The Story of a Life: A Memoir Review

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Aharon Appelfeld, the highly regarded Israeli novelist and Holocaust survivor, has written a hauntingly beautiful book.
It begins with a loving description of his childhood years with his parents in Czernowitz near the Carpathian Mountains and with his grandparents whom he visited in the country every summer. That all ended with the Nazi invasion in 1941 and the murder of his mother. After months of confinement in a ghetto, Aharon, his father, and the other Jews who had not yet been shot or starved to death were forced to march across the Ukraine to a slave labor camp.
Appelfeld writes sparingly about the ghetto, the forced march to the labor camp, his escape from the camp, and the deaths of his parents. "I have forgotten much, even things that were very close to me--places in particular, dates, and the names of people--and yet I can still sense those days in every part of my body."
He describes in somewhat greater detail the time he spent hiding alone in the Ukrainian forest. The strongest imprints the war years made on him, he writes, were intensely physical ones, like hunger for bread. "To this very day I can wake up in the middle of the night ravenously hungry. Dreams of hunger and thirst haunt me almost on a weekly basis. I eat as only people who have known hunger eat, with a strangely ravenous appetite."
He writes that his novels hardly begin to capture what he went through. "I've already written more than twenty books about those years, but sometimes it seems as if I haven't yet begun to describe them. Sometimes it seems to me that a fully detailed memory is still concealed within me, and when it emerges from its bunker, it will flow fiercely and strongly for days on end."
In the Ukrainian countryside the animals he met did not scare him. "I was sure they would do nothing harmful to me. I became familiar with cows and with horses, and they provided me with a warmth that has remained with me to this very day. Sometimes it seemed to me that what saved me were the animals I encountered along the way, not the human beings. The hours I spent with puppies, cats, and sheep were the best of the war years. I would blend in with them until I was part of them, until forgetfulness came, until I fell asleep alongside them. I would sleep as deeply and as tranquilly as I had in my parents' bed."
When from time to time he came out of hiding and worked for peasants in exchange for food, he learned how to pass himself off as a gentile orphan. Those years made him distrustful of the world around him ("even today, I stop and listen every few paces").
After the war he struggled to build a new life and learn a new language in Palestine, soon to be Israel. He immersed himself in Yiddish and Hasidic literature and began writing, but in the late 1950s he gave up trying to be what an Israeli writer was supposed to be and instead became "an emigre, a refugee, a man who carries within him the child of war, who finds talking difficult and tries to speak with a minimum amount of words."
He closes his memoir with a moving chapter about the New Life Club in Tel Aviv, which Holocaust survivors from Galacia and Bukovina established in 1950. "There was no one with whom I was close in Israel, so I'd go there to drink coffee, play chess, or listen to a lecture." Since its members spoke Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German, and Romanian, the club became a substitute home for him.
When Appelfeld's first book, Smoke, was published in 1962 to good reviews, some members complained that his characters were too grayish and too obsessed by the past. Where were the heroes? Where were the ghetto uprisings? they wanted to know. "Only later did I understand: it was hard for some people to be taken back to those places and forced to relive those experiences. The moment I understood this, I was no longer angry."
Since each club member carried within him a double and sometimes triple life, the club was important to Appelfeld for literary as well as social reasons. "I borrowed a little from each of their lives." In fact, it sometimes seemed to him "that all my writing derives not from my home and not from the war, but from the years of coffee and cigarettes at the club. The joy I experienced when it was in its heyday and the pain I felt when it collapsed--these feelings are still very much alive within me."
Part of the credit for the literary artistry of this compelling memoir goes to Aloma Halter, who translated it from the Hebrew.
--Reviewed by Charles Patterson, Ph.D., author of ETERNAL TREBLINKA: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust

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