01-05-2008 - Traces, n. 5

Preview of Rimini Meeting Aharon Appelfeld

What Made Me a
Protagonist

His childhood in a concentration camp. The return to Israel. The discovery of the Bible. And then, the relationship with his forefathers, the language, Abraham... The great Jewish writer explains why, in Rimini this summer, he will speak of the religious sense and of a “nothing that has become little less than a God.” In reality, he will tell the story of a life: his own

edited by Camillo Fornasieri

Aharon Appelfeld, one of the greatest and most authentic writers of our time, is an absolute protagonist. He bears witness to how a person who was stripped of everything can regain this everything and possess it in a new and unforeseen way, through the grievous experience of submitting to those who sought to make him a “nobody.”
 The Story of a Life catalyzed the reissue of a number of his books. Published in more than thirty languages in 26 countries, Appelfeld, who has taught for years at Ben-Gurion University at Beer-Sheva, in southern Israel, has no truck with public relations. He is not a “writer of the Shoah,” though he is sometimes erroneously described in this way. He is a person of moving goodness, intelligence, and humanity, combined with an extraordinary power as a writer, a profession to which he devotes eight hours a day.
For Appelfeld, life itself, the memory of things and people, becomes truth told as an awareness of his own biography and of a world. Born in 1932 in Czernowitz, Bukovina (Ukraine), after his mother was killed he was deported with his father to a concentration camp when he was just eight years old. Alone, he escaped and lived for five years in the forests of Germany, at one time with a band of thieves and murderers and at another in a Russian house of prostitutes. A fair-haired child, he harbored the secret of his Jewish identity, while seeing humanity and a whole world “come to an end,” as he said last October at the Cultural Center in Milan.
He receives us at his home in Mevasseret, a name which means “announcement of Zion,” 20 miles from Jerusalem. He confides that he wants to tell the Rimini Meeting what the religious sense means to him: a striving lived by man who is dust, a nothing, but who was made little less than a God.

Who are the protagonists of your books, and what do you hope to share with us?
An author writes about himself: he is the old man, the child, the woman. In practice, all the characters in his books are the writer himself. And this is especially true in my case. But if the writer talks about himself without considering the various figures that make up his life, he ceases to create. He becomes limited or obsessed, the victim of egocentricity.

From a world that no longer exists, you arrived alone in Israel in 1946. How did you begin to look for yourself? How did you become the protagonist of your life and a writer?
I was lucky. In my youth, I experienced the revival of Hebrew. When I arrived in the Holy Land, some 200,000 people spoke Hebrew. The need and the desire to utter the names of my loved ones led me to do so in a new language. That was the grievous beginning, a rupture. Through Hebrew, I have been able to relate myself to the Bible. I was welcomed to a kibbutz where a man gave me the Bible. I remember myself as a boy, copying out one or two chapters each day. This copying brought me closer, once again, to the original Hebrew text. Since then, I’ve read one or two chapters of the Bible each day. So it’s my first and last school, a school of writing. It was clear to me that the world I left behind–family, home, street, and city–were all alive and had taken root in myself, and all that had happened to me or would ever happen was bound up with the world where I grew up. When I understood that, I stopped being an orphan dragging my loneliness around with me and became a man with a grip on the world.

In The Story of a Life, you wrote that “literature, if it is genuine, is the religious melody that has been lost to us.”
Many of my characters are people who have a link with the divine but sometimes they’re unconscious of it. They do not belong to an institutionalized religion. This is especially common among children, who are unaware they possess such a faculty. My family wasn’t religious. My father had a small factory and at home we had two Ukrainian maids who were religious. I remember the strong impression it made on me whenever one of them would set out her icons and kneel to pray. Perhaps it was the first concrete expression of religion I’d ever encountered, the first contact I had with faith. But the interesting point is that I arrived at faith, because now I am religious, through Christianity. That’s a paradox! Then the Bible and its prose taught me certain things that are essential to any religious vision. For example: silence is more important than speech. Speech is limited, silence is infinite. In many cases, speech is a smokescreen.

Alain Finkielkraut describes you as one who hews close to memory and resists eloquence, writing to rescue life from empty words, from clichés. Is testimony your yardstick?
In wartime, it’s not the voice that speaks, but faces, hands. By a man’s face you could understand whether he was ready to help you or was plotting to destroy you. Words were no help in understanding. But the hand that gave you a piece of bread or a bowl of water when you were reeling from weakness, that’s something you can never forget. Hebrew tends to be laconic. If you can say a thing in two words, don’t use three. This frugality stems from the idea that the word has a special sanctity so it’s forbidden to desecrate it. Hebrew is not descriptive; that’s why we know nothing about the outer appearance of Abraham, the Patriarchs, or other figures. The whole focus is on their acts, their deeds. The heroic protagonists of the Bible nearly all lack outstanding gifts; they have not yet become holy…

What does this show?
Abraham is a very concrete, down-to-earth kind of person. He talks to God, argues, and cuts deals with Him. The protagonists of the Bible are practical people, rough, with strong instincts and drives, shot through with weaknesses. But they have an almost natural relationship with the divine. The Bible was my writing school. Now I can add that its great figures were an example in my personal life. It would be too much to say I’ve followed in Abraham’s footsteps or aspire to his greatness. The concrete, human side of Abraham is clear to me, but I find his experiences, his vision, inconceivable. This school is like a mountain I’m struggling to climb. It’s a kind of mirror in which I see myself reflected every day. I know I’m far from the divine, but I have a mirror and my school is the Bible.

Generally by a “protagonist” we mean someone who’s a success, but this often involves renouncing our aspirations. We are being crushed between uniformity and a cloying nihilism; we tend to “not desire too much...”
I was lucky enough–I’m being ironical–to have spent my childhood in hell. Ever since I emerged, I’ve had a sense of life that’s different from those who’ve never been there. Being in a human hell, where people punish you hour by hour, moment by moment, can make you cynical. The world after the Shoah appears like a world without God, dominated by the forces of evil. Among the Jews, a tragic situation has emerged. By the end of the nineteenth century, most had stopped believing. Once, this was a people who believed in God and they were ready to die for their faith. Today, 80%, perhaps more, no longer have any relation with the divine, and our leaders treat this fact as if it were insignificant. For the few who believe, this faith has become fossilized, and they’re unaware of the tragedy! The Jewish people, by cutting themselves off from the sources of faith, have created so many faith substitutes.

You see relationships as the very stuff of the “I.” You wrote: “The thought that my parents were waiting for me stayed with me, protecting me throughout the war. Paths did lead me out of the forest, but not to my parents.
And,  “throughout the war my parents were mixed up in my mind with God, as a kind of heavenly choir, accompanied by angels, that was supposed to come and save me from my wretched existence.”
The Bible taught to me to read and write, so it rescued me from a world where divinity was absent. In Hebrew, instead of “he died” you say “he was gathered to his fathers.” Death is a reuniting with your forebears. After the Shoah, I was left an orphan and I sought to create ties with my parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. This quest transformed me into a writer, but above all a believer. Wanting to live again with them, which at first sight might seem like a cult of the dead, was a way of struggling against death. When I reunited myself with them, I not only remained a normal person, no longer astray in the world, but I found I was tied to something large, true, and, in part, divine. I was able to emerge from cynicism, to relate myself to people as a man to men, to believe in mankind. I thank God, because I learned to love others as they are.

The protagonists of the world scene seem to be ideologies, projects, or, as T. S. Eliot wrote, “systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.”
I was a victim of two types of ideologies: Nazism, which destroyed my family, and Communism, which killed my uncles–although they were Communists–for not belonging to the Party. They both killed us for being Jewish. I’ve never had any ties with ideologies. They’re detrimental, not beneficial, to man.

In The Story of a Life, you write: “I learned how to respect human weakness and how to love it, for weakness is our essence and our humanity… A moralist cannot face his own weaknesses; instead of criticizing himself, he criticizes his neighbor.”
If we look at the nihilism that pervades society, it’s man’s heart that is stricken. But a society that forgets the individual for the community cannot be a human society. For this reason, in Judaism it is written: “If you save just one person it is as if you had saved the whole world.”