survivors, such as Aharon Appelfeld and Louis Begley, the article focuses on the snippets of literary, cinematic, and artistic analysis published elsewhere that Kofman has interpellated into the autobiographical details. Taken together, these critical readings and the personal narratives gesture towards the internalization and aftereffects of the Shoah for hidden children.

Didi-Huberman e a escrita: ensaiar o ver entre a imagem e o conceito

O presente artigo tem como objetivo tecer uma leitura entre dois livros do filósofo e historiador da arte francês, Georges Didi-Huberman. Cascas (2017), publicado em 2011 na língua original, traz uma narrativa em primeira pessoa de uma visita do autor aos campos de concentração de Auschwitz-Birkenau. O segundo livro, Essayer Voir (2014), ainda sem tradução para o português, configura um processo ensaístico escrito em uma linguagem técnica e impessoal, que toca contudo no mesmo tema do primeiro: as imagens e a herança de Auschwitz. O diálogo entre os dois livros procura mostrar como Didi-Huberman elabora e entra em defesa de seu conceito de imagem enquanto potência dialética e força histórica, desenvolvido a partir de sua leitura de obras como a de Walter Benjamin, Primo Levi e Aharon Appelfeld. Junto a isso, o artigo desenvolve as alternativas propostas pelo autor à seguinte pergunta: de que maneira podemos resistir à barbárie?

The Sound of the Unsayable: Jewish Secular Culture in Arnold Schönberg and Aharon Appelfeld

This article examines the use of central elements of the Jewish religious repertoire and transcendental realm, such as prophecy or revelation, within the aesthetic secular realm of musical avant-garde and modern Hebrew literature. By focusing on two case studies, I attempt to shed new light on the question of Jewish secular culture. Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), an Austrian Jewish composer, was born into an assimilated Viennese family and converted to Protestantism before returning to Judaism in the 1930s while escaping to the United States. Aharon Appelfeld (1932–2018), an Israeli Jewish writer, was born in Czernowitz to assimilated German-speaking parents, survived the Holocaust and emigrated to Israel in 1946. My claim is that in their works both composer and author testify to traumatic experiences that avoid verbal representation by: (1) subverting and transgressing conventional aesthetic means and (2) alluding to sacred tropes and theological concepts. In exploring Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron and Appelfeld’s Journey into Winter among others, this article shows how the transcendent sphere returns within the musical and poetic avant-garde (musical prose, 12-tone composition, prose poem, non-semantic or semiotic fiction) as a “sound” of old traditions that can only be heard through the voices of a new Jewish culture.

Przyczynek do pozagładowego lurianizmu. Droga żelazna Aharona Appelfelda

A CONTRIBUTION TO THE POST-SHOAH LURIANISM: THE IRON TRACKS BY AHARON APPELFELD The article reinterprets The Iron Tracks by Aharon Appelfeld as a work of Lurianic Kabbalah adapted to the world after the Shoah. It is a reality of collapsed transcendence in which no divinity or ethics hold universal validity. As in Lurianism, this world contains entrapped sparks of former transcendence: dispersed Jewish survivors, artefacts of Jewish life and a Jewish Communist organization. Appelfeld portrays a post-survival world based on permanent repetition and unrepented guilt. The gist of his novel, however, lies in the slim possibility of redemption which the main protagonist, Erwin Siegelbaum, opens up with an act of vengeance on a war criminal.

I am an American, Newark Born

I am an American, Newark Born Alan Cooper (bio) Such an Augie March-like pronouncement might have spilled out of the mouths of Neil Klugman, Swede Levov, Nathan Zuckerman, Ira Ringold, Marcus Messner, and the "Philips" and "Roths" of their author's late-middle period and The Plot Against America. Might have, but never quite did, although they were all characters from Weequahic. That Newark neighborhood, 96% Jewish, was, for Roth, a Zion of safety that rendered everywhere else, even Israel, diaspora. Perhaps we might include—briefly—Bradley Beach, Weequahic's summer extension on the Jersey shore. Include, that is, for families from Weequahic, who shared refrigerators, pantries, swim-suit changing rooms, Yiddish accents. But being from Bradley Beach, a year-round off-season collection of ethnic flotsam and jetsam, would disqualify Morris [Mickey] Sabbath from feeling safe in that America, even though he'd wiggled his baby toes in the ripples of its eastern shore. Safety was not Augie March's need. His was a buoyancy that carried him through his adventures wherever he went. He was an American before (if only in the womb) he was a Chicagoan. Roth's Weequahic Jews drew on the restorative blood of their womb-like birthplace to barely survive the challenges of the wider world. Weequahic was more than a location within Newark: the smells of its cooking, the accents of its candy stores and ball fields, its steam baths, Roth's grandfather's shaving mug upon a shelf in the barber shop, these visceral associations—much more than any synagogue—created this paradise of Jewishness. Nathan Zuckerman, world traveler, might say, "I am never more of a Jew than when I am in a church when the organ begins. [. . .] I have the emotions of a spy in the adversary's camp" (Counterlife 256). Still, as Aharon Appelfeld would put it, "Roth's Jews are Jews without Judaism" (Alterman). Although his characters could precisely describe the dimensions of a proper Jewish grave, the dying Roth arranged to be buried on the secular campus of Bard College. [End Page 45] For how long can we speak of "the dying Roth"? Was it from the time he stopped publishing fiction? And how, if at all, did his withdrawal from publishing new works affect his ability to withstand the dying? Roth had stopped writing fiction in 2009. It remained for the Library of America to publish his collected nonfiction some nine years later (Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction), reviewed early in March 20181 and excerpted in Harper's Magazine for August 2017 and then again as "Memento Mori" on May 23, 2018 (the day after Roth's death). Among the essays included is one in which Roth tells of his first experience as a writer, at age ten, during World War II. At the kitchen table his loving mother was teaching him to type on her old Underwood typewriter, and he started writing a sea story, Storm Off Hatteras, in imitation of Howard Pease, "the Joseph Conrad of boys' books." Where the author's name was to follow the title, he wrote "Eric Duncan," because, he said, "a name with two hard Cs" is bound to sound strong ("Eric Duncan," Why Write? 346). Three years later, graduating from elementary school, in the first Weequahic class to have celebrated winning the war against anti-Semitism, he co-wrote a pageant-like morality play for graduation called Let Freedom Ring in the spirit of Frank Sinatra's "The House I Live In." The girl who had been chosen as his coauthor played its protagonist, Tolerance. Its antagonist, played by nearly thirteen-year-old Philip, was called Prejudice. The numerous ethnic and religious groups spread out across the stage could not see the protagonist or the antagonist, standing at the sides of the stage, but these groups were praised by Tolerance with quotations from the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and newspaper columns by Eleanor Roosevelt, and they were denounced by Prejudice in language and epithets that Roth would not have uttered in real life. It was his first experience of being bad—and "Secretly, it thrilled me to think I had a natural talent for...

Choice of Language and the Quest for Israeli Identity in the Works of Tuvia Ruebner and Aharon Appelfeld

Immigration highlights the question of language and raises the dilemma of the relationship between the mother tongue and the language of the new land. For writers this question is even more crucial: should they write in the language of the place and its readers? Immigration to Israel is not exceptional, of course. What choices are open to those writers, and how are they to convey the complexities inherent in the formation of an Israeli identity? This paper focuses on two writers who demonstrate the role played by the “chosen language” in the cultural construction and deconstruction of Israeli identity. Tuvia Ruebner emigrated from Bratislava, Aharon Appelfeld from Bukovina. Ruebner shifted from German to Hebrew and back to German; Appelfeld wrote only in Hebrew. In both cases, their arrival in Israel enabled them to survive. However, the loss of their families in Europe continued to haunt them. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘translation’ and responding to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of ‘minor literature’, the paper shows how their work conveys a multilayered interrelation between national and foreign languages, and between images of exile and homeland, past, present and future – all of which shed light on contemporary issues of Israeli identity.

Відображення єврейських хронотопів: роман А. Аппельфельда «Могутні води» і робота А. Д. Гордона «Людина і Природа»

The paper "Reflection of Jewish Chronotops: the Novel by A. Appelfeld "Mighty Waters" versus the work "The Man and the Nature" by A.D. Gordon" compares between the novel and the philosophic work. In "The Man and the Nature", the popular ideological leader of Zionist movement Aharon David Gordon (1863–1922) developed his mystical concept of "natural man" and tried to inspire the Zionist pioneers in the Land of Israel to devote their lives and work to farming as a way to connect with nature and to communicate with God through intuition and silence. The novel "Mighty Waters" was published in 2011 by the well-known Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld (1932–2018) three decades after Israeli literature switched to postzionism. This article argues that the main character of the novel, a Jewish farmer who lives near the Carpathian Mountains, is a personification of Gordon's ideal and views Appelfeld's novel as a parable that proclaims the traditional Jewish modus vivendi and the importance of Zionism in the 21th century.Both texts are common in ideas and word definitions. Gordon tells about the Juwish loner while the novel shows to readers that such untypical for Juwish mentality existence beyond society is doomed. The researcher proves, that the author of the "Mighty Water' wants the Juwes to be turned back to modus vivendi that have been developed during the Juwish exile. The Juwes for hundred years have been the nation of intellectuals and merchants and still remain them, that have shaped their life style of citizens. So the idea to recalibrate it in separated from the Book and book culture peasant leaving is stillborn.The paper is supplied by the author’s translation of the first paragraph A. Gordon’s work "The Man and the Nature''. Thus, the national chronotop is an important instrument of literary studies, that is able to connect texts of different types and times in order to build a single holistic ideal.

“The fowl are in fact our enemy”

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.

The Image of Bukovina in Aharon Appelfeld’s Writing. Spectres of Marginality

The Image of Bukovina in Aharon Appelfeld’s Writing. Spectres of Marginality

Self as Nation: Contemporary Hebrew Autobiography by Tamar S. Hess

Reviewed by: Self as Nation: Contemporary Hebrew Autobiography by Tamar S. Hess Michael Keren (bio) Tamar S. Hess. Self as Nation: Contemporary Hebrew Autobiography. Brandeis UP, 2016, 213 pp. ISBN 978-1611688801, $40.00. To those of us interested in the lives of others, Hebrew autobiographies, whether written before or after the establishment of the State of Israel, have often been disappointing because so many of these texts have been rooted, as Tamar Hess rightly notes, in collective national life. In her introduction to Self as Nation, Hess shows how Hebrew autobiography since the mid-nineteenth century has followed the path familiar to other national literatures in which the individual self has been subjected to the national narrative. The autobiographer may celebrate the Jews' settlement in a new home or express disillusionment with the Zionist project, but that project overwhelms all dimensions of life, especially in men's life writing. Autobiographies written by women are often more concerned with personal agonies, such as the betrayal of women pioneers by fellow men settlers, but the focal point remains on the collective effort. Hess analyzes a handful of autobiographical works by Israeli writers of different backgrounds and life experiences. These include Yoram Kaniuk and Netiva Ben-Yehuda, whose post-traumatic accounts of their experiences in the war of 1948 are soaked in blood and tears; Nathan Zach and Haim Be'er, whose autobiographical selves are formed in relation to dying mothers; and [End Page 510] the Baghdad-born Shimon Balas and the Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld, whose life stories represent two aspects of the immigrant experience in Israel. Since autobiography allows silenced voices to confront hegemonic ideologies and marginal groups to renegotiate their relationship with the social center, it is not surprising that all the writers analyzed here have taken critical moral stands that challenge the Israeli collective. According to the author, however, they have also continued to assert a commitment to that collective. For example, Kaniuk's narration of the 1948 war reflects both a personal and collective trauma, and in her discussion of autobiographies by Esther Raab and other women Hess states that these writings offer a point of departure for critical meetings of individual identities with the national collective. Self as Nation thus reaffirms a common conception about Israeli identity according to which the self and the nation cannot be separated even in an era in which literature focuses on the individual and society is split. As Hess puts it, "At a period marked by the splintering of Israeli society by ethnicity, class, gender, and religion, Israeli autobiography has become increasingly drawn to collective symbols and cultural tropes" (164). This statement is supported, for example, by an autobiographical sketch written by literary scholar Ariel Hirchfeld, whose older brother was killed in the 1948 war. Hirschfeld tells of his brother's portrait that hung above his cradle, which understandably played a role in his identity formation. Hess, however, does not allow this episode to remain within the private sphere of a family who had suffered a terrible loss. To her, "the national circumstances that underpin his older brother's death prevent it from being exclusively private, thus framing the memoir in relation to both spheres—the public and the private, the individual and the national—inseparably and at once" (154). Here lies what I consider the book's main shortcoming: the assumption that the individual voice of Israeli writers "clearly represents the national, just as the national is the plain on which individual Israeli identities are inscribed, and can formulate themselves" (155). This assumption is not necessarily confirmed by the autobiographies discussed here but seems to stem from the fact that the author is admittedly less concerned with the persons who wrote them than with the ways in which their self-representations construct their identities. Thus, when novelist Haim Be'er, who grew up in a Jewish orthodox home in Jerusalem, tells of the alienation his parents felt toward officials of the Ministry of Rationing and Supply who enforced the government's austerity policy in the 1950s, it makes sense that Hess ties that alienation to Jewish people's traditional fear of ruthless institutions that had endangered them in the...

Holocaust Child Survivors' Memoirs as Reflected in Appelfeld's The Story of a Life

In her article Child Survivors' Memoirs as Reflected in Appelfeld's The Story of a Dana Mihailescu identifies characteristics of child survivors' memoirs in Aharon Appelfeld's writing. Mihailescu addresses the following main question: is the structure of child survivors' memoirs similar to that of Holocaust memoirs written by adult survivors or is there a tendency to focus on certain aspects given the young age some had at the time? Mihailescu argues that unlike regular autobiographies by Holocaust adult survivors, child survivors' memoirs are less constructed around factual events of private and public relevance and that they concentrate instead on deeply-entrenched sensations and the imminence of the death of parents and loss children experienced during World War II. Further, Mihailescu argues that it is important to recognize that in the case of a child survivor turned author like Appelfeld, the act of deferred mourning is inscribed in the technique of memoir construction via the continuous interruption of straightforward chronological organization. Dana Mihailescu, Child Survivors' Memoirs as Reflected in Appelfeld's The Story of a page 2 of 7 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17.3 (2015): Thematic Issue Life Writing and the Trauma of War. Ed. Louise O. Vasvari and I-Chun Wang

'The Heartache of Two Homelands...': Ideological and Emotional Perspectives on Hebrew Transnational Writing

Author(s): Tannenbaum, Michal | Abstract: The work of immigrant writers, whose professional identity is built around language, can deepen understandings of sociolinguistic and psychological issues, including aspects of the immigration experience; the position of language in the ideological and emotional value systems, and the significance of language for individual development. This paper deals with a number of translingual writers who immigrated to Israel prior to its establishment as an independent state and who chose Hebrew as their language. The paper focuses on three figures—Alexander Penn, Leah Goldberg, and Aharon Appelfeld—who came from different countries and different language backgrounds but have in common that Hebrew was not their first language.Two issues are discussed in depth in this article. One is the unique position of Hebrew, a language that retains high symbolic significance given its association with holy texts and the ideological role its revival played in the Zionist enterprise. Its association with identity issues or childhood memories may thus be somewhat different from that of other second languages. The other issue is the psychological motivations that affected these writers’ language shift. Despite the broad consensus on this shift as having been inspired by ideological/Zionist motives, my claim is that their motives may have been broader. Ideologies may at times serve as camouflage—used either by wider society’s collective interest in promoting its ethos, or by the individuals themselves, who prefer to be viewed as part of the collective and lean on its ideology to serve their own psychological needs.

Aharon Appelfeld: língua e identidade

O artigo analisa a maneira como a língua falada constrói a identidade étnica e artística antes, durante e após a experiência do campo de concentração no livro de memórias História de uma vida, de Aharon Appelfeld. As línguas de sua infância - o alemão (a língua materna), o iídiche (a língua dos avós) e o ucraniano (a língua oficial do meio social) -, entremeadas por palavras romenas, são as raízes estáveis na busca de uma nova identidade assumida em Israel a partir do uso da língua hebraica, aprendida em um contexto cultural específico.

A Journey to Poland – A Return to the Self in Poland, a Green Country by Aharon Appelfeld

In his mid-life Jacob Fein, a businessman, an ex-officer in the Israeli army, unhappily married, and a failed father of two daughters, embarks on a Journey to the birthplace of his parents—Holocaust survivors—to a small village not far from Krakow. It was a sudden decision, in fact not a decision but an impulsive urge. The journey turns into a pilgrimage of atonement. Jacob, who in his youth made a great effort in order to move away from his parents and their world, to detach himself from the Jewish past and his roots, feels his life hollow. In the journey he becomes acquainted with his parents’ life before the war, with their world, habits, beliefs, and their green and wild environment. The nature there, so different from Tel-Aviv, enchants him. His parents and ancestors, who were in his eyes wretched and miserable, become worthy, full, interesting, and dignified. The world of his parents fills the hollowness of his life and his self. The self which, as he comes to understand in the village, is incomplete and blemished without the past. Perhaps reconciling with the parents is not enough for a complete atonement, but at the end of the Journey Jacob is in a state in which he is allowed to ask for forgiveness.

Disability as Metaphor in Two Novellas of Aharon Appelfeld

Two of Appelfel’s novellas are fictional autobiographies of disabled Jewish persons. Kutti in A Journey into Winter is a stammerer and Bruno in And the Rage Is Not Yet Over is an amputee–one-handed man. The two novellas are written as monologues of their protagonists. Both of them begin with the same pattern as the protagonist introduces himself by stating his name and disability. The disability is an integral part and a major component of their identity.Although the plots of the two novellas differ from each other, there is a significant paradigmatic similarity between the novellas. In both of them the disabilities and their implications are represented not in a realistic way but in lyrical one. They function as a metaphor through which Appelfeld examines the core and essence of the Jewish protagonists of the novellas.This metaphor has a paradigmatic function. According to the paradigm, every Jew in the Diaspora has a kind of disability. This disability causes many problems and difficulties, but at the same time it is a virtue, an advantage. It makes the Jews special and unique, different from other people. It makes them think differently, have different morality and commitments. According to these two novellas this sublime disability is the core and essence of the uniqueness of the Jewish people.