ISRAEL'S LAST JEWISH WRITER
 David Stromberg
Jerusalem Post, July 16, 2009

Aharon Appelfeld, one of the most celebrated and respected authors of his generation, has witnessed nearly 100 years of Jewish life. From his grandparents, who were still believers, to his assimilated parents and communist uncles, to his own childhood experiences during the Holocaust and his eventual immigration to British-run Palestine, which soon became the Jewish State of Israel, with the entirety of its relatively short but uniquely rich and complicated history-Appelfeld has not only been a part of these tremendous events and tendencies, he has formed a multifaceted understanding and identity, both absorbing this history and reflecting it through his own writing. "My first identity is European Jewishness," he explains. "I lived happily as a Jew and suffered as a Jew. Jewishness is not something I can get rid of. I am Jewishness-my body, my soul. But I come from a very assimilated home, so my second identity is that of an assimilated Jew. My third identity is that of an Israeli. I've lived here for 64 years. I have three identities-like every modern Jew."... Appelfeld not only witnessed the creation of a Jewish state, he took part in most aspects of its development-working on a kibbutz, serving in the army (and in the reserves for 30 years), studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, teaching as a literature professor for 35 years. And yet he stresses the difference between his biography and that of sabra writers whose mother tongue is Hebrew and for whom Israel is their only environment. "I'm probably the last Jewish writer, and it's because I was born where I was born, in Eastern Europe . There was still Jewish life. I saw it. I saw the Jews in the Holocaust." His childhood in Bukovina is connected to his parents and grandparents, to the landscape, as well as to his deportation to and escape from a concentration camp in Ukraine -to all kinds of suffering that he experienced during his 13 years in Europe. ... He arrived here at 13 with no parents, no education and no language. As he explains, he brought with him life and terrible experiences. The existential question was how to express these terrible experiences when he could neither read nor write.... Before writing, he began by copying out a chapter of the Bible every day. "It was my feeling-perhaps it was not rational-that I should affiliate myself with Jewish letters. Not to understand, but to be close to the language. The rational way is to pick up a good dictionary and learn the language, but this is not the way I did it." This connection to Hebrew is reflected directly in Laish, Appelfeld's most recent novel published in English (released in Hebrew in 2001). The narrator and title character-Laish, a 15-year-old Jewish orphan taken in by a convoy of Jews purporting to be on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem-is constantly torn between different masters who make him work from morning till night for his daily bread, and the old men who spend their days studying Torah and who try to teach Laish not only to read and write, but to develop the practice of studying and praying.... But though Laish is rife with references from the Bible, Jewish mysticism, and hassidic teachings and legends (most prominently those of the Ba'al Shem Tov and Rabbi Nahman of Bratzlav), there's a difference between these sources and Appelfeld's writing. The issue is especially relevant when we consider his work's fluid translatability, which can be seen thanks to the efforts of Aloma Halter in this novel, but also as far back as Appelfeld's short stories written in the 1950s. "Don't forget that Hebrew became a modern language," asserts Appelfeld by way of explanation. "Modern Hebrew became one of the modern languages. It's not only the vocabulary, but also the way of thinking that is modern. A modern Hebrew writer is sometimes more connected to modern writers than old Jewish sources."... In Laish, the force of human wickedness seems both inescapable and inexorable.... And while its presence remains throughout the novel, Appelfeld says that he doesn't know how to define either wickedness or evil because by nature he is not a moralist. As he puts it, "Moralists have never been my favorites. I never declare, 'He is good, he is bad. You should be like those, or those.' Human beings are good and bad in the same body. We are not angels and we cannot be angels. We are what we are." He says that perhaps this element is a part of his book because during the war a group of Ukrainian criminals adopted him for a year and a half. "Criminals are not something unknown to me." The criminals in Laish, however, are Jewish. They are an integral part of a motley convoy that includes wagon drivers, dealers, cooks, religious elders, women with children, musicians, paupers, invalids. "Common needs bring them together," explains Appelfeld. "The old men cannot be alone, and the criminals also need them. They are a kind of social organism that has everything in it-good, bad, ignorant, stupid, crazy. They cheat each other, love each other, hate each other. It's Jewish life. And all of them are going to Jerusalem . Or at least that's what they say.... The pilgrimage to Jerusalem is an eternal way.... You should always go to Jerusalem even when you live in Jerusalem . It's very difficult to reach Jerusalem . It means, in other words, to be close to God." This is what makes going to Jerusalem an eternal goal.... But while Appelfeld weaves many themes into his fiction-tradition, weakness, wickedness, purification, faith-he also claims no rabbinical or philosophical authority. "I'm not dealing with abstract questions," he says. "I'm dealing with emotions, thoughts, the stream of life." One motif that arises repeatedly is who and what is a Jew. The book describes many kinds of Jews, and ways of being Jewish. Impious Jews sanction other impious Jews-as one murdering character says, "We may be Jews who have gone bad, but we're still Jews." According to Appelfeld...by emphasizing the good in someone, you make him good. "By saying 'You are Jewish,' it means that even if you committed a crime, you still belong to a society with values." Otherwise, he adds, you lose the sinner, who should not be excluded. "He is a sinner, but he is still a human being, and he is still a Jew." Another important motif is exile, which is a kind of simultaneous burden and relief. As Appelfeld explains, in theological terms we are all in exile, which means we are not living a full life. "We should strive more and more to come to Jerusalem -to the city of God -to be close to God. Otherwise, as human beings, we are in exile by definition."... A third central motif in the book is death, not just in the spiritual sense, but also in constant burial, in laying the dead to rest and the responsibility to give a Jew a proper Jewish burial, in living and dealing with death. As Laish narrates, "As after every funeral... grief was mixed with a selfish satisfaction that we were still alive. I have notices that the barrier between the living and the dead rises quickly. We buried the dead and immediately began to prepare coffee for the mourners. The aroma of the coffee gave us a thirst for strong liquor."... Though the book does not situate the historical date exactly, we know it is set at the end of the 19th century, falling on the border between ages-as Eastern European Hassidism was already in the process of losing its younger generation to the Haskala (Jewish Enlightenment), before modern Zionism but already at the advent of communism.... The book also reconnects today's readers with the roots of Hassidism at a time when animosity is rising between haredi and less religious or secular populations, especially in Jerusalem . "[Hassidism] is a wonderful source," says Appelfeld. There is less ritual and more spirituality, he says, and it deals not only with the individual, but with the elevation of the entire community to a spiritual feeling. "[Martin] Buber dealt with it a lot because this was how he connected himself to Judaism," he says. According to Appelfeld, what Hassidism emphasizes all the time is that God is everywhere, even in inanimate objects, but also in every individual, and therefore we should treat each person as a creation of God. He adds that the idea isn't totally new, but says that "a modern Jew looking for spirituality will find a lot of interesting sources in Hassidism. It's not a godless society, but a God-ful society, universal."... Appelfeld says that Laish, like his other novels, is part of a saga covering 100 years of Jewish loneliness. Though each novel is a complete work, no novel is completely autonomous, each is a chapter in this saga and is associated with the before and after. "Every writer has very limited subjects," explains Appelfeld. "Mainly the painful subjects." He says that a writer doesn't write a different subject every two years, that only the bad writers write about everything, know everything, give advice about everything. "Think about Kafka. He has one subject: father and authority. Think about Dostoyevsky: the decadence of the Russian intelligentsia, all their illnesses." Appelfeld maintains that good writers are limited to a biographical pain. "Actually, every writer has one major theme. The question at the end of the day is: How deep was it? How deep was his digging?"