eJournals Colloquia Germanica 54/1

Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/21
2022
541

Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics in Story of a Life and The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping

21
2022
Abigail Gillman
Israeli author Aharon (Erwin) Appelfeld, born in Bukovina in 1932, survived the Holocaust as a child in hiding. He arrived in Palestine as a teenager and went on to become a celebrated author of over twenty books. On many occasions, he stated that his poetics – his relationship to words; his mode of observing the world (hitbonenut); and his laconic literary style – had been shaped in early childhood and did not change in the course of his life. Appelfeld’s memoir The Story of a Life (1999), and his novel The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping (2010), are centrally preoccupied with the enigma, and the necessity, of his child-like style. The former work, and episodic anti-memoir, depicts children’s modes of observing, experiencing, and remembering, as inherently valuable and artistic. The latter work, and autofictional novel, follows a teenage survivor named Erwin as he matures into a Hebrew writer. Only after he is wounded in war can he begin to reconnect with the world of his childhood, with the Hebrew language, with literature, and ultimately, with his innate, creative idiom. The memoir and the novel represent two interlocking chapters in the story of Appelfeld’s poetics.
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Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics in Story of a Life and The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping Abigail Gillman Boston University Abstract : Israeli author Aharon (Erwin) Appelfeld, born in Bukovina in 1932, survived the Holocaust as a child in hiding. He arrived in Palestine as a teenager and went on to become a celebrated author of over twenty books� On many occasions, he stated that his poetics—his relationship to words; his mode of observing the world (hitbonenut); and his laconic literary style—had been shaped in early childhood and did not change in the course of his life� Appelfeld’s memoir The Story of a Life (1999), and his novel The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping (2010), are centrally preoccupied with the enigma, and the necessity, of his child-like style. The former work, an episodic anti-memoir, depicts children’s modes of observing, experiencing, and remembering, as inherently valuable and artistic. The latter work, an autofictional novel, follows a teenage survivor named Erwin as he matures into a Hebrew writer. Only after he is wounded in war can he begin to reconnect with the world of his childhood, with the Hebrew language, with literature, and ultimately, with his innate, creative idiom. The memoir and the novel represent two interlocking chapters in the story of Appelfeld’s poetics� Keywords : Aharon Appelfeld, Holocaust Memoir, Holocaust Fiction, Child Survivor, Hebrew Literature, Austrian-Jewish Literature 32 Abigail Gillman Nur so kann geschrieben werden, nur in einem solchen Zusammenhang. (Franz Kafka, diary entry of 23 September 1912) 1 This is the way you are supposed to write. (Aharon Appelfeld, The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping, 2010) On April 6, 2011, at age seventy-nine, Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld was a guest speaker in Vienna, at an event hosted by the Jüdisches Museum Wien and other organizations� 2 At that time, Appelfeld’s international status (and his national acclaim) were at their peak� 3 The event featured the author in conversation with journalist Dr. Doris Appel, and a reading from the German translation of his memoir by an actor from the Burgtheater� 4 The event’s title, “’Ich bin ein Europäer geblieben’” (in quotation marks), though perhaps a direct quote from the author, was provocative, given the trajectory of the author’s life. A child survivor of the Holocaust who emigrated to Palestine in 1946, he became an Israeli, Hebrew author of twenty or more books, including short stories, novellas, and novels. The Museum’s podcast about Appelfeld’s Vienna sojourn, still available on YouTube, concludes with the author’s own words. 5 With his round face, twinkling eyes, melodious voice, and Czernowitzer accent, Appelfeld quips, “Mit achtzig Jahren kann man ein richtiger Schriftsteller sein; alles bevor sind wir noch Kinder” (At eighty, one can be considered a bona fide writer; everything before that - we’re still children)� Appelfeld can’t suppress a wink and a chuckle, however, because a writer who claims he is a child at age seventy-nine is not likely to become a bona fide writer at eighty. Why does this world-renowned Israeli author of over twenty books in Hebrew characterize himself as “still European,” still a child? Why the playful reluctance to assume the mantle of a bona fide writer? These attributes actually capture something essential about his poetics and his literary persona, which were shaped by biography, aesthetics, romanticism, and war. Appelfeld’s affinity for childhood is well known, and it has many facets. The author set the large majority of his works in the Central European landscapes of youth, and in Israel, where he emigrated as a teenager. Appelfeld’s prose style bears a child’s handprints. He and his characters speak with an unfiltered eye and naive sensibility, using simple words and unspoken gestures, avoiding analysis and psychology� And Appelfeld maintained on many occasions that his literary style was shaped by a mode of perception acquired in earliest childhood, which he frequently associated with his mother. Moreover, he extended these conditions of his art to “all art,” as in the following 2011 conversation with Shachaf Dekel: Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 33 To draw from within the child’s visions; small glowing details that illuminated your life when you were a child; that is the basis of all art. The child’s eyes; what he saw when he was a child� Later in life our vision “spoils”; it spoils because mental and rational elements get involved; different elements that damage the primary vision of the child. It is important for every artist to preserve the inner child. The moment he loses his inner child he becomes a historian, a philosopher, an anthropologist. He is no longer an artist� 6 To these fundamental aspects of Appelfeld’s persona, one must add the Holocaust� Appelfeld was born in Czernowitz in 1932� Between the ages of seven and fourteen, he experienced his mother’s murder (not directly witnessed, but overheard); the ghetto in Transnistria; a death march with his father to a concentration camp; years of hiding alone in the forests pretending to be a gentile child, at the mercy of peasants and the “underworld”; further wanderings after the war which involved stints in the Red Army, in a monastery, and a displaced persons camp in Naples; and ultimately, the journey with other Jewish orphans to Palestine� He began publishing in the early 1960s� (His father also survived the war, and they were eventually reunited in Israel.) In fiction he returns again and again to the Carpathian Mountains and the landscapes of Austria-Hungary and Central Europe, before, during, and after World War II. His characters, whom he notes are projections or extensions of the author and his family members, usually speak German, Yiddish or Ruthenian. Throughout his career, he eschewed the label of Holocaust writer� But the war is nowhere and everywhere in his work; most stories and novels circle around the Holocaust without describing it directly. Moreover, Appelfeld wrote only reluctantly in an autobiographical mode; apparently, he wrote about his life because his Israeli readers and critics became impatient with a writer whom they supported and celebrated but who never wrote about them, about Israeli history national matters, society in the present. In 1999 he published the memoir Sippur Hayyim (The Story of a Life, 2004). The memoir became widely translated, even winning France’s Prix Medici for best foreign novel; its appearance brought new attention to earlier works, as well as new translations.-The following year, Appelfeld published a second memoir in the guise of a coffee-table-format volume about the Israeli cafés where he did his writing, Od Ha-yom Gadol (Table for One: Under the Light of Jerusalem, 2005). The effort to connect Appelfeld’s biography to his poetics normally begins with the account of the first thirteen years that the author himself repeated on many occasions. I quote from Nurith Aviv’s documentary film Mi-Safah liSafah (From Language to Language, 2011): I was born in the city of Czernowitz� My mother tongue is German� I spoke Yiddish with my Grandparents, Ruthenian with the household help, and when I was born, the 34 Abigail Gillman Rumanians took over, so we spoke Rumanian. This lasted until age eight. When WW II broke out, this ‘idyll’ of speaking German was destroyed at once. We were forced into the ghetto. Then, we were transferred into a camp. They separated [me] from my father; they killed my mother at the beginning of the war� I remained alone� I decided to escape from the camp. I was blond and looked like a Ukrainian boy. The underworld adopted me, and I spent most of the war there. In 1946 I went to Israel. At age thirteen I emigrated to Palestine. Without education, without parents, in truth, without a language. I knew many languages, but all the languages together were not enough for communicating. We were like stutterers. We spoke the language of the body, not the mouth. Each one tried to express himself with what he had. Little by little, with great effort, we acquired Hebrew… Appelfeld’s understated narrative glosses over the unimaginable ruptures he must have experienced. The passage contains an example of what I imagine he meant by “stuttering.” The information “they killed my mother at the beginning of the war” is related only after the fact (as is also the case in Story of a Life)� Even as this account tracks the young author’s journey from “language to language” - from German, and the polyglossia of Czernowitz, to the language of the body, to Hebrew - it barely scratches the surface with regard to his relationship to language as such� A counternarrative about language runs through his corpus: Appelfeld maintains that his relationship to words began in early life and did not change during or even after the war. Consider these statements, the first of which comes about two-thirds of the way into Story of a Life. “During the late 1950s, I gave up my ambition to become an Israeli writer (sofer eretzisraeli) and made every effort to become what I really was (alternately: what I really am) 7 : an émigré, 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” (Story 124). But a few chapters earlier, Appelfeld suggests a different genesis to his laconic style. “Speech does not come easy to me, and it’s no wonder; we didn’t speak during the war. It was as though every disaster defied utterance: there was nothing to say… The hunger for bread, the thirst for water, the fear of death - all this made words superfluous. There’s really no need for them” (Story 102—03). And just a few pages later, one finds the extraordinary statement that the essential attitudes shaping his poetics preceded the war, and have not changed over time� My poetics had been formed at the start of my life [AG: note the use of past perfect tense]; by this I mean everything that I saw and absorbed from my parents’ home and throughout the long war. It was then that my attitude toward people, toward beliefs, toward emotions, and toward words, was molded. This relationship has not changed over the years� (Story 106) Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 35 Taken together, these claims express the conviction that the writer’s reticent style is not a barrier to expression, not a handicap, but an essential part of him. They foreground an attitude towards words that remained constant over a lifetime. Consider his self-description from 1980: “I am a craftsman of self-effacing words, the hiding, the shy words […] my work consists of nuances. It is hard to translate. It requires reading and listening, very strenuous listening, because it contains whispers, screams which turned into whispers” (Fuchs 61, 63). A shy, self-effacing, whispering language evokes the child in hiding, always watching, trying to be invisible� It is a language which contains far more than meets the eye, and the ear. Which demands careful listening. Which is hard to translate, because already translated, calibrated, muffled, muted; “screams turned into whispers.” Such writing may be childlike, but it is hardly simple. This essay proposes a new approach to the well-researched, complex topic of childhood and writing in Appelfeld’s oeuvre� 8 It argues that the multifaceted preoccupation with childhood, exemplified in two late works which, to my knowledge, have never been studied together at length, is fundamentally about creating the necessity for his writing and his poetics� What is at stake is his own attempt to articulate, or perhaps to forge, the connection between the screams and the whispers; between a childhood which was destroyed, and the life of writing which followed; and to articulate also how that which was stolen remains a part of him and, indeed, the ultimate “source.” What is at stake is being able to identify the moment when you knew, “This is the way I am supposed to write” - the magical phrase Franz Kafka recorded in his diary following the night of September 11-12, 1912. Indeed, as we will see, Kafka supplies an important source of continuity. Appelfeld’s references to Kafka date back to one of the author’s first essays, “Edut” (testimony), in which he calls Franz Kafka his “redeemer”: the one who showed him how to move forward as a writer� 9 In the novel The Man who Never Stopped Sleeping, Kafka’s epiphany appears, not in the mouth of the young protagonist, but of his father, upon discovering Kafka’s writing for the first time, “one year before the war.” The rapport between childhood and writing propels the two works which I take up in this essay: the memoir The Story of a Life (2004; Hebrew Sippur Hayyim, 1999), and the autofictional novel The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping (2017; Hebrew Ha-Ish Shelo Pasak Lishon, 2010)� Both memoir and Bildungsroman are predicated upon the organic ripening of the self over a lifetime� For this child survivor, it is the very constituting (memoir), or imagining (novel), of the integrated child-adult writer, that form the central plots. These two works supplement each other in a singular respect: the novel provides a fictional resolution, or overcoming and healing of, the “perpetual struggle” described in the 36 Abigail Gillman memoir. Simply put, the memoir illustrates the problem, the novel, the solution. The memoirist’s ineptitude contrasts dramatically with the novelist’s ingenuity. The Story of a Life strings together episodes from all seven decades of the author’s life, as well as reflections on the war, language, Judaism, and Israel. But the work is overwhelmingly preoccupied with childhood, and with capturing the child’s mode of observation, immediacy of experience, and pure relationship to time and memory. Children - not just the author as child, but many others - are central protagonists in most chapters. The memoir as a whole, I argue, seems written to justify Appelfeld’s attachment to childhood even as he matures through its pages; it illustrates not becoming a bona fide writer. Of critical importance: in the very first pages, the author describes his technique as a memoirist with the plain Hebrew verb l’chaber, which means to join, connect, attach, and secondarily, to compose, to write. 10 Chibbur (the noun form of l’chaber) carries even greater significance in the late novel The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping, the plot of which covers a far shorter time period than the memoir (1946-1948). “Sleeping boy,” as a young survivor named Erwin is nicknamed, arrives at a displaced persons camp in Naples, Italy, and soon sails to Palestine with the Youth Aliyah. A short stint as a soldier leads to a debilitating injury. During his convalescence, his development takes a new form: Erwin, instructed to change his name to Aharon, becomes a writer, drawing courage and inspiration from conversations with the living and dead (in dreams), and from diverse literary encounters, to put pen to paper. The breakthrough is the beginning of a memoir which occupies the book’s penultimate chapter (circling back to where Story of a Life begins.) The Bildungsroman, in essence, culminates in, evolves into memoir, narrating the complicated process by which the child becomes who he is, namely, the kind of writer determined to retain the simple words and naive vision of childhood� In her 2005 book, Emily Miller Budick writes, “Anyone interested in the ‘creative laboratory’ in which Appelfeld produced his fiction over the last forty years will find the autobiography a goldmine” (153). This is equally true of the works written subsequent to Story of a Life. But the autobiographical aspects of the late novel The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping also provoke a reconsideration of the memoir� 11 Israeli scholar Yigal Schwartz, an expert on Appelfeld and editor of many of his works, called the novel a “lens onto hidden chapters in the story of [his] life.” 12 I propose that the novel is an expansive, imaginative treatment of a period of the author’s life which the memoir compresses into two brief chapters, perhaps even into a single paragraph: “The years 1946-1950 were years of verbiage; when life is full of ideology, words and clichés abound. Everyone talked. Sometimes it seemed to me that everyone had attended a school for preachers (beit sefer l’dibbur) - only I hadn’t studied there” (Story 123)� It is Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 37 this stretch of time to which the autofictional novel gives detailed, imaginative expression, in recounting the tale of a young Austrian refugee, orphaned in the war, who prepares to take his first steps as a Hebrew writer, and endowing that process with the aura, the telos, of literary Bildung. Remaining asleep, remaining a child, remaining a European, are parallel expressions of that trajectory. This book is not a summary, but an attempt (and perhaps a desperate attempt) to integrate the different parts of my life and to reconnect them (l’chaber) to the wellsprings of their being. The reader should not expect a sequential and precise account in this story of a life� (Story ix) Appelfeld’s memoir is born of a modest desire to integrate the parts into a whole. Many chapters are fragmentary; others are reflective, essay-like; some are polished pearls. Chronology is more or less retained, but only rarely are years and dates included. The book begins with scant scenes from early childhood, into the war years. The middle chapters contain metacommentary about the initial struggle to become a writer, including also excerpts from Appelfeld’s diary. The final ten chapters depict formative encounters from his university studies and beyond. What the reader grasps is a chain of impressions, memorable experiences, and significant conversations strung together by way of recurring motifs. Some patterns emerge; for instance, within the first half of the book, many chapters begin with a calm or happy beginning and end in muted horror. In many chapters, a memorable personality takes center-stage. There are many ellipses (a feature of what Appelfeld calls “stuttering”). He initially skips over the war years, but recounts episodes from the war later on. An undeniable agenda is to rectify the “invisibility” of children during the war. Their persons, experiences and perspectives, are not simply a constant theme, but form a kind of deep, symbolic language within this disjointed narrative. The following section is not intended to summarize, but to follow this red thread how childhood is a part of the work’s texture� The narrative opens with the question, “At what point does my memory begin? ” (Story 3). In the tradition of Proust and Rousseau, or of Austrian memoirist Elias Canetti, memory originates in a symbolic Erlebnis involving language, family, and food, triggered by a German word that is “too long and hard to pronounce,” namely “Erdbeeren” (strawberries). Appelfeld recollects how he and his parents shared a bowl of strawberries served ritually with sugar and cream on a blissful summer day in the country. The basket of fruit seems bottomless; “there was nothing to worry about, the basket is still full, even if we go on eating all night long, it won’t get any emptier” (Story 4). But all too soon, the leftover strawberries rot in the pantry. In a similar melancholic tone, the chapter proceeds to describe the summer vacations spent with his mother at the home of 38 Abigail Gillman religious, Yiddish-speaking Jews, in the country in the Carpathian Mountains - an Edenic topos which recurs throughout Appelfeld’s fiction and nonfiction. But this too ends ominously, with the reunion with the father, causing the son’s inexplicable outburst of tears which bring a harsh scolding� In sharp contrast, chapter two is a self-contained short story. It begins: “My mother’s uncle, Uncle Felix, was a tall man, strong and quiet” (Story 17)� Uncle Felix was a wealthy Jewish landowner, an intellectual, collector of modernist art, and a serious Jew, who put on tefillin and studied a page of Talmud each day. In these brief pages, we follow the child’s experience of this large man as he is felled, like a great tree. He is forced to relinquish everything - his wife dies, he must give away the Modiglianis and Mondrians, the books and the musical instruments, and ultimately abandon his estate. But he never loses his dignity, taking care to bury the dead to protect their corpses from wild animals. The chapter ends with a devastating image: when Uncle Felix died of typhus during the death march, father could not find a shovel to bury him, so “we laid him upon a pile of hay” (Story 25)� Chapter three reports conversations during a happy train ride with his mother in the summer of 1937, ending with a joyful reunion with his father at the end; here it is only insinuated that this was the last of those summer trips� But the next chapter opens, “Nineteen thirty-eight was a bad year” (Story 32); he describes his maternal grandfather’s death, and the traditional burial and mourning rites which provoked quarrelling between his parents. Still, none of this prepares the reader for the abrupt beginning of the fifth chapter: “In the ghetto, children and madmen were friends” (Story 39). With no school, and with the closing of the mental hospital, these two populations were left to their own devices, both at the mercy of false helpers and assistance which came too little and too late. The child sees those “madmen” just before they are deported, and adult Jews tossing them bread and apples which they try in vain to catch as they stand, smiling. He speaks for the madmen - confirming their friendship: “We don’t need your food now. A little attention, a little love, would have gone a long way…” (Story 41)� These first five chapters depict the vestiges of a happy childhood being swallowed up by foreboding, death, and war. They invite comparison with the memorable opening of a very different kind of memoir by another Austrian, Ruth Klüger, born just one year before Appelfeld: “Der Tod, nicht Sex war das Geheimnis, worüber die Erwachsenen tuschelten, wovon man mehr gern gehört hätte” (weiter leben 7). But rather than expose the veneer of secrecy, as Klüger goes on to do, Appelfeld largely retains the child’s vantage point, leaving many mysteries intact. Klüger would likely have agreed with the view that “During the war, children were ignored. Children were like the straw on which everyone Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 39 trod” (Story 47), though Appelfeld and Klüger take starkly different approaches to remedying their invisibility� Adults in charge of children are either devoted or destructive� Chapter six memorializes the “Janusz Korczak” of his town: Gustav Gotesman, director of the Institute for the Blind. Gotesman, who taught his pupils through music, remained with them to the very end� As in many chapters (and in Appelfeld’s fictional works) the story ends with its characters being “swallowed” 13 into the cattle cars - though only after Gotesman and his children take a final glorious walk through the town, stopping and singing to the cheers of the townspeople. In the next scenario, a nameless woman tries to extricate herself from a young boy who simply will not let go, until “Tina,” as he calls her, is forced to pick him up; both are “immediately swallowed up” in the freight car. In chapter fourteen, which begins “the war spawned many strange children,” we read about Amalia and Chico, singers and performers in the displaced persons camp in Italy, and the “impresario” who “managed” their performances� Another chapter describes the gruesome fates of children caged with German Shepherds in Kalchund� In chapter thirteen, Erwin asks a traditional Jew he meets in the Atlit transit camp to teach him how to pray, because he “loves to pray,” and he learns the Hebrew alphabet (Story 82); beatings are also part of these first Hebrew lessons. Chapter sixteen is devoted to a curious adult-child dyad whom he meets on the ship to Palestine: an older man and an angelic girl named Helga, an amputee, whom this man apparently has adopted. When pressed to tell their story, neither the man nor Helga say anything more than “it rained�” With classic Appelfeldian Anspruchslosigkeit, the narrative portrays Helga and her caretaker with neither judgment nor analysis. As in the stories of the child and Tina, or Gotesman and his charges, Appelfeld depicts adults and children as interdependent, dyadic. By the same logic, in the first half of the book, the perspectives of the narrating adult subject, the witnessing child, and the myriad characters being described, subtly merge� The book’s final ten chapters are devoted to the author’s mentors and teachers after the war, first among them the memorable, the fierce “poet Y.S.” who taught the orphans Yiddish poetry and music, and also Hasidic tales, “pitting himself” against the youth leaders who came from Palestine, and protecting the youth even with physical violence from the smugglers who tried to seduce and kidnap them. (Y.S. is identified as Slobodkin in The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping.) Other professors and writers who mentor him in Israel include the famous literary scholar Dov Sadan, the first head of Yiddish Studies at Hebrew University, who taught Appelfeld that Hebrew and Yiddish were “twin sisters” - a critical, even heretical idea, at the time (Story 113); the philosopher Martin Buber; the Nobel-Prize-winning author Shmuel Yosef Agnon - an essential role 40 Abigail Gillman model, together with poet Uri Zvi Greenberg - and Gershom Scholem, scholar of mysticism, who declared, upon the publication of his first novella, “Appelfeld, you’re a writer” (Story 155). On yet another variation of the theme, in the memoir’s final four chapters, Appelfeld occupies the role of the adult in charge of other children� During the Yom Kippur War he tells his life story to soldiers as an army educator, and in the exquisite chapter twenty-nine, he describes in detail a futile, “stuttering” attempt to talk about the war with the son of a good friend� The memoir ends with a poignant, detailed portrait of the New Life Club, created in Israel by survivors from Galicia and Bukovina in the 1950s. The chapter traces how the author experienced the Club in different decades of his life; how it shut down; and what remains. As the memoir closes, and narrated time veers closer and closer to narrative time, the book’s surprising telos becomes clear: the adult narrator has become less, not more, articulate, than the young child savoring strawberries and cream. The adult writer conveys that he understands just as little about his own story as he did at the outset - or perhaps, that understanding is not necessary, since the main thing is simply to have arrived. Speaking in the plural “we,” he returns to a state of invisibility: “The steam from the coffee and the haze of the cigarette smoke enveloped us for years and brought us to where we are today” (Story 198)� Children are not only the main characters in Story of a Life; the work as a whole strives to imitate or recapture the child’s vantage point, and to narrate the fleeting encounters between children and adults, for the most part and crucially without analysis, reflection, judgment. Moreover, in the middle section (chapters 18-21), Appelfeld explicitly identifies their special mode of observing as the basis of his poetics - contemplation, and not recollection, which is an adult preoccupation. The work begins, “The pages before you are segments of contemplation (hitbonenut) and memory” (Story v), but it is the former term which becomes central� Hitbonenut, translated as observation, contemplation, or gazing, is often lost in translation. 14 Emily Miller Budick captures the term’s etymological nuance, as well as its significance as the “dominant register of his own relation to the world and the basic mode of his fictional representations”: “That word is, in Hebrew, hibonenut, which means observation, reflection, contemplation, and insight. Related to the kabbalistic concept binah [wisdom, understanding], the word is also laden with mystical connotation, suggesting meditation as well” (Budick xi). As Budick notes, Appelfeld describes a mode of intense observation, but from a distance, from the outside, that takes everything in but “does not impose”; a form of understanding which enables self-forgetfulness, even survival. This observant child becomes the writer who records images and gestures rather than facts and dates� Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 41 In chapter one, before recounting the memory of the Erdbeeren, Appelfeld recollects an earlier scene occurring even before age four, in his childhood room. “Snow is falling, and fleecy soft flakes are slowly coming down from the sky with sound so faint that you cannot hear it� For hours I sit and gaze in wonder (mitbonen), until I merge with the white flow and drift off to sleep” (Story 3; Sippur 9). Such “gazing” precedes language and memory, just as the account of observing and merging with the falling snow precedes the “clearer, distinct memory” which follows. A few paragraphs later, the word recurs in a memory of the family’s trips to the forests, the Carpathian Mountains, and the River Prut. “I see us climb a hill, sit on top of it, and gaze around (mitbonenim) […] Nothing spoken - no phrases - remain in my memory from those distant days, only Mother’s gaze (mabateha). It was filled with so much softness and tender solicitude (hitbonenut) that I feel it to this very day” (Story 5; Sippur 10). This mode of observation, imbibed from the mother, is a preconscious, nonverbal mother tongue� Appelfeld ascribes to hitbonenut extraordinary spiritual power and physical resilience. Far more than simply a mental mode of perception, it enabled him to connect with his new surroundings and with his roots, to forget his suffering, but also (paradoxically) to retain his individuality, apart from the masses. 15 I survived the war not because I was strong or because I had fought for my existence� […] Danger made me into a child who was attentive to his surroundings, but not into a strong child� I would sit for hours in the forest and observe (mitbonen) the underbrush, or sit by the side of the stream and watch the current� Contemplation (hitbonenut) made me forget about the hunger and the fear, and visions of home would return to me. […] These hours of grace preserved me from spiritual extinction at the time, and afterward as well, when I travelled through Europe after the war and during my years in the youth village. I would sit in contemplation, wrapping myself in sights and sounds, connecting with my previous life, and feeling happy not to be just another one of the anonymous thousands who surrounded me� (Story 139) Of his years in the army: There are a few noteworthy aspects of observation: when you observe (mitbonen), you’re on the outside, a little higher up, and distant. From this perspective you can understand that whoever’s shouting at you is perhaps really shouting at his father or his mother. […] Through observation, you can shake off some of your sadness and self-pity. The more you observe, the less pain you feel. (Story 134) Increasingly, Appelfeld valorizes hitbonenut as an alternative to memory (the prerogative of adults); in fact, his very first assertion is that to write about the war entailed listening to his body, rather than to his memory (Story vii)� He re- 42 Abigail Gillman peats often that children experienced the war in their bodies: “I was not myself, but like a small creature that has a burrow, or more precisely, a few burrows” (Story vi)� Adults who survived could relate to the Holocaust as an eclipse of reality; others forced it into a category - social, theological, historical; still others cast it as an experience that cannot be expressed in words� But children who grew up during those years knew only what was before their eyes� Children did not enter the war with abstract knowledge of good and evil; they learned about it by observing adults’ body language. They learned that there were two kinds of people: protectors and predators; noble adults who helped children and bad adults who ignored or preyed on them. Paradoxically, in such a world, where adults were, of necessity, reduced to a single dimension (good or bad), children developed into complex and discerning beings, with uncanny powers of discernment. From an earlier essay: “They knew man as a beast of prey, not metaphorically, but as a physical reality with his full stature and clothing, his way of standing and sitting, his way of caressing his own child and of beating a Jewish child” (Appelfeld, qtd. in Lang 91). These last phrases encapsulate a key element of Appelfeld’s narrative technique� Chapter fifteen - the midpoint of Story of a Life - begins with the mature writer’s meditation about remembering, and the opposing of the recollective abilities of adults and children� While the adults spoke about what had come before , for children the Holocaust was now and always. While the adults fled from themselves and from their memories, repressing them and building up a new life in place of the previous one, the children had no previous life, or, if they had, it was now effaced. The Holocaust was the black milk, as the poet said, that they sucked morning, noon, and night (Beyond Despair 36—37)� Someone who was an adult during the war took in and remembered places and individuals, and at the end of the war he could sit and recall them, or talk about them. […] With us children, however, it was not names that were sunk into memory, but something completely different. For a child, memory is a reservoir that doesn’t empty. It’s replenished over the years, clarified. It’s not a chronological recollection, but overflowing and changing, if I may put it that way. (Story 91—92) In describing a child’s memory as “a reservoir that doesn’t empty,” Appelfeld characteristically completes a thought with a figure, to illustrate the very point that children remember “something completely different” which even he, as an adult, cannot directly name. Children’s memories are not anchored in chronology or geography, but rather ebb and flow and transform in the manner of Bergson’s durée. But the chapter ends in a different key, with a discrete memory about the brutal march in the mud he endured with his father across the Ukraine, which he frames in a rare moment of self-consciousness as “a fragment Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 43 about a forced march that I’ve been trying to describe, without success, for years” (Story 92)� Finally, in The Story of a Life and in lectures, Appelfeld makes the stunning claim that children who lived through the war were the first to give it artistic expression, and moreover, that they were uniquely able to do so. It seems to be based on his personal experience: the very first artists (performers, singers, jugglers) whom he encountered in the camp in Naples were children� And in one of his lectures, he makes another kind of leap: “I have discussed the children because it was from them, in the course of time, that artistic expression arose” (Beyond Despair 38). Ultimately, these formulations express the fundamental Appelfeldian idea that the child survivor’s immediate and unmediated experience became the condition of artistic expression: “Schwarze Milch der Frühe / wir trinken sie abends wir trinken sie morgens und mittags wir trinken sie nachts / wir trinken und trinken…” The artist’s refusal to describe events in chronological order, or facts, or even “the past,” but rather, places and people to whom he was in one way or another connected, is stated most clearly in the closing lines of chapter twenty (and of the book’s middle section): I do not pretend to be a messenger, a chronicler of the war, or a know-it-all. I feel attached (mitchaber) to the places I have lived in, and I write about them. I don’t feel that I write about the past. Pure and unadulterated, the past is no more than good raw material for literature� Literature is an enduring present - not in a journalistic sense, but as an attempt to bring time into an ongoing present. (Story 125; Sippur 114) Neither powers of contemplation, nor the lived experiences, could pave a direct path to becoming a writer� What was missing was language� Appelfeld borrows the title of one of Kafka’s first stories, “description of a struggle” (Beschreibung eines Kampfes) to describe the process of acquiring language� His Kampf began when he arrived in Palestine and found himself mute� A sense of the futility of words had taken over already during the war� Words did not help one understand. The senses were what provided you with correct information� (Story 104) In 1944, the Russians recaptured the Ukraine. I was twelve years old. A woman survivor who noticed me and saw how lost I was, bent down and asked, “What have you been through, boy? ” “Nothing,” I replied. (Story 91) The idea that words were superfluous, that there is quite literally “nothing to say” about what he had been through, might be labelled a symptom of trauma. 44 Abigail Gillman But the psychological diagnosis does not suffice. Appelfeld’s shy words challenge readers to imagine what “nothing” connotes� The struggle, as detailed in chapters eighteen and nineteen of Story of a Life, begins when the youth who was raised speaking one language composed of four languages, German, Yiddish, Ruthenian, and Rumanian, suddenly has no language, “like a stone” (Story 111)� In a departure from the previous chapters Appelfeld uses his diary from that period to jar his memory: it is “stuttering and impoverished, and yet, at the same time, it is full to bursting.” (What follows is my own English rendering of the next sentences, which corrects a mistake in the English version): 16 What is not there: longing, guilt, sketches that are drawn from observation (sartutei hitbonenut), and sexual yearning. Beyond all this, there’s a desperate attempt to connect (l’chaber) precious childhood memories with a new life. This was a perpetual struggle […] also to safeguard that core of myself that was being asked to be something he didn’t want to be and couldn’t be. But above all, I fought to acquire the language and to adopt it as my own tongue� (Story 116) Appelfeld describes a period of “stuttering,” at a point when Hebrew, “which promised to be my mother tongue, was nothing more than a stepmother” (Story 111). Stuttering is the linguistic correlation to limbo. “Quite obviously, I was neither here nor there” (Story 111). Although Appelfeld “overcomes” muteness, he also makes clear that the stuttering did not disappear with the acquisition of Hebrew. This facet of the new language would enable him to connect past and present, and to plant new roots - two constant metaphors for memory and creativity. “I’ve carried with me my mistrust of words from those years. A fluent stream of words awakens suspicion within me. I prefer stuttering, for in stuttering, I hear the friction and the disquiet, the effort to purge impurities from the words, the desire to offer something from inside you” (Story 103)� Upon arriving in Israel, Appelfeld shunned “conceptual expression,” “generalizations,” and “externalization upon externalization” (Beyond Despair 14)� In the turbulent period of the 1940s during which the State of Israel was created, Appelfeld kept his distance from ideological expression. He realized he could not avoid writing about the war. At the same time, he understood early on that “memoir” or “autobiography” were not options. Neither memoirs, nor the “comprehensive factual material, including historical, social, psychological background,” could “bring this dreadful experience into the circle of life” (Beyond Despair xiv). The goal of writing is not to testify or to comprehend, but to allow his experiences to infuse the present, to inform life - and in that way, to restore the survivor a continuous self� Only through art could this be done� Only Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 45 as an artist could he “freely” deal with the Holocaust; “only art has the power of redeeming suffering from the abyss” (Ramras-Rauch xv). The struggle for expression dominates the account of his first four years in Israel, 1946-1950, when Appelfeld lived in a youth village. In those years, the national mandate was to transform a polyglot mass of Jewish refugees and survivors who had lost everything into strong, productive “new Hebrews.” The pedagogical methods to which these new immigrants were subjected were not primarily designed to produce artists. “The attitude at that time regarding language was overwhelmingly functional: ‘Build up your vocabulary and you’ve got a language! ’ This approach tried to uproot you from your world and implant you in a world you could barely grasp” (Story 117). The impediment was not his unfamiliarity with Hebrew per se, but an attitude towards language as such, and a compulsory method of acquiring new words which only intensified his displacement and self-alienation� From the moment I arrived in Israel, I hated the people who forced me to speak Hebrew, and with the death of my mother tongue, my hostility toward them only increased. […] Let me be clear. We acquired the rudiments of Hebrew quite quickly, and by the end of [the] first year we could even read the newspaper. But there was little joy in this acquisition. It was like being trapped in a protracted military tour of duty that would last for many years and for which I immediately had to adopt the soldiers’ language� But at the end of my service (which would be equivalent to the end of the war), I would return to my mother tongue. There was, of course, an inescapable dilemma: that language had been German - the language of those who murdered my mother� 17 How does one go back to speaking in a language drenched in the blood of Jews? This dilemma, in all its severity, did not detract from the feeling that my German was not the language of those Germans but the language of my mother, and it was as clear as daylight that if I met up with her I’d speak to her in the language that we had spoken together since I was a small child� (Story 111—12) In this transitional period, neither German nor Hebrew are viable. German, the mother tongue, is the language of his mother’s murderers. But speaking Hebrew feels like a duty to be discharged� Appelfeld’s “inescapable dilemma” recalls the “impossibilities” that Franz Kafka articulated one generation earlier. 18 Like Kafka, and inspired by Kafka, Appelfeld finds a different way: “it was as clear as daylight that if I met up with her I’d speak to her in the language we had spoken together since I was a small child.” The condition of writing is the certainty that regardless of which language he chooses, he will be able to communicate with his mother. This is precisely the solution that Appelfeld imaginatively works through years later (in the Freudian sense of durcharbeiten) in The Man Who 46 Abigail Gillman Never Stopped Sleeping, above all by inventing or imagining the protagonist’s numerous conversations with his mother (and father) while dreaming� Mother and I were walking without speaking� Mother’s silences were among the wonders of her self-expression. […] Mother was sitting by my side, as she did when I was sick. I told her that splitting rocks wasn’t trivial work. When she heard this, she narrowed her eyes and said, “You’re using incomprehensible words�” “Me? ” “You appear to be using a secret language.” I became confused and I didn’t know how to reply. Finally, I realized that I was mixing words from home with new words, so I tried to separate them. I wanted to tell her about all my adventures since I had been parted from her� I knew I had a lot to tell her, but it seemed beyond my power, like a pile of broken stones that I had to load onto my back� “Mother,” I said, “I can’t right now.” “No matter,” she said. (Man 53—54) The manual labor of inventing a new language proceeds by fits and starts. Ultimately, Erwin dreams that his mother gives him permission to speak in Hebrew. The resolution, I emphasize, is not simply about trading a mother tongue for a step-mother tongue, German for Hebrew. The new language incorporates the child’s powers of observation, and the survivor’s need to connect; the muteness, stuttering, and struggle that marked his teenage years; and the will to make great literature, because only literature would bring the story of this life into the “ongoing present.” The mother’s “secret language” describes Appelfeld’s idiom. Rather than view him simply as a reticent writer, or a traumatized one, one must attend to the paratactic phrasings and rhythms of the Hebrew Bible; the melodies of Yiddish literature and Hasidic tales written in pre-modern Hebrew; the syntax Franz Kafka and Shmuel Yosef Agnon, his German and Hebrew muses. All of this lends his writing a parabolic quality. Appelfeld’s prose, no less than biblical style, is “fraught with background,” in Erich Auerbach’s phrase. “Since the war I have been trapped in a continuous slumber” (Man 3; my translation)� 19 The opening sentence of the novel The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping continues the mood created by the smoke and haze surrounding the survivors in the final line of The Story of a Life, published eleven years earlier. This opening sentence also repeats almost verbatim a line from the preface to the memoir: “For many years I was trapped in the slumber of forgetting” (Sippur 7), or in Aloma Halter’s translation, “For many years I was sunk deep within the slumber of oblivion” (Story viii). Notably, in the later work, in which sleeping becomes a central trope, the term oblivion is dropped; sleep acquires other connotations. This is the first way in which the novel solves the dilemma described in the memoir. There is also a chronological discrepancy between these texts: Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 47 The Story of a Life locates the struggle to become a writer as occurring “during the late 1950s,” but Appelfeld sets the novel The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping in the late 1940s, synchronizing Erwin’s coming of age with the period of Israel’s War of Independence. Moreover, in The Story of a Life, Aharon enlists in the army, but he is not found fit for fighting, only for service. In The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping, Erwin does get to fight, and he is injured in his first battle - a plot twist which changes everything� The novel begins as a classic Zionist coming-of-age tale. The protagonist Erwin starts out in a DP camp and makes his way with a group of other teenagers to a youth village in Palestine. His constant need to sleep, which seems to connote the weakness of the diaspora Jew and/ or the trauma of the survivor, sets him apart from the others. Still, the new immigrant trains to be a farmer and defender of the land, and watches proudly as his weak youth’s body begins to transform into that of a strong, suntanned fighter. But the Zionist plot is short-circuited approximately midway through the novel, when Erwin, now Aharon, is seventeen. His life changes course when he is injured in his very first combat mission and suffers paralysis. The injury, followed by many surgeries and a long struggle to “connect” his legs to his body, sets in motion a radically different struggle - to become a Hebrew writer. As he describes the turning point, “our lives were cut in two” like a piece of paper torn in half (Man 109). Before, he did the planting; after, words are “planted” inside him, enabling his inner life to flower, or in his image, to prevent his inner world from being extinguished (olam hapnimi lo cavah). In the initial plot, Erwin is guided by Ephraim - the native-born troop leader who trains the group of refugee boys and builds them into soldiers. In the second plot, his guide is a surgeon, the German-speaking Dr. Winter, who supervises his recovery, and who bears resemblance to his uncle and other family members. When he recovers, instead of returning to the kibbutz, he opts to live in solitude in a city apartment full of books, bequeathed to him by an elderly man from his native Galicia, where he pursues the creative life� Bodily injury - perhaps an allusion to Kafka’s illness - makes writing possible. Immediately after he is injured, Erwin begins to obsessively recollect his father’s writing: “For as long as I could remember, Father wrote at night” (Man 115). Erwin’s development progresses in fits and starts, though the chapters are imbued with the telos and hopeful arc of a Bildungsroman� Like the modernist Bildungsroman (Franco Moretti), it is short on action and long on conversation with both the living and the dead, with mentors, other adult survivors, teachers, doctors, and his peers. Dreamed conversations with his parents, about life, literature, language, play a central role. The recovery process, which Erwin describes in child-like terms as “reattaching his legs to his body,” becomes a trope 48 Abigail Gillman for his gradual and protracted struggle to connect his inner life with Hebrew, and through Hebrew, with his own creative idiom. It is that struggle, recounted in condensed form in the memoir, which the novel elaborates on a micro level, with pathos, and at a painstakingly slow pace. In one powerful scene, Erwin prints the names of his family members and town in Hebrew characters for the first time, and apologizes for “clothing” the names of his dear ones in a foreign alphabet� 20 Of great importance are an extended period of reading and obsessive copying verses out of the Hebrew Bible. Though his peers fail to grasp the purpose of this practice, he intuits that copying is the best preparation for writing (and this in a period when copying biblical verses was a form of school punishment). The novel culminates with his first, long-awaited attempts at creative writing - some poems, fragments of prose, and a complete chapter. 21 In all of these ways, Appelfeld’s novel constructs the period of struggle as one of Bildung. Through fiction, in other words, Appelfeld imagines events and conversations which made that self-acceptance possible: which enable him to become what he was; to move from muteness to speech; from the loss of languages to Hebrew; and through Hebrew, to develop his own poetics - to find the words to express how the world of his childhood, including his Jewish and European heritages, remain living sources of inspiration. The Hebrew word chibbur (connection, written composition) is used to refer to the joining of past and present; images and thoughts with a new alphabet and language; the reading self with books (l’hitchaber); and Erwin’s legs with his body. This term too gets lost in translation. The inability to walk becomes the central metaphor for a spiritual uprooting� Erwin’s struggles to forge connections, physical, spiritual, emotional and literary, analogize one another. The multiple connections he seeks are, at different times, present or absent; real or imagined; true or erroneous. In these examples translator Jeffrey M. Green renders chibbur alternately as “connect,” “make part of,” and “rejoin.” In the refugee camp in Naples, Erwin joyfully reunites with his parents’ friend Dr. Weingarten. But one day, Dr. Weingarten falls ill, and Erwin learns he has been transferred to a hospital� “I stood in the empty courtyard in front of the infirmary without moving. I now realized that Dr. Weingarten had connected me to my true world with many fine threads” (Man 49). The inner connection becomes realized only through loss, once Weingarten has left him. In the second half of the novel: “I tried to cleave to the Hebrew letters, and the effort cost me deeply� It was hard for me to make them part of my thoughts and without that close connection, everything was chaotic, falling into the depths of darkness” (Man 139)� And in an extraordinary passage describing one of many dreams about his father, Erwin tries to connect, or align, his father’s efforts to succeed as a writer with his own struggle to learn to walk� Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 49 That night I saw my father sitting at his desk and writing. It seemed to me that his efforts and my efforts to rejoin (l’chaber) my legs to my body were shared� I wanted to call out to him� We’ll both do it, but I realized that this was erroneous. There was no connection (eyn kesher) between his writing and my injury� “Will my legs be reattached (yitchabru) to my body? ” I asked Father fearfully� “I have no doubt,” he replied as he raised his big eyes to mine. “But the doctors…,” I said, and the words stuck in my throat� (Man 120-1; Ha-ish 102) The mere fantasy of a connection between the father’s writing and the son’s efforts to reconnect his legs to his body begins to empower Erwin to take the next steps� To become a writer requires establishing a connection with the father, or in other words, constructing his own patrimony. In order to obtain the parents’ blessing, he must synchronize his postwar life in Palestine with his parents’ lives before the war� How does a son who is a war orphan establish his own literary patrimony? Through flashbacks, memories, and dreams. Erwin’s father was a failed writer. Initially, Erwin doesn’t remember his father writing in the evenings; he only recalls that he played chess in the cafes� But other memories begin to surface during conversations with his father’s close friend Dr� Weingarten, and he begins to recall his father writing tirelessly in the evenings and sending out multiple manuscripts, all of which were rejected and sent back. An epiphany comes when Dr� Weingarten tells him that this same father who couldn’t get published in the prewar years found a new voice and a new role in the labor camp, retelling stories by Kafka and Kleist as well as his own. For a year and a half, he served as a kind of Shahrazade, telling stories at night to keep people’s spirits from sinking (v’lo naflu b’rucham). Erwin, one might say, is inspired both by his father’s failures in the prewar years and his success during the war. Because in an inverted world, which has become a hell, the father’s stories and voice resound “as a voice from on high” (Man 39). In a striking phrase, the stories began to be read as “parables to be deciphered in the future” (amru shgam sipurav hem meshalim she-od atidim lehitpaneach) (Man 39; Ha-ish 37)� Appelfeld also writes parables: tales told in a childlike voice in the tradition of religious tales, texts with unspoken meanings which will become revealed when world history catches up with literature� But obtaining this information about his father’s eventual success does not simply inspire mimetic desire� Appelfeld’s plot is subtle� Erwin must experience something akin to his father’s professional fiasco: the failure the novelist contrives is the failure of the boys’ first military mission as soldiers. The chapter closes with the words “the big operation […] had failed” (Man 109)� Erwin has been injured, as has the troop leader Ephraim. But the life-changing event is 50 Abigail Gillman described only in passing - in a stutter. 22 Only after this injury does the urgency to become a writer, to follow in his father’s footsteps, take hold. From this point on, Erwin uses a childlike expression for his condition, saying that his legs were detached from his body. The loss of his legs enables him to identify with the father, the failed writer; he has the illusion that they are united in a common effort (ma’amatz meshutaf)� And he becomes aware that his wounded state connects with his father’s wound - by way of Kafka. The series of dreamed conversations between Erwin and his father, and the real conversations with Dr. Winter, recall the surreal dialogues in Franz Kafka’s “Ein Landarzt” (A Country Doctor); Erwin is alternately the sick patient whose wound may or may not be curable, and the country doctor, who is himself paralyzed, trying to “do the impossible” for everyone� Erwin constructs a literary genealogy that picks up where his father’s literary pursuits left off. In the course of the novel, Erwin learns, reads and copies from a series of texts: the Hebrew Bible, in particular Psalms, Samuel, and Genesis 22 (the Aqedah); stories of Franz Kafka and S.Y. Agnon; and Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. Imitation has always been an essential part of artistic development, but copying suits Erwin’s humble personality� He not only develops his own taste and sense of literary style; he also imbibes from these texts and from his teachers a hermeneutic which Appelfeld prescribes to his readers in turn� In a memory dated “about a year before the outbreak of the war,” Erwin recalls his father’s reaction upon reading a booklet by a “little-known author named Franz Kafka.” “That’s exactly the way you have write to write today,” he finally said. “Do you feel an affinity with his writing? ” Mother asked cautiously. “He’s my brother, dear, my big brother, who broke through the barriers by storm. Now we know who we are and what our place is in this world.” All that day, the thin book never left father’s hands. (Man 197, Ha-ish 165) In preceding chapters, Erwin had been reading and copying from Psalms 102, from Agnon’s story Tehila, and from Psalm 102� Galician-born Hebrew author Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1887-1970), about whom Appelfeld writes in the memoir, had lived in Germany from 1912-1924. Agnon, who also wrote in parabolic style, blends European Jewish life, Jewish texts, and European modernist techniques in his work. Agnon’s style holds great appeal; however, Erwin notes, “this enchanting melody wasn’t mine” (Man 215)� Despite the strong personal connection, and despite their common Austrian heritage, the Holocaust separates them definitively. But Franz Kafka, who had been his father’s muse, plays a more complicated role. A few chapters later, Erwin opens up a book by Kafka and recalls his father’s words; he quotes and copies out the first lines from “Ein Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 51 Landarzt” (in Hebrew Rofeh K’fari)� 23 After copying, he remarks, “I read it over and over. I had never heard a story in this rhythm… the facts knock against each other.” The rhythm of “Ein Landarzt” is not that of The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping. But it does recall the style of other works by Appelfeld such as The Immortal Bartfuss or For all my Sins� Even more than Kafka’s story does the Hebrew Bible become Erwin’s style guide. The Aqedah (Genesis 22) - like the novel - describes a trial of a father and a son who are bound by a “common effort” which they face together, mostly in silence. The tale of Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah becomes a parable of Erwin’s experience during and after the war, and implicitly also of his quest for patrimony� The Aqedah (Genesis 22) and “Ein Landarzt” serve as the novel’s most important intertexts, and both inspire Erwin’s own writing in profound and complicated ways� Engaging with those stories shapes Erwin’s understanding of literature as such, and the type of literature he will write (and the type which Aharon Appelfeld did write). In turn, The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping helps us to see that Kafka’s modernist parable and the biblical parable share central motifs: fathers and sons; doctors and patients; the struggle to help others, and to let oneself be helped; sacrifice and suffering. Though the biblical Abraham’s ma’asiut, his diligence, contrasts sharply with the Country Doctor’s ambivalence, in both texts, the adult self and the child are bound together as a dyad facing a trial, and in both, the adult sacrifices, or is unable to care for, his son. In both stories, as in Appelfeld’s novel, the sick or sacrificed child, who seeks healing, proves stronger than the adult. Both stories function as important stepping stones in this narrator’s quest to become a writer in his own right: a project which entails first conjuring, and ultimately leaving behind, the paternal legacy. Kafka and the Bible shape the Appelfeldian idiom, as do the “secret content” (Hebrew: Tochen sodi; Man 77) and the mother’s “secret language�” Erwin also learns about such pregnant texts from his Bible teacher Slobotsky (referred to in the memoir only as Y�S�)� 24 “It seemed that the words Slobotsky presented to us were carved out, each word individually, and laden with secret content. I felt something similar when I saw for the first time the blue of the inner Carpathians� I was so astonished that I wept” (Man 77)� Reading a text laden with secrets is another form of contemplation. “’The Bible must be read attentively,’ [Slobotsky] sometimes said. ‘Many secrets are hidden in it. (…) History and Geography have their place, but the secrets are more important than they are’” (Man 78)� Copying these texts allows Erwin to further engage with language’s hidden power� Hitbonenut becomes an exercise in literary expression� Why associate the hidden meanings in the Bible with the blue of the inner Carpathian Mountains? The association highlights the departure from both a 52 Abigail Gillman Jewish religious approach and a Zionist approach to the Bible. When Erwin reads the Aqedah, he ponders the famously understated style of Genesis 22, and suggests it was written in such a way “perhaps so that we could hear the silence between [the words]” (Man 158) - a phrase which recalls Appelfeld’s description of his own prose as “self-effacing words.” Erwin concludes: it would be best to wait “patiently” for it to be decoded; this is exactly what was said of the stories his father told during the war. The Bible, like his father’s stories during, and about, the war, and like all parables, require time and patience to decode, as their deeper truth and meaning emerge over time: “…it didn’t seem to be a story with a moral, because what was the moral? Rather, it was intended to seep into one’s cells, and there it would wait patiently until it was deciphered” (Man 158). Erwin learned this kind of reading from Slobodsky, who used his hands and facial expressions to explain words: “Sometimes it seemed he was trying to convey the meaning of the sentences to us without the mediation of explanations” (Man 76)� Erwin returns to the Aqedah in a kind of coda to chapter 43, expressing his dissatisfaction with the conclusion of the story, when God credits and rewards Abraham for fearing God and not withholding his son� “What could Abraham say to himself? I’ve succeeded… What could he say to his son? Thank you for standing with me… Your courage is greater than mine” (Man 163—64)� Erwin concludes: no. The story purposefully ends in silence, without further commentary by the players or the narrator. As such, it must stand on its own and not be resolved through banal commentary� Appelfeld’s coda concludes: The episode was a dark tangle that led to another tangle (svach afel she’gorer svach acher), so it was better for Abraham just to go to Beersheba with the donkeys and not say anything� Any talk about a test like that would be stupid� Abraham obeyed the command and did what he did. There was no doubt that he would be tormented by it all his life� And so the story falls silent there� (Man 164; Ha-ish 138) Scripture commands silence on the part of the reader� Another famous child survivor, Elie Wiesel, wrote and lectured on Abraham’s and Isaac’s trial numerous times throughout his life, and about his own trials in the death camps with his father, most famously, in Night� In contrast to Elie Wiesel’s approach to the Aqedah, which entailed an endless, fertile rewriting, researching, and reimagining, this author suggests that only silence does justice to Abraham’s suffering; anything more is “violence.” Anything more prevents the story from being what it is: a “dark tangle that leads to another tangle�” This formulation recalls Franz Kafka’s parable “Prometheus”: attempts to pile on legend and myth and interpretation risk ending in banality. (The translator appears to miss Appelfeld’s allusion to Genesis 22: 13: he uses “tangle” to ren- Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 53 der the Hebrew svach, the biblical term for the bush in which the ram’s horns are caught.) Appelfeld’s resistance to interpretation, his preference for seeing just the tangles, contrasts with the long tradition of the uses and abuses of the Aqedah in Jewish and especially in Israeli history and literature, discussed in great detail by Yael Feldman’s Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and National Narrative (2010). Appelfeld opts to bequeath this hermeneutic, a “shy,” nonintrusive, and patient mode of reading, to his readers. How did Appelfeld become the writer he was meant to be? The memoir and the novel represent two late chapters in the narrative of Appelfeld’s writing life - a narrative comprised of fictional and nonfictional texts, interviews, and essays throughout his corpus. They offer numerous insights into the stages and strategies, as well as the important mentors, thanks to whom his singular voice emerged. The coming-of-age story described in the novel expands upon a few paragraphs in the memoir, and pulls together disparate themes and statements scattered throughout that earlier work, into a full-fledged novel plot. The plot begins with a violent symbolic break with the Zionist coming-of-age story. The struggle to write entails blending the mode of perceptive observation, inherited from the mother, with a paternal ability to tell tales and compose parables during wartime - stories whose meaning may only become clear at some future time. He names further precursors, including Kafka, Agnon, Hesse, and the Bible. The intricate process of shaping a “secret” literary style out of all of the above and more is encoded in the task of making connections� A final word about sleep. 25 The novel titled The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping begins, “since the war I have been trapped in a continuous slumber” (my translation). Both in the original Hebrew and in English, the title and the first sentence distinguish “sleep” from “slumber�” Where the title uses a commonplace verb “to sleep” (lishon), the Hebrew noun for “slumber” (tardemah) alludes to the sleep God imposes on the first human being in Genesis 2, in order to create his companion. The trope of sleeping does not only signify amnesia, escape, and healing, but also the writer’s gestation and birth. The tardemah, the continuous sleep of the first line of The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping, has the same function as the steam and the smoke in the final sentence of The Story of a Life. In that final chapter, Appelfeld joins his voice to those of “the silent ones, those who barely uttered a word. The steam from the coffee and the haze of the cigarette smoke enveloped us for years and brought us to where we are today” (Story 198). Smoke, like sleep, surrounded, protected, and carried the young survivor forward in time and space. Fittingly, Smoke became the title of Appelfeld’s first collection of short stories (Hebrew: Ashan)� 26 54 Abigail Gillman Notes 1 Kafka 294. 2 The event took place at Vienna’s Hauptbücherei; co-organizers were the Rauriser Literaturtage and the Institut für Judaistik (University of Vienna). 3 Stillman 20� 4 Robert Reinagl. The memoir in German is Geschichte eines Lebens (Rowohlt, 2005)� 5 „Ich bin ein Europäer geblieben“ Aharon Appelfeld im Gespräch mit Doris Appel. https: / / youtu.be/ NpsUNXI4jn0 6 Dekel, “Aharon Appelfeld interview.” 7 The lack of the copula in Hebrew [am, was] creates the ambiguity. 8 Inhabiting or adopting the persona of the inner child is not only about returning to the self as “other” - a strategy Naomi B. Sokoloff has studied in Appelfeld, and across modern Jewish fiction. 9 Masot beguf rishon [Essays in the First Person] 15. It further recalls another moving statement, that he travels always with a book of Hasidic tales in one pocket and a book by Franz Kafka in the other - a phrase that in itself alludes to the famous saying by a Hasidic Rebbe Simcha Bunim that he carried two notes with him at all times: in one pocket, “For my sake the world was created,” and in the other, “I am but dust and ashes.” For Appelfeld, Kafka and the Hasidic storytellers were spiritual guides, but also style guides. Style expresses spirit, and spirit shapes style. I thank Stephen Dowden for this insight� 10 In the original, the image is “to attach (l’chaber) the different branches of my life to the roots of their growth,” evoking a solid image of life as a tree, rather than a well� Lilach Lachman notes that l’chaber can also be vocalized lachvor, “to be part of a community” (private conversation). 11 Important analyses include Budick 153—80, Hess 75—102, Band- 469—74, and Band’s “Foreword” to Schwartz, Aharon Appelfeld (xi—xvi)� See also Schwartz’s second book on Appelfeld, Ma’amin beli kenesiyah [Believer without a Church]. 12 Back cover, Aharon Appelfeld, Ha-ish Shelo Pasak Lishon. 13 On such swallowing scenes, see Schwartz, Aharon Appelfeld 74� 14 The root (b-n-h) הנב also means “to build.” Appelfeld quotes the Zionist slogan in these chapters: “We had come to Israel, as the saying went, ‘to build, and to be rebuilt’” (Story 116; Sippur 107). That Hitbonenut shares this root adds a level of irony; The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping replaces national self-building and nation-building with artistic Bildung� Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 55 15 “We would sit for hours and observe. Hunger, thirst, and weakness made us observant creatures. Rather than the murderers, we observed their victims, in their weakness and in their heroism […]. They were stamped upon us the way childhood is stamped upon the matrix of one’s flesh” (Appelfeld, qtd. in Lang 91)� 16 The translation misses the fact that the opening question, followed in Hebrew by a colon, is rhetorical. “What it does not have is longing, guilt, sketches that are drawn from observation, or sexual yearning. Beyond all this, there’s a desperate attempt to connect precious childhood memories with a new life” (Story 116; Sippur 107)� 17 In Hebrew, the dilemma is even more poignant. “My mother’s tongue/ mother tongue, so to speak, was German, the language of my mother’s murderers” (Sippur 103)� 18 Letter of Franz Kafka to Max Brod, June 1921 (The Basic Kafka 292)� 19 Jeffrey M. Green translates, “At the end of the war, I became immersed in constant slumber�” 20 “For the first time I saw the names of my family, my city, and my grandparents’ villages in Hebrew letters. The names gleamed in my notebook, as though garbed in clothing that wasn’t theirs� For a moment I was sorry I had clothed my dear ones in strange garments, and I was about to erase the list” (Man 81—82)� 21 Rina Dudai and Yigal Schwartz have verified that these are in fact early texts by Appelfeld� 22 “Everything began to quiet down within minutes, but for the ones who were hit - including me - our lives were cut in two: the seventeen and a half years before the shots and then the life after them” (Man 108-9)� 23 “Ein Landarzt” opens with a doctor who urgently needs to get to a patient ten miles away on a snowy evening� He has everything prepared for the journey, has his bag of medical instruments, but there is no horse; his horse had died the night before. The opening lines resonate with the plot of the novel as a whole, since they describe paralysis and urgency. Though not strictly a father-son story, the patient whom the doctor is trying to help is a young boy suffering from an incurable wound. (In fact, as Marcel Kring has pointed out in his recent study of the Landarzt cycle, those first lines were most probably inspired by a book of Polish Jewish legends�) No sooner does he reach the patient than the doctor finds himself torn impossibly between the task at hand, his work, and the young girl Rosa who is being raped back at the homestead. The narrative has a dream-like, surreal quality, wherein the doctor is thwarted by the various people who call upon him, “demanding the impossible from a doctor,” not the least of which is the boy-patient 56 Abigail Gillman himself, who cries, “doctor let me die,” but also accuses him of failing to help him� 24 See Chapter 21� 25 The trope of sleeping requires a study of its own. In the conceptual terms of Yigal Schwartz, whereby the novels are structured in counterpoint, with retardative elements - which hold the protagonist back - interwoven with proleptic or forward-looking elements, sleeping and dreams are setbacks, and at the same time, triggers of healing and advancement. The tension is somehow magically aufgehoben. That which reconnects him to the past is at the same time that which sets him on a different course and nurtures him on that course� Moreover, Erwin experiences different kinds of sleeping. First is the state of sleep that in the novel’s very first sentence tells us he has been in since the end of the war through the travels that brought him “here,” that is, to Napoli. (I’m reminded of the first sentence of Yehoshua’s The Lover (HaMeahev): “And in the last war we lost a lover.”) The novel begins in a state of postwar sleep. He is literally carried along by refugees. Later on, he describes a different kind of sleep born of physical exhaustion, sheyna sgura during his hakhshara, “miad nofel el toch sheyna sgura, she’ayn bah lo marot v’lo chezionot” (Man 29)� But the more important sleep for our purposes is sheyna ptucha, sleep which opens up the psyche to numerous dreams that are embedded as realistic conversations and events within the novel. These are not the surreal, Freudian dreams of Asya in Yehoshua’s HaMeahev, but they do contain mar’ot v’chezionot. Needless to say, sleep is a multivalent metaphor� It is a reaction to trauma; anaesthesia; an intense somatic coping mechanism, like the train travel in the novel Iron Tracks� Sleep enables withdrawal from the outer life; Erwin will “ask for a sleep day” when he needs it. He is in control of sleep. It also provides communication with the dead, dreams in which feelings come to the surface� As long as he is sleeping he is somehow unable to mourn what he has lost� 26 On Smoke, see Nili Gold’s unpublished paper, “Appelfeld’s Text of Enigma.” Works Cited Appelfeld, Aharon. Ashan [Smoke]: Stories. Jerusalem: Achshav Press, 1962. ---� Beyond Despair: Three Lectures and a Conversation with Philip Roth. Trans. Jeffrey M. Green. New York: Fromm International Publishing Corporation, 1993. ---� Ha-ish Shelo Pasak Lishon. Ed. Yigal Schwartz. Tel Aviv: Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir, 2010. Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 57 ---� Masot b’guf rishon [Essays in the First Person]. Tel Aviv: WZO, 1979. ---� The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping. Trans. Jeffrey M. Green. New York: Schocken Books, 2017. ---� Sippur Hayyim. Ed. Yigal Schwartz. Jerusalem: Keter Publishers, 1999. ---� The Story of a Life. Trans. Aloma Halter. New York: Schocken Books, 2004. ---� A Table for One. Under the Light of Jerusalem. Jerusalem: Toby Press, 2005. Band, Arnold J. “Agnon and Appelfeld.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 103�4 (2013): 469—74� Ben-Horin, Michal. “The Sound of the Unsayable: Jewish Secular Culture in Arnold Schönberg and Aharon Appelfeld�” Religions 10�5 (2019): 334� Ben-Mordechai, Yitzhak, and Iris Parush, eds. Between Frost and Smoke. Beer-Sheva: Ben Gurion U of the Negev, 1997. Bindefeld, Nicole, and Irène Kaganski. “Réflexions dialoguées autour du ‘rêver’ chez Appelfeld dans ‘Le garcon qui voulait dormir’�” Le Coq-héron 225�2 (2016): 20—28� Budick, Emily Miller. Aharon Appelfeld’s Fiction: Acknowledging the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005. Dekel, Shachaf. “Aharon Appelfeld interview.” youtube.com. YouTube, 15 Apr. 2015. Web� 12 Dec� 2020� Dudai, Rina. “From Excess to Origin: Traversing Time Zones as an Act of Redemption in The Man who Never Stopped Sleeping by Aharon Appelfeld�” Yod. Revue des Études Hébraïque et Juives 19 (2014): n� pag� From Language to Language [Misafa l’safa]. Dir. Nurith Aviv. First Run / Icarus Films, 2005� Film� Fuchs, Esther. Encounters with Israeli Authors. Ann Arbor: Micah Publications, 1982. Gold, Nili. “Appelfeld’s Text of Enigma.” N.d. TS. Hess, Tamar S. Self as Nation. Contemporary Hebrew Autobiography. Waltham: Brandeis UP, 2016. Kafka, Franz. Tagebücher 1910-1923. New York: Schocken, 1948. ---� The Basic Kafka. New York: Pocket Books, 1979. Klüger, Ruth. weiter leben: Eine Jugend. Göttingen: Wallstein, 1992. Lang, Berel, Ed. Writing and the Holocaust. New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1988� Ramras-Rauch, Gila. Aharon Appelfeld. The Holocaust and Beyond. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Schwartz, Yigal. Aharon Appelfeld. From Individual Lament to Tribal Eternity. Trans� Jeffrey M. Green. Hanover and London: UP of New England / Brandeis UP, 2001. ---. “A Preacher without a Pulpit, a Believer without a Church.” Twenty-four Readings of the Works of Aharon Appelfeld� Ed� Avidov Lipsker and Avi Sagi� Ramat Gan: Bar- Ilan UP, 2011. 383—404. ---� “Le’at (Slowly): The Orchestration of a Motif in Appelfeld’s Fiction.” Trans. Hannah Adelman Komy Ofir. Yod: Revue des Études Hébraïque et Juives 19 (2014)-: n. pag. ---� Ma’amin beli kenesiyah [Believer without a Church]. Or Yehudah: Dvir, 2009. 58 Abigail Gillman Sokoloff, Naomi B. Imagining the Child in Modern Jewish Fiction� Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. Stillman, Dinah Assouline. “Encounters with Aharon Appelfeld.”-World Literature Today 84.6 (2010): 20—23.-