[In the following essay, Langer contends that Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 is full of narrative ironies, and that “his language contains a Janus-like energy, full of hints and portents that never achieve the clarity of expressed meaning.”]

Aharon Appelfeld's art takes us on a journey into the realm of the unsaid; but it rejects the corollary idea, so often maintained by commentators on Holocaust literature, that the unsaid is necessarily unsayable. This distinction is at the heart of his imaginative vision. His fiction invites us to experience not catastrophe, but the avoidance of catastrophe, or the silences surrounding it. This obscures but does not negate the catastrophe, which his characters deny or refuse to discuss while his readers sculpt its outlines from the scanty details available in the world of his fiction. His language contains a Janus-like energy, full of hints and portents that never achieve the clarity of expressed meaning. The evidence of hindsight conspires with the absence of foresight to implicate us in the drama of recognition that comprises the essence of his art.

Appelfeld crowds his best-known novella, Badenheim 1939, with narrative ironies that only an informed reader can dispel. Sometimes they appear as simple declarative statements: “The secret was gradually encompassing the people and there was a vague anxiety in the air, born of a new understanding.”¹ These are Tantalus sentences, beckoning one toward an unspecified revelation that never achieves expression. “Alien spirits,” “nervous looks” and “distant dreads” infect the text like ripening bacteria, warning of but never naming the disease; we must learn to diagnose as illness what the characters themselves refuse or are unable to see. Echoes of vacancy in the imagery itself urge us to replace absence with content: “The man's voice dripped into him like raindrops pattering into an empty barrel.” (25) How much water is necessary to give substance to empty space? How much insight is required to give catastrophe a discernible shape?

Omens abound to prompt the guests at Badenheim to exercise their prophetic imaginations, but they do not appreciate the clues. They prefer to embrace the self-delusion concealed in platitudinous dialogues like the following, which may sound trite to the retrospective vision but which expose with piercing irony the fatal failure of self-definition that in turn made the victims so vulnerable:

“I am Austrian born and bred, and the laws of Austria apply to me as long as I live.”

“But you also happen to be a Jew, if I'm not mistaken.”

“A Jew. What does that mean? Perhaps you would be so kind as to tell me what it means?”

“As far as we're concerned,” said Frau Zauberblit, “you can renounce the connection any time you like.”

“That is my argument precisely.”

As if to confirm this delusive failure, a moment later a “strange intimacy descended on the dark lobby, an intimacy without words.” But for Appelfeld one overwhelming revelation of the Holocaust experience is the ease with which unspoken intimacies betray, especially when they are based on traditional assurances like the one expressed in the previous dialogue.

Intimacies without words lead to unexpected consequences, as we learn a few lines later when the schoolgirl's pregnant condition is disclosed: “The people stood around her looking chastised, as if the facts of life had suddenly given them a slap in the face.” (76, 77) The news shatters the twilight hour, but not with the blinding illumination that death as well as life lurks in the future. The so-called facts of life will continue to blur the doom of threatened extinction until the end, inspiring potential victims to substitute visible illusions for invisible threats.

If the unsaid is sayable, is the unseen then seeable? Once more, at least in Badenheim 1939, Appelfeld's fiction divides such questions into two verbal tributaries, one irrigating the minds of his readers, the other drowning the vision of his characters. A line like “And the investigations showed what reality was” defines the division between the two and illustrates the twin momentum of Appelfeld's narrative appeal. We the readers are compelled to reenact the split, since we are armed with insight from our own retrospective prescience while simultaneously sharing the failure of foresight and insight in the orbit of the characters. When “estrangement, suspicion, and mistrust” begin to invade the town, the characters seem to veer toward our orbit; but when we learn that “the people were still preoccupied with their own affairs” (31), we return to the world of the “non-seers.” Experiencing the language of the novel through such alternations, we encounter anew the verbal fervor and the inert irony of an assurance like “the investigations showed what reality was.” This is the challenge facing anyone who enters the realm of the Holocaust: wherein lies its essential reality, and how do we gain access to it?

Appelfeld's lines have a resonance beyond their immediate definition; as he “says,” we are enjoined to “see,” but not just what is before our eyes. The impresario Dr. Pappenheim, as he witnesses the collapse of his tourist season, laments: “If only he had known, he would have designed the whole program differently” (37), and the lament appeals to creators of “reality” at every level: the victim, the reader, the artist, and God Himself. Indeed, “If only he had known” becomes the despondent epigraph and epitaph for all Appelfeld's fictions about the Holocaust. A bitter regret is one of its major legacies, as the vacationers at Badenheim are to learn, and no small source of that regret, as Appelfeld more than once implies, is the neglect of the resonance native to the word.

This ominous drama is played out repeatedly on the stage we call the text. “You can't imagine the feeling of vitality that a stay in Badenheim gives you,” says one of the guests at the resort. “I'm very glad that you decided to stay. It's an event not to be missed.” And this brief dialogue ensues:

“An event?” said Lotte.

“I can't think of a better word. You're sensitive to words, I see.”

(41)

A mockery, or a warning? Written with compassion, or scorn? Certainly, exchanges like these are red flags to the reader, urging him to consider the possibility—one of Appelfeld's most insistent themes—that alongside the catastrophe to humanity, the Holocaust decreed a catastrophe to language.

In a remarkable story called “Repetition,” Austrian writer Peter Handke, alluding to the devaluation of language in the modern era, asks whether it wouldn't be wiser, since words had lost their fairy-tale magic, “to say that they performed the function of a questionnaire: What is my situation? What is our situation? What is the present situation?” With insouciant cunning, he alludes to the partial source of that devaluation by asking further: “Didn't the term that in the past century designated only ‘emigration’ lose its innocence now that the events of the last war have changed its meaning to ‘forced resettlement’”?² Appelfeld's characters in Badenheim 1939 inhabit a verbal world like this, where the dictionary, as it were, still stands on a shelf in the Garden of Eden. Slogans like “Labor is Our Life,” “The Air in Poland is Fresher,” and “The Development Areas Need You” exert a prelapsarian influence on the unwary guests, who accept customary definitions because they are unaccustomed to a life built on precise analysis of what Handke called “the present situation.”

Appelfeld summons us to the avoided task by turning words into vacuums and reminding us bitterly that though nature abhors such environments, human beings at that time apparently did not. He introduces substantives without substance, and makes us wonder why it was so easy to breathe in such stifling surroundings: “The secret was gradually encompassing the people and there was a vague anxiety in the air, born of a new understanding,” or “There was a different quality in the air, a sharp clarity which did not come from the local forests.”³

The nouns pile up like empty threats waiting to be charged with meaning: Secret, anxiety, understanding, quality, clarity. They are like bullets aimed at a target convinced of its immunity, like troops assaulting a Maginot line persuaded that it is invulnerable.

The odd paradox of Appelfeld's novella about blindness to danger is that the vocabulary prods the reader toward insight, as if the clue to future threats came from the words themselves. If the nouns are barren of meaning, they nonetheless solicit epithets to impregnate them and fulfill their portent. Words begin to link up in a verbal union announcing the “differentness of things,” but they occupy an insulated reality:

The light stood still. There was a frozen kind of attentiveness in the air. An alien orange shadow gnawed stealthily at the geranium leaves. The creepers absorbed the bitter, furtive damp.

(83)

The verbal pieces seem to resemble familiar patterns, since “frozen,” “alien,” “stealthily,” and “furtive” can be assembled into a kind of descriptive jigsaw puzzle. But in the minds and ears of Appelfeld's characters, they do not interlock: a crucial key is missing. There is no “picture” on the box containing the pieces, reminding us of what they are supposed to look like when they are properly put together. A few lines later we encounter “huddled,” “afraid,” and “sudden,” but they do not solve the mystery either; they only add to the confusion. More than “discovering” the characters' mistake, the reader experiences it: the expectation of pattern, connection, a unified whole is an illusion born of misplaced reliance on the coherence of language itself.

The text is ripe with clues. A musician, told that where they are going he will be a musician still, asks his friend “In that case, why send us there at all?” This leads to the following exchange:

The friend sought an impressive formula. “Historical necessity,” he said. “Kill me, I don't understand it. Ordinary common sense can't comprehend it.” “In that case, kill your ordinary common sense and maybe you'll begin to understand.”

(90)

A central dynamic of Badenheim 1939 (as well as of other Appelfeld fictions) is the tension between language as “impressive formula” and words as exhausted content. When the famous reciting twins finally perform at the spa, “Their mastery was such that the words did not seem like words at all: they were as pure and abstract as if they had never been touched by human mouths.” By the end of their performance, “the words did their work alone, flying through the air like birds on fire.” (101) Somewhere between language as impressive formula and words untouched by human mouth (and hence untouchable by human comprehension) lies that realm of expression where the artist forges his sinister implications and verbal ambiguities—the realm, indeed, of Appelfeld's art.

The challenge to the guests at Badenheim—one they fail to meet—is to free themselves from the prison of impressive formulas. Though their lives are in danger, they feel safe between the covers of their trusty thesaurus. “The sun was still shining,” says Appelfeld, “but the angry people clung stubbornly to the old words, hoarding them like antiquated gadgets that had gone out of use.” Though “words without bodies floated in the lobby,” no one recognizes the odd phenomenon—how does one begin? Eventually, “word” becomes one of the novel's characters too, more aware of its displacement, because of Appelfeld's manipulations, than the characters are of their own. Words know about themselves, and we know about them—that they have lost their roots: “The words did not seem to belong to the present. They were the words of the spring, which somehow lingered on, suspended in the void” (115, 117). Such language is designed to alarm the reader's consciousness; but it lulls the unsuspecting victim in Badenheim into lassitude, till the impulse to sleep and silence replaces the will to speech and significant action.

Both dialogue and commentary contribute to this tension between formula and verbal misunderstanding, as the shadow of Franz Kafka hovers smiling in the wings. “I'm not to blame for anything,” cries one of the imminent victims. “It's not a question of crime,” replies another (cousin to Joseph K. in The Trial), “but of a misunderstanding. We too, to a certain extent, are the victims of a misunderstanding.” The world of Kafka infiltrates Appelfeld's novel still further when the narrative voice explains, perhaps too lucidly, “The words procedure and appeal seemed to satisfy him. He had apparently once studied law. He calmed down a little. The contact with the old words restored him to his sanity.” (123) “Crime,” “misunderstanding,” “appeal”—Kafka has already taught us how futile is the search for these terms in the glossary of atrocity, in a world where victims are unreasonably accused and unseasonably condemned. One of Appelfeld's most remarkable achievements is his ability to adapt the unspecified threats shaping Kafka's dark vision to the specific perils of the Holocaust universe. In the absence of a vocabulary to warn, the “old words” soothe their users into a fatally vulnerable state. Is this one of Appelfeld's solutions to the enduring enigma of how it could have happened in the first place?

If the various self-delusions that left the victims unprepared reflect a psychological condition, that condition, Appelfeld insists, was inflamed by the virus of language. Unnerved by the approaching uncertainties, the guests at Badenheim turn upon each other, with the former impresario Dr. Pappenheim bearing much of the opprobrium. As the human alienation intensifies, as the pastry shop owner declares his own innocence while suggesting that “the east” is the right place for Pappenheim, words too are transformed, their link to meaning disintegrating. While the pastry shop owner vainly invents distinctions between “this” kind of Jew and “that” kind of Jew, “There was a stubborn rhythm in his voice and from the hotel lobby it sounded like someone shouting slogans over a loudspeaker.” (142) From the victims' point of view—and this is the one that Appelfeld has always been most concerned with—here is the culprit. Slogans deaden the sensibilities of intended victims, even as they “justify” the behavior of the persecutors and nurture indifference in the bystanders. When the “filthy freight cars” appear at the end of Badenheim 1939, the victims are left speechless, except for Pappenheim's pathetically irrelevant observation that dirty coaches must mean that they haven't far to go. The triumph of the enemy means the end of human differentiation, as the former guests are “all sucked in as easily as grains of wheat poured into a funnel.” (175)

Appelfeld's fiction may be seen as variations on a single theme, as victims or survivors struggle to adapt to the one event forming the subsequent or prior nucleus of their lives—the Holocaust. If Badenheim 1939 chronicles the doom of an entire community, Tzili narrates the fate of one person's estrangement from that community, of a search for contact that never succeeds, of a solitary mind contending with the dilemma of the displaced self. Unlike the guests at Badenheim, Tzili wanders across the countryside during the years of the war in a realm where threats abound while forms of defense diminish. As time passes, we experience the consequences of the situation sketched in Badenheim: the futile and fatal influence of verbal formula for existence.

The myth of the inviolable self is part of the romantic heritage of western civilization. Despite his failing health, an ironic reminder of the “dis-ease” implicit in his words, Tzili's father attempts to refute her limitations (thereby perpetuating the myth) with the formula “If you want to you can.”⁴ It wasn't a judgment, we are told, but a faith, uniting the entire family. Dependence on such formulae slowly undermined one's ability to function in the world of atrocity. The theme is more insistent in Tzili than in any other of Appelfeld's works. Summoned to instruct her in her prayers, a religious tutor asks her “in the traditional, unvarying formula: ‘What is man?’” and Tzili replies “Dust and ashes.” (5) But language that once defined human nature and its relationship to spirit prompts routine responses here, instead of insight. The catechism about prayer and obeying the commandments of the Torah awakens “loud echoes in Tzili's soul, and their reverberations spread throughout her body” (6); but the description mocks the mystic moment, since Tzili is shortly to be abandoned by her family and left totally vulnerable to a hostile environment.

Slogans that in normal times sustain the unexamined life thread the narrative like hopeful detours to security. “Women are lucky,” Tzili remembers having been told. “They don't have to go to war.” (56) “Without cigarettes there's no point in living” (73) exclaims Mark, the father of Tzili's unborn child. They are verbal pathways leading to a dead end, language at cross-purposes with the particular reality of the Holocaust, as is stingingly confirmed for us (if not for Tzili) by the “encouraging” words she receives from the nurse when her baby is in fact born dead:

You must be strong and hold your head high. Don't give yourself away and don't show any feelings. What happened to you could have happened to anyone. You have to forget. It's not a tragedy. You're young and pretty. Don't think about the past. Think about the future. And don't get married.

(177–178)

“You have to forget. It's not a tragedy. You're young and pretty.” The nurse disappears from the novel, but her rote consolations achieve a voice of their own, having been successfully delivered while the life in Tzili's womb dies. It dies because the language necessary to animate it has been stillborn first. Behind such well-intentioned but misguided-formulas cower the despair and futility of the Holocaust-haunted spirit.

If Tzili had been designed as a traditional Bildungsroman, then Appelfeld's beleaguered adolescent would have discovered a new and vital language to express her private vision of reality. But Appelfeld parodies the form: no sooner does a formulaic principle register itself in Tzili's consciousness (and the reader's too) than its opposite appears, undermining the stability of language, of consciousness, of the very structure of the novel. Beyond mere platitude is the terrifying sense that words no longer match the reality of things, impeding the most elementary efforts at comprehension, to say nothing of defending one's life. When reality steals on you unawares, as it does on Tzili and Mark, what support can one fall back on? “Death isn't as terrible as it seems,” says Mark. “A man, after all, is not an insect. All you have to do is overcome your fear.” (101) How far have we traveled from Tzili's father's advice that “If you want to you can”? At first, Tzili is not encouraged by Mark's formula for survival, although he repeats it as he is about to leave for provisions: “Once you conquer your fear everything looks different.” (103) When he doesn't return on time, his words prop up her failing spirits, giving her back a kind of confidence: “Mark's voice came to her and she heard: ‘A man is not an insect. Death isn't as terrible as it seems.’” (106) Tzili clings to the possibility of Mark's return, though by now we have learned that words offered in conviction do not need to represent truth. His refrain becomes a dirge, an ironic epitaph, as it returns in her dreams: “Death is not as terrible as it seems. All you have to do is conquer your fear.” (114) The formula achieves a kind of closure when Tzili utters it herself, as a principle of her being, to a group of refugees who apparently have survived an ordeal far worse than hers: “I'm not afraid,” she says. “Death is not as terrible as it seems.” (120) One is reminded of Paul Celan's sinister refrain in “Todesfuge”: “Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland.” But Tzili has never read Celan, nor discovered, as he had, how atrocity had rotted the bond joining language to truth.

For a single moment in Tzili, it seems as if formula has finally been replaced by a resounding truth, as one of the refugees announces: “Death will follow us all our lives, wherever we go. There'll be no more peace for us.” (160) Surely here language has shaped a durable insight, sturdy enough to pass the test of platitude. But the principle of alternating viewpoints that dominates the novel forbids any such dramatic climax as this. Scarcely a page later, the summer sun works its magic and real pleasures return, “as if the years in the camps had vanished without a trace.” (163) Onto the screen of reality Appelfeld projects two images, sometimes overlapping, sometimes distinct, but always present: Normal existence, with its hopes and illusions (“Death isn't as terrible as it seems. … Once you conquer your fear everything looks different.”) and the soiling vision of Holocaust fact (“Death will follow us all our lives. … There'll be no more peace for us”).

Each image imposes part of its contour on the other, so that neither is ever entirely uncontaminated. If utopian hopes precede and follow nightmare, nightmare nonetheless casts its shadows on both. One day Tzili is convinced that Mark and the others will return; the next, she realizes that her search and her expectation are in vain. Naive consciousness contends with a dark history in a never-ending effort to recover the impossible. Oblivion and memory establish a constant flow in the narrative: shall we reclaim a ruined past, engage in drunken and forgetful revelry in the present, or set out in sober quest of a reborn future? Lacking the inner resources to shape her own life, but still a victim and survivor, Tzili clings to the shreds of promise served up to her by others. “In Palestine everything will be different” (182) is only the last but certainly not the best of the formulas—this one containing its share of ambiguity—that thwart her quest for equilibrium.

Some refugees dance, others play cards or sleep, still others choose suicide. Explanations for their behavior only confuse Tzili, who never is able to reconcile language with her experience. A failed Bildungsroman (as any novel of the Holocaust must be), an adventure in dis-education, Tzili quietly rejects the form in fiction that weds speech to insight and makes character growth the test of a successful imaginative version of reality. Tzili listens to speakers heralding “the agonies of rebirth in Palestine” (182), but the whole momentum of the novel has warned us against such bland formulations. “Birth” in any of its combinations no longer exists outside the orbit of “death”; the Holocaust has cancelled an essential feature of vocabulary, the principle of antonyms.

Therefore, when at the end one of the refugees with Tzili calls out “We've had enough words. No more words,” she acts not as a mouthpiece for Appelfeld, but for a point of view that has been rumbling beneath the crust of the text from the beginning. The Holocaust has taught us to mistrust not only what we hear, but what we have heard. Tzili disgorges this meaning despite its lonely and unresponsive “heroine,” who like us listens to its ultimate expression from other lips, not, as one might expect, from her own: “I'm declaring a cease-words. It's time for silence now.” (182) What appears to have been a narrative of survival turns out to be equally a chronicle of loss: neither exists apart from the other. The refugee who utters these sentiments adds “Phooey. This rebirth makes me sick” (182), and then takes Tzili under her wing, as if to prepare her for the journey to the Holy Land that may never be a homeland. At least, we are cautioned to be wary of our epithets, lest we betray the ordeal of Tzili and her fellow survivors. This character, about whom we learn only in the novel's closing pages, represents a fusion of attitudes that prepares us to confront the trial she and the others have endured: “She had no regrets. There was a kind of cruel honesty in her brown eyes.” (184) The oxymoron will prove surprising only to those who have not followed Appelfeld's scrupulous habit of forcing words into complicity with each other. Cease-words (another oxymoron?) and silence are only a prelude to the cleansing of the cluttered imagination, cluttered by verbal formulas designed for reassurance more than truth, an honesty amputated from cruelty—a desirable eventuality, perhaps, but one forbidden by the shadows which continue to stalk Tzili despite her wish to escape them.

Badenheim 1939 is a story of relocation leading to destruction. Tzili is a story of dislocation leading to another kind of relocation. In a sense, at least for our purpose of understanding some kind of progression in Appelfeld's use of the Holocaust in his fiction, The Immortal Bartfuss permits a rounding out the interpretive cycle I have been pursuing. A survivor like Tzili, Bartfuss has been living in the land for which Tzili was about to depart; his fate allows us to test the ambiguous promise that in Palestine “everything will be different.”

Is there meaning simply in safe refuge? Has Bartfuss, among Jews, achieved the equilibrium denied to the guests at Badenheim and to Tzili amongst the refugees? Bartfuss, at least, has experienced the somber tones of Celan's Deathfugue; we have his creator's word to confirm it. “The survivor, Bartfuss,” said Appelfeld in a recent interview with Philip Roth, “has swallowed the Holocaust whole, and he walks about with it in all his limbs. He drinks the ‘black milk’ of the poet Paul Celan, morning, noon and night. He has no advantage over anyone else, but he still hasn't lost his human face. That isn't a great deal, but it's something.”⁵ This is a minimal tribute, perhaps; but one must turn to the text to determine how having “swallowed the Holocaust whole” affects one's spiritual digestion.

One must proceed with caution. Bartfuss himself is wary of those who would make him into a legend. Although he internalizes his ordeal, he rarely talks about it. He may have changed, but he will not be changed by others. “They need legends too,” he thinks, “heroes, splendid deeds. So they could say, ‘There were people like that too.’ In fact they didn't know a thing about Bartfuss. Bartfuss scrupulously avoided talking about the dark days. Not even a hint.”⁶ He even resents the appellation “immortal,” which is someone else's invention. He knows how impurities in language can lead to impurities in life. And he is reduced to silence no less by the awe of others than by the scars of his inner wounds. “He withdrew, and words he had once used withered inside him.” (61) But the gnawing remnants of his unexpressed past, though muted, have not been silenced; like embers that will not be extinguished, they flare up at odd moments unprovoked. Appelfeld's narrative documents the pain of not being able to share this recurrent inner turmoil.

In a stark reversal of romantic doctrine, the self has grown inviolable through violation, not organic contact with the world of nature and spirit. Bartfuss will not tolerate further violations. Hence his conviction (mistaken, but understandable, Appelfeld would imply) that “People were born for solitude. Solitude was their only humanity.” (100) The loneliness thrust on Tzili by her environment becomes the inner landscape of Bartfuss's life, internalized by him in a way that substitutes conversations with himself for the social discourse he never can encompass. What appear to us as monologues are dialogues to him; words are his companions, and language the obstacle that prevents him from breaking out of his isolation. This paradox is the secret of his being.

Others may dream of human contacts; Bartfuss does not. Enveloped by his loneliness upon wakening, he dimly recalls an encounter with language: “A few words, which he had apparently used in his sleep, skimmed over his tongue. Their warmth still lingered.” (68) But the words left over from sleep do not help him in his daily contacts: “years of silence, revulsion, and abstention had brought him close to no one.” (70) The two words, “in Italy,” which ought to unite old acquaintances who once shared the intimacies of this remembered locale, only alienate them further. Bartfuss's few efforts to reawaken memories of the post-Holocaust days “in Italy” only meet with hostility; and when others attempt the same with him, he rebuffs them. One of these encounters ends with Bartfuss angry and his interlocutor withdrawing “like someone caught in the wrong jurisdiction.” (74) In fact, Bartfuss and the other survivors are caught in two jurisdictions, and that is their problem. Like Tzili, Bartfuss has his hopeful moments, which inspire him to far more articulate aspirations than her limited imagination is capable of: “Now he would devote himself to the general welfare, he would mingle, inspire faith in people overcome by many disasters. He would no longer think of himself, his agony, but would work for the general good.” (75) But at this point he lacks the word “generosity” (which he will wrestle with later) to enable these dim impulses to coalesce into action. The word “labor,” he discovers, smells like distilled alcohol. It is one of those old words upon which the Holocaust has cast a shadow. Accordingly, his efforts to translate his new interest in general welfare into genuine intimacy with Schmugler, another survivor, are greeted with chill indifference, and in his frustration Bartfuss watches his words turn into blows.

The other jurisdiction that Bartfuss inhabits promotes different rules and leads to the disjunction isolating him in his prison of the alternately remembered and avoided past. The very language of Tzili infiltrates his imagination, the legacy of the Holocaust thus pursuing him through literature as well as through life. For a moment, Bartfuss too turns critic, offering us a retrospective analysis of Tzili's dilemma that is not so far removed from his own: “The people who were in the camps won't betray their obligations. There are sacred debts. A man is not an insect [Mark's very words, in Tzili]. The fear of death is no disaster. Only when one has freed himself of that fear can one go forth to freedom.” (94) In the very process of repeating the earlier language, Bartfuss reveals himself as a man besieged by a vocabulary he simultaneously longs to, and no longer can believe in. Appelfeld is specific about this inner conflict: “His own words and those of others teemed within him and ravaged him, and for a long time the words rolled about within his brain as if on wheels.” (94) A battlefield would be an equally adequate image. How does one pay homage to those dead without betraying them—or oneself? Like Tzili again, Bartfuss suffers from fatigue because of his embattled situation—he is often on the verge of sleep.

Bartfuss cannot share his knowledge that “man as insect” and “fear of death” are verbal formulations that the Holocaust has polluted beyond articulation. Although the Holocaust context of their special demise continues to affront his memory, in his other “jurisdiction,” as a resident of Jaffa in the contemporary world, he needs remnants of that vocabulary to go on living. His mistress Sylvia, another survivor, offers him what she calls a “word for yourself” (101)—resilience—from which he recoils, denying in conversation with another the very need he admits through his inner dialogue. But Sylvia's words seem to thaw some of his numbness, since after her death, at her funeral, in a cemetery where “not a word was heard,” he suddenly pluralizes his dilemma by asking another mourner “What have we Holocaust survivors done? Has our great experience changed us at all?” (107) A new word falls unfamiliarly from Bartfuss's lips—“I expect generosity of them,” he says (107—but Appelfeld refuses to permit this apparently transformative moment to sentimentalize his fiction. Seeds the reader expects to germinate are killed by the fungus that feeds on hope; the next chapter begins: “After Sylvia's death no change took place in his life.” (108)

But a kind of resilience has nonetheless taken root in Bartfuss, and the closing chapters of Appelfeld's narrative admit some narrow rays of light into his consuming inner darkness. The survivors he now meets, though they don't all remember him, no longer deny that they remember “Italy,” a pivotal locale for Bartfuss between the camps and Palestine, the place where the certainty of death and the possibility of rebirth first contended for primacy in his mind. Does Bartfuss see an image of himself in Clara, who insists that “there really were two Claras, a selfish Clara who wasted most of her money on cosmetics and fashionable dresses; and, alongside her, another Clara, a hidden one, whose heart went out to anyone who came near”? (114) One of the Holocaust's enduring legacies is precisely this principle of the divided self, and Bartfuss's recognition of how Clara has managed her split nurtures his own resolve “to be generous and not stringy.” (115)

Is this merely another formula, disguised as a guide to action? On the one hand, Bartfuss himself regards it as “a good slogan” (115); on the other, he seems driven by a need “to be close to the people from whom he had distanced himself.” (116) Does this mean his family, from whom he is estranged, or the community of survivors, toward whom he has made tentative gestures throughout the novel? He tries first with his retarded daughter Bridget, but in spite of his good will, his efforts to rehabilitate generosity encounter the familiar obstacles of silence and the past. “Words had gone dumb within him,” Appelfeld writes, while Bridget's appearance, her dull eyes and full breasts and bewildered expression only remind him of the passive casual women he had had on the beach in Italy. The reality of “in Italy” intrudes even here, defeating his resolution to improve his behavior as a father.

Nevertheless, Bartfuss feels a “strange closeness” to his daughter, though wounded words like “mercy” and “generosity” that emerge from the final pages of the narrative, as well as some that are implied, like “gratitude” and “forgiveness,” continue to elude his efforts to wed consciousness to conduct and heal the split within. If in the beginning was the expulsion, the disavowal of community that we saw dramatized in Badenheim 1939, the alpha of destruction that soiled the lexicon of human behavior, the omega that will remedy time past, mend the present, and promote a convalescent future still beckons in the distance. Like the words of love that Hans Castorp whispers as he slodges through the mud on the battlefields of World War I, the Omega watch which Bartfuss has bought for his daughter but not yet presented to her may augur some meaning for his still unravelling fate. But the final image of the novel is sleep, and though the ironies of art may have secured Appelfeld a tranquil rest, we have no such reassurance for Bartfuss—or for ourselves.⁷

Notes

1. Aharon Appelfeld, Badenheim 1939, trans. Dalya Bilu (New York: Pocket Books, 1980), p. 53. Subsequent citations will be included in the text.

2. Peter Handke, “Repetition,” The New Yorker (Feb. 29, 1988), pp. 34–35.

3. Appelfeld, Badenheim 1939, p. 53.

4. Aharon Appelfeld, Tzili: The Story of a Life, trans. Dalya Bilu (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), p. 3. Subsequent citations will be included in the text.

5. Philip Roth, “A Talk with Aharon Appelfeld,” The New York Times Book Review (February 28, 1988), p. 31.

6. Aharon Appelfeld, The Immortal Bartfuss, trans. Jeffrey M. Green (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), p. 61. Subsequent citations will be included in the text.

7. For a valuable study of Appelfeld's use of language in two other novels, The Age of Wonders and Mikhvat Haor [Searing Light], as well as important commentary on the literary challenges facing exiled writers, see Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi, “Aharon Appelfeld: The Search for a Language,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry, I (1984), pp. 366–380.