Word: appelfeld
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Like water running over stone, the novels of Aharon Appelfeld slowly make a deep impression. Badenheim 1939 (1980), The Age of Wonders (1982), To the Land of the Cattails (1986) are imperceptibly abrasive, patient and stubborn in their scourings. Appelfeld's recurring subject is daily life just before and after Hitler's war against the Jews. The central crimes of the period need no enhancement, having been passed directly into the stream of conscience by the unadorned testimony of the survivors...
...Appelfeld is one himself. Born in 1932 in a part of Rumania that now belongs to the Soviet Union, he was sent, with his father, to a labor camp in the Ukraine. The eight-year-old boy escaped and, during three years reminiscent of Jerzy Kosinki's The Painted Bird, roamed the countryside in the guise of a shepherd. He lived mainly alone and in silence, fearing what the peasants might do to him if they learned that he was a fugitive Jew. After the war, he made his way to a displaced-persons camp in Italy...
Forty years later, Appelfeld is regarded as one of Israel's best novelists -- though not necessarily its most typical. Living in a nation whose people have aggressively reversed the role of outsider and helpless victim, he still writes what he describes as a literature of uprootedness. In his new novel, The Immortal Bartfuss, the concept of a Jewish homeland is not relevant. Bartfuss, the emotionally anesthetized protagonist, does not even have a proper home. He sleeps in a room apart from a wife he avoids and two daughters he scarcely knows. Bartfuss is some sort of underworld trader who keeps...
Good fiction can survive reductive quizzing, and The Immortal Bartfuss is more than passably good. Appelfeld quietly works the particulars and lets the generalizations take care of themselves. The half-light of early mornings and the battening darkness of late nights are the dominant tones of the book. Bartfuss's thoughts and feelings -- about his hateful wife, his distant + daughters, the treasure hidden in the basement -- have the cool clarity of the day's most private hours...
...Appelfeld's prose has the quality of light sleep, an uneasy alertness in which the past is like a fading dream ("Nothing was left of those dark days except twitches, remnants of nightmares, grimaces, and scraps of words") and the present a sudden, painful awareness: "In the next room Rosa and Bridget were still sleeping. The windows of the apartment were closed, and the heavy throbbing of their sleep could be felt even in the kitchen. Their forgotten existence awoke inside him for a moment and then passed away." Of such mortal moments is the immortal Bartfuss made and remembered...