The heaviest wheel rolls across our foreheads To bury itself deep somewhere inside our memories.

—Mif, “Terezín”

But now I am no more a child
For I have learned to hate.
I am a grown-up person now,
I have known fear.
Bloody words and a dead day then,
That's something different than bogie men!
But anyway, I still believe I only sleep today,
That I'll wake up, a child again, and start to laugh and
                    play.

—Hanuš Hachenburg, “Terezín,” I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children's Drawings and Poems from Terezín Concentration Camp, 1942–1944

In his essays Aharon Appelfeld has commented directly on some of the dilemmas that artists face as they attempt to speak, in retrospect, of unspeakable horror. He formulates his ideas in the same vocabulary and concepts that Bialik provided half a century before and which figured so importantly in that author's own narrative of childhood, Aftergrowth. Acknowledging his debt to Bialik as a predecessor in the chronicles of catastrophe and absurd suffering, Appelfeld notes that revealment and concealment, gilui vekhisui, are the essence of all expression, but for those who experienced the Shoah, this phenomenon takes on heightened importance.¹ Contradictory impulses toward articulation and silence constitute the very soul of the survivor, who wavers ever about the thin line between saying and not saying. During the war, the author remarks, one powerful motive for remaining alive was the hope of bearing witness. The desire to tell about the ordeal later was an impetus that often gave people the strength to go on. Afterward, ironically, many were silent. Some wanted to distance themselves as much as possible from the horror; for others, words seemed totally inadequate for the purposes of testimony. Furthermore, to recount a story it is crucial to have an audience with shared understandings. The events of the Nazi era seemed unbelievable even for those who had lived them personally. Literature, in Appelfeld's conception, presents particular difficulties in this regard, for it is not content with public language or generalizations. While much discourse about the Shoah tends toward the pathos of high-toned abstractions, literature's very substance and raison d'être is personal expression and engagement with detail. For these reasons literary art is that much more painful for the survivor to confront or create.

In the aftermath of the war there was eventually a return to speech and art, and in this connection Appelfeld quite explicitly identifies children as a major source for expressive response. His explanation is that adults were incapable of renewed vision. Their entire understanding of the world had been shattered by the conflagration, and they sought to forget. Children, on the other hand, absorbed the suffering into their bodies. Part of their being, “like arms and legs,” it was patterned into their every movement. As a result, for the very young the unforgettable nightmare served as a field of the unconscious, binding past and present. Together with their blindness and innocence, it provided them the resources for a poetics of suffering.

According to this view, the first manifestations of the child's impact on art took place in refugee camps on the beaches of Italy after the war. Troops of children led about by impresarios sang cabaret songs, old Jewish melodies, and monastery organ tunes learned in hiding, or they offered imitations of birds and animals perfected during wanderings in the forests. Appelfeld sees in these plaintive performances an affirmation of life and a kind of grotesque but genuine religious impulse. Later, in Appelfeld's own work, childhood becomes a source of creativity because the author's memories afford him an ability to restore particularity and revive secrets of the self. While the mass destruction of the war irremediably damaged individuality, the literary option can help uncover and mine the richness of the past. Suspicious of abstract, metaphysical theory, Appelfeld avers that introspective art, while not replacing religion, can rescue both his own soul and that of his people from oblivion, in a process of rediscovery marked by wonder.

Appelfeld, then, in effect articulates a principle that has been demonstrated in other narratives of childhood. Here, too, earliness otherwise irrecoverable can achieve voice only in a fictional realm. It is the silent register of writing that provides the opportunity to bring the child's inner world to expression. And, as was true elsewhere, a discourse of childhood fulfills the function of combining especially sensitive perceptions or powers of observation with naiveté. The result is new interpretations of reality or a fresh look at the world. In Appelfeld's case, however, while the dynamics are similar to those in, for example, Bialik's Aftergrowth, the circumstances are immeasurably grimmer. The child's vision is particularly valuable, not only because it allows for a revivifying vitality, but because it simultaneously borders on silence. Shaped by ignorance, the child's view reveals a blindness that shields the character from trying to understand too much. Consequently this fiction may cast the world of devastation in a light that makes recollection of the past more bearable for author and reader.

As Alan Mintz has documented in Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature, the notion of maintaining childhood sensibility within adult writing significantly informs Appelfeld's artistic vision and the workings of his fiction as a whole. It emerges with particular force in the story “Hagerush.” That tale, which features a young orphan as protagonist and narrator, shows the child's mind to be uncluttered by acquired knowledge, unpracticed in interpretation and so able to observe or record in “non-interpretive amazement.”² This is a figure, consequently, who stands for the possibility of fictional discourse that registers rather than construes. Such hallmarks of Appelfeld's fiction as his attempts to neutralize judgment and his refusal to demonize or sentimentalize stem from just this stance and express the author's desire to be a faithful witness. To be sure, in his work there are always evident the voice of an adult and the prevailing control of a mature mind. The artist has carefully reworked material from a former time. Yet the author's conceit is that “the writerly second stage of creativity carries over something of the photographic innocence of the child's outlook.”³

This is a poetics that finds its most sustained realization in The Age of Wonders (1978), a narrative divided into two parts so distinct that they may function more as two novellas in one volume than as a single text.⁴ The first section, the title piece, and the second, “Many Years Later When Everything Was Over,” deal respectively with life in Austria before the war and after. Part 1, as it cultivates the perspective of a child protagonist, conveys the unbelievability of the impending disaster. Because the little boy is unprepared to foresee the cruel events that follow, his limited understanding makes an apt vehicle for conveying the disbelief of his family and friends as well. Living in a world that has not yet known the full extent of Nazi brutality, they cannot grasp the magnitude of the coming destruction. The Final Solution is doubly unanticipated by the characters of this fiction, members of a highly assimilated Jewish family, because they consider themselves wholly integrated into European society. Indeed, the bulk of the narrative is devoted to detailing a spectrum of reactions within the Jewish community as the varied characters act out their inability to truly fathom the seriousness of the deteriorating situation. The father, a celebrated writer who denies his Jewishness, directs his violent anger first against his own people (especially the Ostjuden) and then against himself. Eventually he abandons the family in pursuit of a phantom solution; he supposes that by joining a literary salon, under the patronage of a Gentile benefactress, he will escape the common fate of the Jews. The mother reacts by throwing herself into a surfeit of futile charitable works. An aunt of the child, succumbing to mental illness, also converts to Catholicism. Jewish intellectuals blame Jewish merchants, and Jewish merchants blame Jewish intellectuals, for the contempt with which non-Jews treat their people. Finally, these patterns of denial or attempted escape are put into sharp relief by the exception to the rule: the half-Jew Stark, increasingly cognizant of his Jewishness, chooses to undergo circumcision and unequivocally declares his solidarity with the Jews.

This initial segment of the narrative ends with the onset of atrocity, as the family awaits deportation. The period of most intense horror is both effaced and evoked by a hiatus in the narration. The absence of text suggests that some degrees of suffering can be expressed only as a gap in the writing. Subsequently, the story resumes as the protagonist comes from his postwar home in Jerusalem to visit the town of his childhood. Pursuing the theme of homecoming, familiar from many works of Hebrew fiction on the topic of the Shoah—for instance, Amihai's Lo me'akhshav velo mik'an (1963) (Not of This Time, Not of This Place) or Dan Ben Amotz's Lizkor velishkoah (1968) (To Remember, to Forget), this second portion of the narrative yields a project of somewhat different aims and methods than the treatment of the childhood perspective. By dramatizing the adult's return “many years later,” his reassessment of the past, and his responses to contemporary Austria, this section contrasts with the recapturing of the child's inner life and the imaginative reconstitution of the prewar scene featured in part 1.⁵ Part 2 differs from, but helps put into relief, the significance and function of that more daring narrative strategy and its accomplishments in the opening segment of the text.

In part 1 the implementation of Appelfeld's poetics of noninterpretive amazement depends on an allegedly autobiographical stance. A grown-up narrator reminisces about his earlier life, roughly between ages ten and twelve, recounting events in the two years preceding the family's removal to a concentration camp. The unusual retrospective power of this view is its insistence on consonant narration. In The Age of Wonders the narrating figure is emphatically not a dissonant narrator who, as a sovereignly cognizant speaking self, can look back and explain the confusions of his youth. Instead, the narrating figure is one who identifies with his earlier self and to a significant degree renounces cognitive privilege. Here, for instance, there is virtually no mention of specific historical events. Exposition of collective circumstances remains at a minimum and so reveals no broad picture or panoramic view of the crisis facing European Jewry. Only one date, 1938, appears in the text, but this happens almost inadvertently, late in the narrative, and does not serve as introductory orientation for the reader. Thus, when crowds of people converge on the family's estate, having been turned out of their own homes, the narrator remarks simply, “These people were panicked Jewish businessmen seeking momentary refuge in their flight” (117). No specific account is offered about what catastrophe they flee. There is a marked absence of detail about both the abuse these refugees have suffered and what will become of them later. Consequently, it is by and large the child's perceptions that prevail, and not the views of an older and wiser, more informed authorial figure. Outcomes are not revealed, and emphasis is placed on the limited understanding of the protagonist.

The adult view does intervene in a modest way. It is restricted primarily to constant reminders that this text constitutes a memory, that something has happened since. As the narration in this way cuts down on suspense, indicating that doom is always lurking, it serves as a counterpoint to the ignorance of the times and simultaneously makes that ignorance so much more glaring. Adult narration is also felt in the development of broad patterns of motifs, most importantly through the mention of trains. This motif establishes a narrow set of variables by which to trace the deterioration of the family. First the mother and son return from a resort in a well-appointed carriage. Later, taking Aunt Theresa on a train to a sanatorium, the family members are subjected to increasing suspicion and revilement by non-Jewish passengers. To arrive at Theresa's funeral they ride in a freight car, for no other transportation is available. Finally, in the last sentence, there is ominous mention of cattle cars hurtling south, and the reader can surmise the culmination of the progressive pattern of breakdown already charted. While this structuring of the narrative creates a framework that helps make the individual, fragmented events more intelligible, there is still a notable lack of retrospective, informed commentary and narratorial self-exegesis. The major hindsight offered—namely, the fundamental fact that destruction awaits the family—provides the story some objective coherence, but of singular interest is the much more obtrusive withdrawal from discursive explanation.

This general stance coincides nicely with and enhances various well-recognized features of Appelfeld's stylistics. The writer is known for his indirectness in referring to the Holocaust and for his deflection of attention away from atrocity. Often, accomplishing this effect entails putting emphasis on cyclical time rather than specific occasion. In The Age of Wonders much the same pattern obtains and can be understood as the child's propensity to notice passing seasons rather than to pinpoint historical dates or political developments. Similarly, the lack of causal links between events may be ascribed to the protagonist's immature grasp of the situation. Appelfeld's typical characterization, that of joining multiple figures together as a collective entity, makes sense if it is viewed as a child's vague awareness of comings and goings and as a youngster's circumscribed ability to engage in prolonged or sophisticated analysis of character traits. In short, the presence of the child figure endows the deemphasizing of plot, the rescinding of in-depth characterization, and the vague reference to time and place with a new-found verisimilitude.

These same qualities of narrative indirection, apparent throughout Appelfeld's oeuvre, have been viewed as an expression of repression and as elements that constitute both the strength and weakness of this author's fiction. The writer's minimalizing focus, in contrast to the enormity of events evoked, creates an eerie, unsettling tension and so reminds the reader of the gap between what can be said and what cannot. Appelfeld's is an understatement that tries to avoid numbing the audience or repelling it through an account of overwhelmingly horrifying detail. At times, though, the concentration on small things eclipses the central phenomenon, the Shoah, such that the vital tension loses its impact.⁶ Focus on a child mitigates this problem. The young character provides a perfect foil, for understatement is built into the dramatic speech situation as a matter of course. Due to the child's limited understanding, it is easy to naturalize the pervasive compression of information in the text. Indeed, this mimetically favorable narrative framework may account for some of the positive reception accorded The Age of Wonders. In 1979, shortly after its publication, Dan Miron saw this novella as a kind of summa of Appelfeld's works that reengages his established techniques and reworks familiar thematic material with renewed force and concentrated appeal. As do previous texts, this one features attention to a limited period of time, a unified situation leading to slow dissolution, and an emphasis on failure of communication. Here, however, Miron finds better-realized individuals and argues that this is in some ways the most dramatic of Appelfeld's writings.⁷ The child, as astute but naive observer, allows for both more particularity and more deflection of attention away from horror and historical detail.

The child, then, is not a simplistic emblem of incomprehension but a locus for tensions between a capability to observe and restricted observational powers. This figure struggles to understand and also fails to understand. As such, he embodies an ambiguity fundamental to Appelfeld's aim of creating an art that both reveals and conceals. Add to this the double-voicedness, the dual perspective inherent in texts where adults depict children's experience, and it becomes clear how engagement with a child character in The Age of Wonders may foment a central thematic concern with knowledge. Such a move allows the text to bring to the fore a preoccupation with epistemological and expressive possibilities in writing about the Holocaust. For example, this fiction often conflates adult and child levels, blurring boundaries between afterthrough and anticipation. From this there emerges a series of subtle modulations between authorial voice and experiencing character, uncovering a continuing and pervasive oscillation between purportedly interpretive and noninterpretive domains. In addition, the child figure himself flickers back and forth between feeling at a loss and entertaining prescient intimations of what the future holds. To be sure, his moments of certainty—“Suddenly I sensed with a kind of childish clarity” (85), “Now I knew” (51), “One thing I knew” (46)—are less frequent than and subordinate to a general stance of incomprehension. Both, however, are finally part of a larger gestalt that privileges and problematizes questions of knowing and not knowing. The result is undecidability that at times gives the impression of uniformity, but that finally represents less an abdication of interpretation than a stance of constant vacillation. The poetics of noninterpretation consists in effect of multiple layers of hesitation.

That the child's primary attitude is one of amazement is firmly established in the text through frequent assertions that things have become strange. The word muzar (odd) recurs like a refrain and often stands independently as a complete thought. Devoid of explication, this one word serves as a sentence unto itself. (In English the syntactic structure is modified; “strange” appears as a parenthetical aside, introducing another sentence.)

Strange, Father was not angry with the friends who had abandoned him, the many societies that had stopped inviting him to their meetings. He was angry with the Jewish petite bourgeoisie.

(103–04)

Strange, not one of [the refugees] knew how to explain what had happened, how they had arrived in our town, at our house and where they intended to go next.

(117)

Strange, no one interrupted our conversation.

(84)

“Strange,” said Amalia, “I thought there were Jews here.”

(37)

At other times the words meshune and muzar (odd) punctuate the prose as adjectives or predicates. Mother devotes herself to charity with a “strange, self-denying piety”; Father, surrounded by members of the Jewish burial society, “looked strange” (67); the narrator remarks, “my sleep that night was strange” (38). Numerous other examples attest to this emphasis.⁸ Similarly related words appear, too, in overt reference to the perplexity the child or other members of the family experience. At various times they are amazed, bewildered, or shocked, and the roots h.l.m., d.h.m., and t.m.h. are scattered throughout the text.⁹

While sometimes the pervasive perceptions of oddness are explicitly ascribed to the child, at other times comments of a purportedly objective, expositional nature bolster the impression that the bizarre is not solely a figment of the child's imagination. Rather, it is endemic to the entire circumstance. Testifying to a mood of grotesque festivity, the narrator describes the atmosphere of the town as “gay, drugged despair” (103). When the end approaches, the narrative reinforces this picture of disagreeable jocularity: “As in every place exuding the stench of disaster, here too people occupied themselves with barter, the exchange of rumors and bitter jokes” (117). Another example occurs when a young girl, unmarried, pregnant, and without means, seeks asylum with the family. Her tragedy likewise fosters “gay despair” and “strange celebration” (74). Apparently, the father is overjoyed to have contact with someone from his native village. Currying acceptance by a Gentile, even a helpless unfortunate, makes him feel less powerless and cut off from his Austrian identity. Consequently, her misfortune becomes an occasion for him to host a round of raucous, financially ruinous parties. This episode, then, like the previous ones, contributes to a dynamic familiar from Appelfeld's [novella] Badenheim 1939. Life, even at the brink of disaster, goes on, but in a distorted and falsely festive way. In light of these matters the title, Tor hapela’ot, takes on special resonance. The appellation “age of wonders” may refer to the general strangeness of the era even as it draws, too, on an understanding pervasive in Western literary tradition: that of the child as a creature who perceives the world in magical terms and possesses a special capacity for wonder. In this text the two notions converge in an inverse, sinister way. At issue is not joyous wonder nor even comic misinterpretations of the world and ironic revisions of traditional wisdom. Here, instead, the child experiences amazement as the world astounds in acutely cruel and troubling ways. In the process the protagonist becomes an indicator of Zeitgeist and an expressive vehicle for collective historical experience.

The treatment of the child's ability to know and understand moves beyond this fundamental point of departure most decisively through thematic attention to language. Above all there is an awareness that words are instrumental as a way of clarifying experience, but one that most often fails to provide order and meaning. These matters work themselves out in three major patterns. First, the narrative obtrusively emphasizes that many verbal exchanges are beyond the young boy. Second, it becomes clear that a certain amount of information is available to the protagonist. There exists a shared public framework of discussion, but it is one on which he can hang only partial understanding. Finally, the text alludes to a subverbal realm of experience or a point at which words become entirely inadequate yet still affect the character's perceptions.

In the first pattern the narrator frequently spells out that the boy doesn't comprehend.

Words I did not understand flew through the air like flaming torches.

(32)

Mother kept trying to pacify Theresa with all kinds of words whose meaning I could not understand.

(52)

When Mother said “I don't understand,” it meant that something had happened. But whatever it was was beyond my comprehension.

(63)

The double avowal of incomprehension in the last example brings to the fore that the child's perplexity is often matched or paralleled by that of the grown-ups. This kind of sentence alerts the reader to the overall strategy of the text; the child puts into relief a widespread phenomenon of bewilderment in the face of crisis. When Cousin Charlotte, formerly a celebrated actress, loses her job, the uncle responds, “I can't understand it. I can't understand it.” An acquaintance of the family echoes, “This is incomprehensible” (30–31). With similar effect the phrase “for some reason” (mishum mah) surfaces frequently in the narrative and turns the child's wonderment into an index of adult confusion: “Mother asked for some reason if Theresa needed a coat” (55). As constructed here, the words “for some reason” may constitute the boy's admission that he fails to understand. Alternatively, they may also indicate that grown-up actions are disjointed and unclearly motivated. The adults themselves do not always have a good reason for their behavior. Subsequently, as the narrative progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that the adults understand as little as, perhaps less than, the boy and are incapable of dealing with their plight. Explicitly exploiting his retrospective advantage, the narrator puts this phenomenon most acutely into relief by drawing attention to the culminating instance of incomprehension. In the final scenes, as the Jews are compelled by Nazi authorities to register en masse in the synagogue, they ask in astonished tones what they are doing there. Some have to be dragged in and refuse to believe they are part of the community of the condemned. Still unwilling to face up to the situation, their reaction is to attack the rabbi and blame him for their predicament.

Throughout the novel, as overt statements of incomprehension testify that the little boy does not fully understand events about him, these same comments also bear a certain ambivalence. At issue is not total blindness to and disregard of surrounding conditions but an instance of a character who knows that he doesn't know. The result is to imply that knowledge is problematic in The Age of Wonders. Further traces of this ambivalence mark the effort to provide information by reproducing lengthy quotations and conversations beyond the boy's comprehension. Much informative talk is reported as the child overhears it, even as he does not appreciate the force of the arguments whirling about him. This narrative strategy entails a shift to direct address that obviates any need to mediate speech acts with the boy's interpretation. It should be noted, though, that the character must be present, as a device to register and record the overheard words. Furthermore, his attention to these words belies his sensitivity, his partial awareness that something significant is occurring. Such scenes furnish the purest instances of a child character as witness, and by performing this function the protagonist keeps the audience apprised of collective events while still demonstrating his own cognitive limitations.

Early on, for example, as the family plans a gathering to celebrate their son's birthday, the atmosphere is decidedly unjoyous. The narrative reports only external signs of gloom because the boy has no clue as to the source of the unhappiness: “The colors of light faded. … I sensed that something was coming to a head in the silence … whispered remarks were exchanged that I failed to understand” (26). Belatedly, the reader becomes privy to adult exchange: “Haven't you heard that they've fired Charlotte from the National Theater?” (30). It turns out that anti-Jewish measures under the Nazi regime are beginning to affect the life of the affluent family and have cast a pall over the party. The reader can grasp the context just in bits and snatches as childish reportage would allow, and much as a child would, by overhearing.

The approach conveys, in several senses, a double message. First, character and reader experience the conversations differently. The comments signify differently in the two separate frames of presupposition: that of the immature individual who, before the worst has happened, can only surmise approaching evil, and that of the adult equipped with historical hindsight. Second, Appelfeld underscores that the child both knows and doesn't know. The youngster's apprehension of events depends on what is articulated for him by his elders, but their statements and explanations are insufficient.

The partial occlusion of events through incomplete apprehension of them puts into prominence that words are not always accessible or meaningful. A more intense expression of this same ambivalence is evident in the conversations reported indirectly, rather than directly. The child is highly aware of words and silences, if not always of their content. This technique grants words a kind of concreteness and animates them as a palpable influential factor in his surroundings. All the same they are unforthcoming, unable to disclose meaning. This is a contradictory portrayal of language as something both crucial and unavailable, inadequate but ever felt as a presence. Examples are numerous.

Inside silence seeped through the rooms like a liquid about to jell.

(32)

A few shallow words still hung in the air together with the last notes of the band.

Although no one spoke, it seemed to me that everything we did was governed by the jangling rhythm of Charlotte's words.

(33)

The next day my parents returned from the provincial capital bringing with them a breath of alien tumult, words and phrases they had picked up in the law courts.

(44)

In a variety of other circumstances language assumes a similar quality of fundamental yet evasive importance. Although many times the inaccessibility of particular statements could be justified by factors not associated directly with a childlike perspective, these examples are noteworthy because in them words continue to function more as an ominous presence than as a medium to reference or understanding. For example, when the doctors treat Aunt Augusta on her deathbed the protagonist remarks, “The whispered words reaching our ears were faint and unintelligible, as if they came from another world” (66). Certainly, physicians are often reluctant to convey bad news to a patient's family, but here the secrecy dovetails with and underscores the general impression of language as something uncommunicative and remote. Similarly, the reader is informed that in the hospital where Stark's circumcision takes place, men “sat drinking coffee out of little cups, baiting each other in a babble of unintelligible words that sounded like curses” (98). On one level the words seem distant simply because the men speak Yiddish, a foreign language as far as the protagonist's family is concerned. On another level the scene contributes to the overall sense that the province of the partially overheard is emblematic of a general elusiveness of understanding and an ever-widening gap between words and explanation. In this way there is reenacted, on the level of the individual incident, the dilemmas of The Age of Wonders as a whole and, indeed, of Appelfeld's entire oeuvre. Here, as elsewhere, the central issue is one of coming to terms with saying and not saying, language as at once crucial and ineffective when speaking about the unspeakable. Thanks to this kind of inchoate dialogue and to abortive attempts to internalize the words of others, apprehension of meaning throughout the text recovers both senses of the word apprehension. Cognition is synonymous or coterminous with incipient fear. The arrival at knowledge proceeds with trepidation.

On other occasions the child protagonist relaxes his attempt to penetrate the world with words, and it becomes clear that there is much reality above or beyond verbal effort. This happens, for example, when Mother tells bedtime tales, and the narrator, remembering how grateful he felt at those times, explains, “Mother would take my hand in hers and this was as enjoyable as the story itself. Even then the evenings were clearer than the mornings. Perhaps because words spoken at night, before sleep comes, partake of the nature of sleep and fall like seeds into the receptive earth” (71). This scene suggests that the way in which words are said—the tone, context, and gesture that accompany them—are as important, or more important, than content.

The realm of nonverbal experience that bears its own legitimacy and dominates the character's inner life is conveyed largely through simile and metaphor. These are infused into the thoughts of the character and become so abundant as to constitute a veritable method of rendering consciousness. Dorrit Cohn's conception of “psychoanalogy” offers a useful description of this technique.¹⁰ The term refers to situations in which a narrator distrusts a character's idiom but wants to capture that figure's sensitivity or perceptions. Such distancing of narratorial voice from protagonist's parlance is a model that accommodates itself easily to The Age of Wonders, for the prose in general has been far removed from childish diction. Virtually no indicators of the boy's verbal activity of mind (neither quoted monologue nor self-narrated monologue) are featured by the work. The entire text, while maintaining at least partially the perspective of the child, is rendered in the adult narrator's voice. The analogies and similes, moreover, are particularly unchildlike in their formulation. They recall a child's propensity for creative metaphor and the ability to see things in an unconventional way, but the comparisons are articulated here in a sophisticated and studied manner.

Uses of this pattern are legion and fulfill a variety of purposes. Often they serve to grant actions immediacy and to suggest concrete, vivid presence as those occurrences would gain graphic impact, filtered through a child's imagination. A feeling of doom, for instance, goes through the protagonist “like a thick liquid” (9), in Hebrew “kenozel samikh” (9, emphasis added). Theresa enclosed in a room studying is “like a prisoner” (34), “ke’asir” (30). The outline of Theresa's face seeps into the child “like a sweet soft touch” (34), “ke’ehad harehafim hametukim” (30). Of particular significance are the comparisons that associate Jewish characters with animals. In their own town the family lives “like animals on display, mocked and abused” (103), “hayinu bah kebetokh kluv, mutsagim lera’avah, mevuzim, umesuragim ’eyvah” (90). Father paces the rooms “like a caged animal” (94), “kebesoger” (82). The Jewish passengers who get off the train for an inspection by the authorities looked “like little insects wrinkling the straw with their feet” (11), “harakim ze‘irim hamekamtim ’et hakash bedarkam” (10), and as Father berates the rabbi responsible for Stark's conversion, skinny men come rushing out at him “like a swarm of angry wasps” (100), “kenahil” (87). This kind of portrayal of the Jews, familiar from others of Appelfeld's works and brought out pointedly in the English translation even more than in the Hebrew original, clearly echoes the Nazi ideology of Jewish racial inferiority. The narrator and/or the child character (it is difficult to distinguish exactly where the idea originates) incorporate this negativity into their own views, like the father who explicitly assays that the Jews runs about “like rats” (102), “mitrotsetsim ke‘akhbarim” (89), infesting all of Austria with their poisonous presence. The difficulty of differentiating between narratorial and figural view encapsulates the essence of Appelfeld's poetics. His art depends on overlap between maturity and youth, a child's perceptions retained and exploited in adult creation. Many things expressed here could not be said without adult vocabulary, but they are predicated on a child's mode of thinking and show to what extent self-hatred has affected not just the father but the son as well.

Another kind of analogy further develops the function of these techniques. Presenting conditions contrary to fact, one brand of trope points up the behavior of self-deception, which dominates the Jewish community. The Jews stubbornly persist in believing that things will turn out all right, and the word kemo appears several times to show that this is a mistaken assumption. Consider, for instance, the scene in which Theresa dies. The nuns at the convent take over all responsibility for funeral arrangements, leaving the family feeling useless. The narrator reports: “‘We must go,’ said father, as if we had another pressing engagement somewhere else” (89), “kemo tsipa lanu ‘inyan aher bemaqom ’aher” (77). Later the father insists on going to visit a friend of his youth, a powerful nobleman whose support he craves. Servants turn the family away ignominiously when the master refuses to see them, and Father's response is similar to the one in the convent: “‘We're getting out of here on the first train,’ he said, as if we had any other choice” (113), “kemo ‘amdah lifanav ‘od brera” (98). In each of these instances this figure fools himself into believing he can still exercise his own will and authority.

A host of similar but somewhat distinct cases also hint at discrepancy between the characters' behavior and their situation. Here, however, the feeling of dissociation cannot be ascribed only to the action at the level of narrated events. It stems as well from the interpretive role of the narratorial voice. For example:

Theresa was now brisk, polite and hospitable like a woman returning to her own home and familiar furnishings. […]

(56)

Father was stunned. He said, “I don't understand,” and turned his head away, looking into the gloom as if he hoped to meet the eyes of the guilty there. […]

(95)

Mother approached the coffin, her head slightly bent, as if she was looking into a baby's cradle. […]

(88)

“We're here. What now?” called the coachman, as if he were dealing not with people but with ghosts. […]

(53)

As before, in these passages, too, there is clear evidence that the characters deny the reality of their plight. In the first example Theresa has objected to being returned to the convent sanatorium but then embraces that return wholeheartedly. She sees the Catholic environment as home, when in effect she is mentally ill and in flight from herself. After Theresa dies, the mother stands over her coffin as if it were a cradle, confusing death with birth. Father looks for someone to blame for his friend's adoption of Judaism, when in actuality no one is guilty of coercing Stark. The half-Jew, of his own volition, has actively sought out Jewish identity, and his name (“strong” in German) implies that he is a figure of strength. The last example expresses the coach driver's attitude toward the Jews. The Gentile simply sees through them as if they weren't there, denying their existence. These comparisons, then, indicate that the characters are never entirely consonant with themselves in their own actions or in the eyes of the non-Jews. The narrator's constant search for analogy suggests in addition that the characters are not fully themselves within his estimation either. They are always paradigmatic of something else, never described simply in terms of one context. This circumstance creates the impression of a pressure toward interpretation. The narrator is ever trying to pin things down, never definitively able to identify or refer to phenomena directly, and so always tentatively explaining them in terms of another context. He is unwilling to assert with authority, and the overload of imagery suggests an assaying of meaning at once urgent but hesitant. Implications emerge in several directions. The narrative indicates the unreality of the times themselves, as an era suffused with duplicities. Furthermore, the use of simile and analogy indicates that the narrator at once interprets and renounces responsibility for imposing meaning onto events.

The use of the present tense reinforces this reading as it contributes to the complexity of the psychoanalogies.¹¹ In the examples given, the words kefi she and ke introduce a gnomic present suitable for expressing generalizations or cultivating an essayistic quality. This is a move that leads the text away from a specific temporal account and the progression of narrative sequence. Creating an antinarrative component or an element of timelessness, the procedure calls attention to the perceiving mind, which casts actions from one context into another. Consequently, the passages convey a sense that events are constantly mediated by consciousness. External actions and phenomena demand interpretation. They are too strange or estranged to be taken for granted as self-explanatory, yet the interpreting mind grasps constantly after an elusive objective correlative. The use of the present tense has a further related effect as well, which is to collapse the child and adult levels of the narration. In these passages it is impossible to know exactly who perceives. The synchronization of narrated time and the moment of narration conflates the narrative voice with the experiencing self. The temporal indicators suggest that past has become present and that the narrator relives the time about which he tells. (This effect is reinforced by the occasional but extended use of the evocative present in The Age of Wonders. Whole paragraphs of the narrative at times feature this “peculiar grammatical make believe”¹² that shifts the prose into the present tense as if the events were taking place at the very moment of writing about them. The grown-up remembers the past vividly. It has not left the child survivor, who is now an adult. The artist still embodies his suffering “like an arm or a leg” and relives those experiences in all their immediacy.)¹³

As a result, then, yet another displacement has been put into operation, and the unreality of the epoch has infused itself into the narration as well as into the narrated events. The characters react to the strangeness of their circumstance with willed dissociation and are never totally present in their actualities. The narrator, too, is divided, never entirely at home in the present because always captive, in his thoughts, to the past. Further contributing to the sense of displacement or dissociation from an immediate dramatic situation is the narrator's unusual use of kemo and ke. In colloquial contemporary parlance kemo introduces similes, and ke‘ilu introduces conditions contrary to fact. Appelfeld, by contrast, most often employs ke only for similes and kemo for conditions contrary to fact. While such formulations are acceptable in mishnaic Hebrew, they sound a note of incongruity in modern Hebrew prose. The author, invoking a language not of today, presents in his narrative a world of introspection, a cautious probing of an inner realm that exists only in memory and imagination, not in the present of idiomatic, spoken exchange. Overt artifice of language here connotes a tentative formulation of a realm neither here nor there, past nor present, and so creates an evidently fictional register in which to convey the extraordinary reality of this age of wonders.

These formal features contribute to a confusion of remembering self and experiencing self that proves the child to be more a device of authorial voice than a portrait with pretensions to psychological verisimilitude. Attempted here is not the mimetic capturing of child discourse or cognitive development, nor a reasoned assessment of childhood through memory. Appelfeld's protagonist is singularly without individuality. He acts more as a conduit for narratorial perceptions and testimony than anything else, yet this is an artifice that claims to convey kinds of truth otherwise inexpressible. In its artifice, though its purposes are different and the mood more somber, The Age of Wonders more closely resembles Sholem Aleichem's Mottel than the other texts covered in this study. In Mottel an artificially perpetual presence testified to an attitude of optimism, a willingness to embrace the future by greeting each new moment with laughter through tears. Here a lingering of the past in the present and a present enslaved to the past also create a temporal never never, but preoccupation with early trauma yields only the grotesquerie of exultant despair and precludes true joy. Altogether, Appelfeld's effect is one of merging and fusing narrative levels. The impact is quite different from that of, say, Uri Orlev, whose novel The Lead Soldiers operates on much the same fundamental premises as The Age of Wonders.¹⁴ It, too, exploits a child character's incomprehension in order to allow an adult writer to speak of incomprehensible disaster. However, Orlev's effectiveness depends on maximizing the gap between young character and older narrator. A closer look at that narrative is in order so as to put into relief the singularity of Appelfeld's writing.

In The Lead Soldiers the protagonist's matter-of-fact acceptance of gruesome suffering is designed to shock. War is what the little boy has known for most of his life, and so he takes it for granted. Later, the terrors he has lived and witnessed will affect his entire way of thinking, but in the midst of events he continues to play childish games. His toy soldiers are more significant to him than the grown-ups' war. The author keeps narratorial comment and child's perspective clearly separate, and the narrator, chameleon-like, steps in and out of narrated events to referee and transmit the child's thoughts to the reader. For example, in a scene from an infirmary, a girl whose feet have been amputated crawls over to the little boy's bed to bring him a sheaf of papers. Laying bare the essentials of Orlev's narrative strategy, the narrator cautions his audience, “Don't read your emotions into him. He wasn't at all upset. He was sure that this was how it was supposed to be” (101). Another more dramatically effective technique used to reveal much the same idea is the presentation of dialogue. The narrator remains aloof, permitting the children's own discourse to prevail and to demonstrate of its own accord how different their outlook is from the expected reaction of horror.

By way of illustration, consider an occasion when two boys in the ghetto first play at teasing a toddler and later go off to their school lessons. In the course of these ordinary activities, a brief, intervening exchange takes place. One child asks the other if he would like to see a horse, and the exposition that follows puts their discussion into an interpretive context that the adult reader can understand.

They crossed the trolley tracks and headed for the last row of houses in the neighborhood.

“Over there,” Tadek pointed.

They came to the edge of a pit.

“It's a hole,” Yurik said.

“It must have been some bomb.”

“Is it a horse?” asked Yurik.

“The head looks like a horse's,” said Tadek. “Everyone says it's a horse.” He picked up a stone and threw it at the carcass. Yurik found more stones and threw them too. […]

(45)

This is prose that clearly invites reader-response criticism, as it only belatedly makes apparent that the horse the children go to see is a dead one. The impact and surprise, largely dissipated in a second reading, derive from the obscure referentiality indicated in English translation through the repeated use of “it” and in Hebrew, though distributed somewhat differently, through the use of “zeh.” A carcass as a plaything is a horrifying phenomenon, but the reader recognizes the facts of the situation only gradually. The boys, by contrast, find the situation self-evident and so remark on it in words that neatly illustrate Bernstein's distinction between restricted and elaborated codes.¹⁵ That is to say, they needn't explicate in detailed vocabulary or syntax because they know to what they are referring. The clearly shared frame of reference obviates the need to articulate their interpretation, and so they can use simple deictics—“zeh,” “k'an,” and “mi”—without further explanation. These are words (demonstratives, adverbs of time or place, and personal pronouns) whose signification depends on the situation in which they are uttered. Here they have clear meaning for the boys, who take their environment for granted. Above all, there is a disinclination to translate visual impressions into words or value judgments, because there is no preexisting framework of interpretation within which those things register as being remarkable. Child and adult views couldn't be farther apart.

Appelfeld, by contrast with Orlev, arrives at a smoother integration of child and adult levels of the text. His approach is particularly noteworthy because it subverts one of the common characteristics of autobiographical novels. In this genre the time of intense reflection is more often the present than the past. Some of the most memorable of fictional minds, as Dorrit Cohn observes, belong to narrating rather than experiencing selves. Tristram Shandy, Moll Flanders, and Beckett's Molloy all illustrate this point. Consonant presentation of a past consciousness is dependent on self-effacement of the narratorial voice, and few authors of autobiographical fiction have been willing to silence this voice completely. Appelfeld's peculiar accomplishment is to achieve a kind of consonance that doesn't call attention away unduly from narrated events to the consciousness of the narrator. The depiction of the child figure's thinking infuses the time of narration with immediacy and access to stupefying events, yet the author never endows that character with its own words or grants it importance as a speaker. Appelfeld's is a technique that detracts from or diminishes the prominence of both experiencing self and narrating figure, but synthesizes the two and thereby enriches both.

Indicative of the resonance the text gains from its idiosyncratic confusing of child and adult realms is the difference between parts 1 and 2. The second segment is narrated in the third person and so forms a neat contrast with the preceding account. Whether the “I” of the first part and “Bruno” of the second are the same protagonist is a question raised by the abrupt structural discontinuity of the text. Not only is there formal divorce between the two books. There is, in addition, overt commentary on how much has changed when the man goes back to the town of his birth. Everything is altered. Bruno meets Louise, the servant for whom he felt such affection in his youth and who had enjoyed close ties with the family. She had even been the lover of a number of relatives and family friends. The belated reunion, however, yields a sad conclusion: “Now he knew for sure: of Louise nothing remained and all that sat before him was an old Austrian woman” (172). Another former acquaintance, Brum, refuses to recognize Bruno, and the main point of the entire episode is put into relief when a homesick Japanese student residing in Austria insistently belabors conversations about reincarnation. The implication emerges that, if Bruno is still himself, it is only as a kind of reincarnation estranged from his former self. In this world, where everything has changed, the protagonist develops a dissonant retrospective glance at his childhood; and the text, likewise, proffers dissonant narration that sets “Many Years Later” distinctly apart from The Age of Wonders. Part 2, for example, provides extended, discursive explanations of Bruno's feelings about Louise in which magic is not so much recaptured as explicated. The intimacy of living the past, childhood experience is available much more through the curious autobiographical stance of part 1 than it is in the concluding section.

Part 2, moreover, functions as a kind of commentary on the significance of part 1. The ending section demonstrates how the effects of time (and deliberate attempts on the part of some to erase the past) invalidate the protagonist's memories. Doing so, “Many Years Later” underscores the uniqueness of part 1. It insists on the value of preserving Jewish memories and on the indispensable importance of art, which alone can recover the feel of the Holocaust era. This observation accords with Harold Fisch's reading of The Age of Wonders. Fisch has assessed the disjunction between the two sections of narration as a move that negates the conventions of the Bildungsroman.¹⁶ The initial segment presents an apprentice novel about growing up and sketches an inner drama of awakening consciousness. Subsequently, the expected moment of epiphany or traditional realization of vocation fails to take place, must fail to take place, because the deportations start. The plot therefore does not follow the evolution of youth into maturity, but rather depicts an aftermath, a maturity that demonstrates how very distant the protagonist's early reality has become.

The division of the book into two separate sections is artistically felicitous, as it incorporates into the overall narrative organization that same radical disjunction of circumstance which, in separate ways, also motivates parts 1 and 2. The discontinuity, which expresses itself initially as consonant narration in the cultivation of the childhood perspective, manifests itself later as dissonant narration, and it results, too, in the very split that structures the volume into two disconnected sections. The question of discontinuity and its impact on Appelfeld's art also raises yet another set of issues crucial to The Age of Wonders. Intertexts and interpretive frameworks, as thematic and stylistic components of the text, are complicated by the dislocations that shape this fiction.

Commenting on the displacements in his own life, the author has spoken movingly of his reliance on Kafka as a literary precursor.¹⁷ For a considerable period after the trauma of the war years, Appelfeld shied away from literature, throwing himself instead into other activities and into the demands of adjusting to life in Israel. When he did turn to writing, modern Hebrew literature was not much of a help in developing an art about the Holocaust. Hebrew was a language entirely new to Appelfeld and therefore, in his estimation, not suitable for a deeply personal mode of writing. It served instead as a public idiom, a surface or mask behind which to hide.¹⁸ Kafka, by contrast, provided a model after which Appelfeld could pattern his own fiction and so break his silence about the Shoah.

Appelfeld's work is reminiscent of Kafka's in its combination of understatement with horrific event and in its focus on the disorientation of individuals who are dwarfed by monstrous powers, monstrously larger than themselves.¹⁹ Without doubt there are also very significant differences between the two writers. Among other things, Kafka often features the quick but futile intelligence that attempts to deal unsuccessfully with inexplicable events. His writing, too, offers detailed descriptions of excruciating cruelty or horrifying acts. (The execution carried out in the Penal Colony and Gregor Samsa's metamorphosis into a cockroach are but two examples.) In The Age of Wonders, by contrast, there is much more approximately an abdication of reason, just as there is a shying away from brutality. However, the factors that do bear a resemblance to Kafka allow the author to develop his own brand of childhood discourse. The adult writer can never transcribe the child's voice or experience with absolute authenticity, but Kafka's portrayals of defenselessness provide a parallel to the child's sense of smallness, and the matter-of-fact acceptance of the bizarre as a given offers parallels to the child's noninterpretive wonderment and acquiescence to surrounding events.²⁰

Significantly, Kafka is mentioned at length in The Age of Wonders, and this fact helps insinuate thematic attention to literary models into the plot actions. The father is a writer friendly with eminent lights of Austrian letters. Above all he is an ardent admirer of Kafka. In the course of events he inevitably falls from grace with the authorities, his readers, and the literary establishment because he is a Jew. The point is of interest, for, in acknowledging his own debt to Kafka, Appelfeld emphasizes that Jewishness is the basis of his feelings of affinity with that predecessor and his concern with persecution, alienation, and estrangement. In The Age of Wonders the father does not recognize any such reason for his admiration of Kafka, and the painful irony emerges that this man clings to his identity as an Austrian to the point that he spurns his fellow Jews and, finally, all Jewish writers. Losing his grip on a paradigm that might help him see his own plight in more perceptive terms, he loses his awareness of absurdity. Acceding to the interpretive dictates of the time, he tries to justify Aryan notions of Jewish inferiority. In this way the mention of Kafka in The Age of Wonders does more than contribute to the negative characterization of the father. It also underscores, within the narrated events, the need for models of interpretation. This is a matter that came up before, when the text pointed out how the child's awareness depends in part on what is articulated by his parents. Because he overhears puzzling conversations, this child is a step ahead of Orlev's Tadek and Yurik; they don't even know there is something remarkable occurring on which they might comment. However, Appelfeld's novel does share with The Lead Soldiers an insistence that meaning is not inherent in the protagonist's experience. Both narratives, then, pose two questions: to what extent do events lead to expression, and to what extent do preexisting assumptions determine the child's ability to perceive?

Responses to catastrophe in literary works are profoundly modulated by the paradigms of meaning with which the author approaches the subject, and Appelfeld turns this issue of presupposition to a principal focus of the novel as he thematizes the question of interpretation. In turn, the child's various encounters with language, together with the father's dwelling on Kafka, heighten the reader's awareness of the narrator's own dependence on narrative conventions: in particular, his liberation from silence thanks to Kafka. In sum, the same preoccupations underlie the author's struggle with expression in his own life and define the fundamental problems explored at the level of narrated events (the child's dealings with language as revealment and concealment). These tensions translate themselves at the level of narration into oscillations between narratorial voice and experiencing self.

The Age of Wonders in all these different guises emphasizes the problematic nature of knowledge and language in an art that attempts to speak of the unspeakable and recover an irrecoverable past. The artistic voice that at first reading seems uniform, understated, a stance of noninterpretation, finally reveals a highly complex set of tensions. A closer look at a single passage may demonstrate how these subtleties adumbrate the deceptively simple prose. Perhaps nowhere are so many of the salient concerns of the entire narrative brought together more richly and concisely than in the following passage. This scene is recounted after the departure of Yetti, the unwed mother whose presence served as a pretext for immoderate partying and so brought the family to the brink of destitution.

The nights were long, brightly lit, and empty. A sick bitterness pinched Father's lips. He became more and more entangled in his lawsuits until there seemed no way out. At night the fleeting memories of Yetti took on menacing substantiality. She still seemed to be sitting there in the corner with her shadows.

In vain Mother tried to give our meals their old serenity. Intimations of orphanhood had fallen on everything, even the drapes. Charged, unspoken words floated in the air like hidden accusations. Mother's face too was infected with the same sick bitterness. One evening Father said, “What more do you want? You chased her away, didn't you?” Mother wept and Father did not try to comfort her. I knew: everything I had once known, my childhood, too, was over.

(77)

The actions of the characters, symptomatic of their no-exit situation, are similar to those that typify their behavior throughout the novel. Father, unable to cope with his loss of prestige, is entrenched in useless court battles hoping to make the press rescind libelous reviews of his writing. Mother, for her part, deliberately tries to perpetuate illusions of normal routine. Furthermore, language here is conceived as something elusive and problematic. It is only through unspoken words and snatches of conversation that the child recognizes the seriousness of the situation and the substance of the parents' psychological denial. The impression arises that silence communicates more than speech acts. Most powerful is that which is not articulated. Then, words explicitly designated as mute take on concrete presence (“milim ’ilemmot shotetu bahallal”) and highlight the eeriness of the circumstances. In this they resemble the memory of Yetti, a figure whose absence takes on substance and remains present. (Once again the condition contrary to fact dominates: Yetti is sensed by the family “ke’ilu ‘adayin yoshevet bapinah”). The illusions of the parents and the substantive impact of that which is lacking dramatize that this is a time not consonant with itself. This is a world haunted by ghosts, in which appearances deceive. Such a dynamic carries over into the entire narrative of The Age of Wonders, whose adult narrator continues to be haunted by events of that earlier age.

Out of this mixture of deception, feigned normality, and miscommunication comes the child character's incomprehension or noninterpretation. His perceptions yield a deadpan, matter-of-fact recording of developments, along with a contradictory knowledge. The child knows that he doesn't know. The ambivalence of this knowledge, moreover, yields a paradoxical insight that the very patterns of understanding, the interpretive frameworks that once were operative, no longer are. The English translation felicitously brings out this concept more than the Hebrew. While the original reads, “everything that was, even my childhood, would not return” (“kol shehaya lo yashuv ‘od, ’afilu yalduti”), the English doubles the verb to know in the main clause and in a relative clause, thereby juxtaposing the old, familiar knowledge and the new, unsettling kind: “I knew: everything I had once known, my childhood too, was over.” This move is not an unjustifiable liberty taken in translation. The concern with models of interpretation is implicit in the Hebrew, explicitly brought out not in the exact words of this sentence but in the opening of the paragraph. There the mother tries to establish not “serenity” but “hanusah hayashan”—that is, the old formula, the previous tradition. In Judaism the word nusah refers to modes of prayer, and here it is significant that the expression is divested of, though not entirely divorced from, its religious connotations. The implication emerges that if former times for the boy bore a kind of sanctity, a serenity and wonder akin to prayer (especially in the early chapters, which describe peaceful summer holidays), now that quality is extinguished, as is the very meaning of nusah in a spiritual sense.

The narrator's suffering, his loss of childhood, does not remain singular here. It is generalized. Orphanhood is not his alone, but everyone's. The child becomes the emblem of collective sorrow as orphanhood signifies a burden of massive proportions, a communal loss of support and social moorings. The word “yatmut” in itself bears interesting polyvalence. Orphanhood is at once proper to children (since adults whose parents die are not designated as orphans) but also leaves children bereft of the innocence associated with childhood. Leaving them facing the painful reality of death, it often forces them to grow up that much more quickly. The protagonist's entire world here is characterized, then, in terms of childhood simultaneously maintained and threatened. Bereavement, pain, helplessness, and incomprehension predominate. The same ambivalence obtains in the novel as a whole. Appelfeld's artistry throughout is based on a discourse of childhood suffused with the knowledge that there has already been an end to innocence.

Notes

1. Ahron Appelfeld, Masot beguf rishon (Jerusalem: Hasifriah Hatsionit, 1979), especially 19–26 and 41–51. My citations in English draw from a version of these ideas presented by Appelfeld as “Holocaust Writings: Personal Reflections” (Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures, University of Washington, Seattle, Wash., 1983).

2. Mintz, Hurban, 203–38. This perceptive analysis touches on child characters in Appelfeld's early work but mentions The Age of Wonders only very briefly.

3. Ibid., 220.

4. Ahron Appelfeld, Tor hapela’ot (Jerusalem: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1978). An English translation by Dalyah Bilu has appeared as The Age of Wonders (New York: Washington Square Press, 1981). Quotations from the novel are taken from these two editions.

5. Several studies have examined this pervasive preoccupation in Hebrew literature with a return to the past, after the Holocaust, to reckon with loss and lost childhood. See, for instance, Shaked's “Yaldut ’avudah,” in Gal hadash, 71–86; Alter's After the Tradition, 163–80; and Alexander's Resonance of Dust, especially chapter 3.

6. See, for example, Gershon Shaked's assessment in Gal hadash, 149–67; Esther Fuchs's “Hahasaha hatematit: tashtit mivnit bekitvei Ahron Apelfeld,” Hebrew Studies 23 (1982): 223–27; and Lily Rattok's Bayit ‘al blimah (Tel Aviv: Heker, 1989). Rattok includes an extensive bibliography of the Appelfeld criticism surveyed in her monograph.

7. Dan Miron, Pinkas patuah (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1979), 49–59.

8. Further examples can be found in the English on pages 67, 69, 71, 73, 74, 75, 80, 85, passim, and in the Hebrew on pages 70, 78, 89, 91, 93, 120, passim.

9. See, for instance, pages 55, 85, 121.

10. Cohn, Transparent Minds, 43.

11. Additional examples using ke plus the present tense are found in the Hebrew on pages 41, 45, 48, 57.

12. The phrase is Cohn's, Transparent Minds, 171.

13. For extended passages of the evocative present, see pages 66–67, 72, and 73 in the Hebrew. This stylistic feature is not maintained in the English.

14. Uri Orlev, The Lead Soldiers, was published originally by Sifriat Poalim (Tel Aviv, 1956); quotations here are from the 1983 edition. The English translation, by Hillel Halkin, appeared in 1980 (New York: Taplinger).

15. Bernstein, “Language and Socialization,” 329–45.

16. Harold Fisch, A Remembered Future (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

17. Appelfeld, Masot beguf rishon, 9–18.

18. This is the subject of Appelfeld's novel Mikhvat ha’or (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1987).

19. Hillel Barzel, “Zikat Apelfeld le Kafka,” Zehut (May 1981): 112–20.

20. David Jacobson pursues the question of parallels between Kafka and Appelfeld in relation to Badenheim, in an essay called “Kill Your Common Sense and Then Perhaps You'll Begin to Understand,” AJS Review 13 (1988): 129–52. In that novel some characters do futilely rely on common sense in a failed attempt to explain their deteriorating circumstances to themselves. Others, who relinquish common sense, perceive and comprehend more but lose their sanity.