Aharon Appelfeld is a survivor of the Holocaust who, in his own words, has been “inclined” by fate for “some reason,” to literature. He tries to speak, as he says, of

the individual whose mother and father gave him/her a name, to whom they taught their language, gave of their love and bequeathed of their belief. This individual who, because of the many, has been obliterated and become one of the many … is the individual whose essence is the core of the literary vision.¹

It is this individual of whom he feels compelled to speak, for

… at the moment that simple truth is revealed to you, you are no longer free to deal with the grand and the lofty: you learn to inquire modestly about this individual whose soul you would touch or, to be presumptuous about it, whose essence you would reach.

And he adds:

This individual is a Jew. Willingly or unwillingly he is a Jew.²

One of Applefeld's Jews—Bartfuss—is the subject of this article. A Jew, perhaps an individual or maybe one of the many, he is the protagonist in Appelfeld's The Immortal Bartfuss.³ What is he, this human, this “immortal,” that all survivors claim him?

Bartfuss. The name is immediately striking. Divide it into its two German constituents and the result is bart fuss, “beard foot.” Turn the whole thing around, cognizant of Appelfeld's bilingualism (how could one not be, with this construction embedded in a Hebrew text?) and divide the name once again into two, then recombine the parts, aware of vocal assimilation, and you are left with bar dfuss as in “son”/“owner”/“bearing” or “outside of” (bar,) and “the printed” or “the fixed in shape/formed” (dfuss)—in another reading, the immortal “non-prototype” (outside the fixed and formed convention).

What do these readings yield? As Bartfuss—hairy foot, beard foot—the name echoes the late eighteenth-century German custom of imposing absurd names on Jews. In this context it is a name redolent of anti-Semitic practice. It is not a name given by a mother and father “in their language,” but a name forced by strangers on a mostly helpless population; it is not an act executed in kindness or loving bequest, but in unrequited cruelty. It speaks volumes in presaging other kinds of sadism perpetrated, in much later generations, by the descendants of those same medieval namers on the descendants of the named. And this while the victims still bore the inscription of their earlier persecution.

In this reading the name connotes the historical continuity of progressive anti-Semitic practice. Append the adjective “immortal” here and it reverberates in two directions: Bartfuss, the immortal Jew (cf. Ahasuerus); or, conversely, a representation of the immortal, not novel, not unique, expression of anti-Semitism. Either way, Bartfuss is taken out of the category of the individual and placed in the realm of the communal and the representational.

If the gestalt is inverted to foreground the Hebrew, and the German left as backdrop, the communal still pertains in the rendering of bar as “son of,” “bearing,” dfuss, a “fixed form” or “prototype.” And if dfuss is disentangled from its prototypic/formal denotation, what is left is “that which may be printed,” that which can be represented, eternally (The Immortal). The implication of eternality here suggests repetition, even if not of the exact essence, then at least of intent, so that the story is one that repeatedly recurs and may eternally be printed, written, inscribed. And in another reading—“son of,” that is “fruit of,” “the printed,” which is “the text”—literature, and, finally, the author.

If the Aramaic portion of the construction, bar, is rerendered, something quite different emerges. If bar is taken as “outside of” or “on the outside,” the name changes once again and becomes “outside the realm of print or representation,” or “beyond the prototype”—and thus unable to be contained either in words or within any prehension of the known or represented. Bar-dfuss is eternally elusive, evasive, untappable—beyond even the notions of individual and community, or so individual, so unique, that no known idiom can express it.

In this story Bartfuss is called immortal by his comrades in suffering and smuggling because he has taken fifty bullets in his body (p. 62).⁴ There is thus a very concrete and particular reason for his immortality, which removes him from the domain of the communal, of dfuss. And where does it reside? It is embedded in his very body, the most visible, observable mark of individuality.

We are told—either by way of the narrative voice, or via Bartfuss's deflected, inner monologue—that he is spoken of with awe and is referred to as “immortal” because “They needed legends, too, heroes, splendid deeds. So they could say, ‘there were people like that too’” (p. 60). But this is immediately followed by the comment: “In fact they didn't know a thing about Bartfuss” (p. 61). Thus, despite his singularity, despite any actual physical imprint that inscribes him with a uniqueness, Bartfuss's immortality in the tale is stamped on him by the actions or consciousness or needs of others—by their need for heroes. This uniqueness is not his own. It is the property of the many, part of communal consciousness, coerced by the covetousness of heroism.

How far is that heroism actually expressed in the text? Is Bartfuss, undoubtedly a legend, a hero too? Do the perception of others and his own actions coincide? And if so, is that person contained in the narrative? Does he bear expression? Is he prototype or person? And how is he each?

The first sentence of the book reiterates and affirms the title, while the ensuing paragraphs contain much of the thematic kernel of the tale. We are told, in a short three-word phrase comprising the opening statement of the narrative, that “Bartfuss is immortal” (p. 3), but the reason for this “immortality” is only explained much later. At this stage the passage continues as follows:

In the Second World War he was in one of the smaller of those notorious camps. Now he is fifty, married to a woman he used to call Rosa, with two daughters, one married. He has a ground floor apartment, not very large, with two trees growing at the entrance.

Every day he rises at the same time, a quarter to five. … He drinks a cup of coffee and lights a cigarette right away. The first cigarette makes him feel very good. For a long while he sits next to the window and absorbs the little tremors of the morning: an old man walks to synagogue, a truck unloads a crate of milk. These little sights charm his eyes. At six he rises, gets to his feet, lights a second cigarette, and to his surprise, discovers some unpleasant scraps of food in the sink. The old fury rises in him immediately. But he doesn't let the fury take control of him. The muscles tense sharply in his neck for some reason, and he nips his anger in the bud. He goes straight to his room.

His room is practically bare. … Once Rosa tried to dress up the walls a little. She even brought in a table and chairs. That was years ago, when they still talked. Bartfuss cleared them right out, with his own hands.

Since then the room has stood bereft of any garment.

(pp. 3–4)

The quite extraordinary opening sentence is flanked by some minimal historical data and then followed by a rather pedestrian description of the fictive present, which leads into a detailed and, by contrast, microscopic depiction of the assuefaction of Bartfuss's daily activities. Thus the extraordinary receives scant mention, while the mundane spreads, at great length, across the passages. The narrative representation at the beginning of the book is emblematic of Bartfuss's existence. Much in the manner of the text, his life consists of painstakingly observed minor rituals designed to lessen the repressed but ever-present historical atrocity indelibly marked, not just on his body, but on his whole being.

As indicated by the title, the book is a story about Bartfuss. He acts as the axis of the narrative, with his feelings—or, rather, his abhorrences, sensations, denials and evasions—serving as its core. But despite his focalizing function, and in consonance with his psyche, little of an inner world is expressed. Instead, the text constitutes an array of reactions to the world: reactive thoughts, presented in a deflected manner by way of the narrative voice, or reactive action, which is usually the response to the perceived demands of others and to the threat their intrusion entails.

Bartfuss is a survivor. He lives in Jaffa in a “not large apartment” with his wife, and has two daughters (Paula and Bridget). His life at the outset of the book comprises a perpetual attempt at fending off (“He nips his anger in the bud”). He fends off the avaricious advances of his wife (“the woman he used to call Rosa”), who is greedy to get her hands on the treasure he hugs to himself and hides in the cellar. This “treasure,” which is a focal point in Bartfuss's life, is really not much of a treasure at all. It consists of a few thousand dollars, some gold and some objects of sentimental value, but Rosa does not know this, and it becomes an instrument of withholding for Bartfuss. Rosa imagines it contains fortunes of unimaginable bounty, and he does not disabuse her of that notion.

Bartfuss also fends off his daughter Paula (whose approaches are also related to the treasure), and he fends off society at large. Like the treasure in the cellar, he hugs himself to himself (“goes straight to his room”) whenever the world seems to come too close to him.

But most of all he fends off words, and his life is lived in a silence he has created. He speaks to almost no one except café owners and waiters/waitresses when he orders food and drink (he eats out all the time and does not take nourishment at home); bus drivers (on his night rides to Netanya); and presumably to those with whom he has business dealings when he does his buying and selling. It is not clear what he buys and sells and precisely how he makes a living. In the time after liberation, in his idyllic days on the beach in Italy, he was a smuggler, and it seems his “work” in Israel is a legal continuation of this.

Bridget, Bartfuss's younger daughter, is retarded. She is not much given to language and is totally under her mother's domination, so that she thinks of Bartfuss as “he” and is quite terrified of him. She is the one with whom he feels most affinity, but Rosa has blocked his way to her. She has cut him off from both her daughters and set them against him. But Bartfuss is hardly blameless in the matter. When some lame attempts to establish a relationship with them in their youth failed, he easily gave up the endeavor.

There are only a few things which Bartfuss actively seeks out: the sea and bus rides—and sometimes, though infrequently now, desultory, wordless liaisons with strange women on the beach. He has removed himself from language and chooses instead to immerse himself, whenever possible, in the womb-like sensations of inchoate sound and rocking movement. But although he seeks solace in the prelinguistic, preform world, he avoids the total unconsciousness of deep sleep. He struggles with it perpetually, so that part of him is always awake and aware, always watching for intrusions from the outside, and especially guarding against Rosa and her curiosity.

Near the beginning of the narrative, in chapter 5, Bartfuss's life begins to change. He is seized one day with chest pains and is hospitalized. This event sparks the beginnings of a new process in him and he slowly begins to relate (if it may be called relating) to the world around him. His new “openness” is reinforced when, sitting at a café, he sees a woman from his past. She is Theresa, whom he met on his way to “that little camp known for its horrors” (p. 48). They had spent the night together discussing The Brothers Karamazov. She is the only person he remembers from among the sea of faces that passed him that whole year. Seeing her evokes in him memory and the wish to remember and discuss the past. She, however, neither wishes to remember nor discuss anything other than the present, and she claims not to know him. Her attitude has a paradoxical effect on him: as against her refusal to remember, Bartfuss enters memory and “Now he relived that horrible journey to Dorfenziehl as he never lived it before, in detail, with a kind of visionary devotion. Above the great collective suffering, a point of light shone” (p. 54). Theresa redeems memory for him, indeed, redeems him: “… momentarily Bartfuss' life dropped anchor, as it were, at that pier—not exactly a splendid pier, but one that aroused many hopes: Theresa” (p. 54).

Bartfuss decides that survivors need to work for the common good, need “generosity” and “mercy.” He forms a relationship with a woman called Sylvia, also a survivor. She dies shortly thereafter, but not before she shows him his lack of generosity. Finally, at the end of the tale, Bartfuss gives away bills of money to a woman—Marian—who, like his daughter Bridget, is semiretarded. Marian is also a survivor. In earlier days she was pretty and gave herself to any man in exchange for gifts that helped her survive. The book ends at this point. Bartfuss goes home and we leave him on the brink of the relief he has denied himself all these years: having entered the world of words and released his anal hold on his treasury by giving it to a surrogate Bridget, he is about to fall into a deep sleep.

This book may be seen as a struggle for expression and a concomitant denial of words and language, a denial of and struggle against history. The denial of history extends from a very personal sphere—Bartfuss's own history—to a wider arena. The broader aspect cannot be evaded, because of Bartfuss's experience of the Holocaust; willy-nilly he is only partly individual—an “accident” of history decrees that. And yet he can only find his way to history by way of the personal. It is Theresa's individuated form that creates for him “the point of light” into which the “orangish spot before his eyes” (p. 48)—a sign of his impending illness—changes. And yet it is only the retrieval of the personal that allows Bartfuss entry into the communal. Note his visits to the “H.M.” or “Holocaust Memorial” (p. 76), and his decision after seeing Theresa that “now he would devote himself to the general welfare … wholly for the public good” (p. 76).

Thus history, communal and individual, reasserts itself in Bartfuss's consciousness by way of an individual presence in the shape of Theresa's body. Her body (i.e., her presence) operates on him in a manner opposite to the way his body acts on the rest of society. His body, marked as it is by a personal exposure to a communal experience, has become a general symbol of hope immortal: “I expect great things of him” (p. 62), says an observer. His body has become the property of the many and stands as a quasi-individuated expression of the Jewish people—fatally wounded many times, but still alive.

When thinking about the Holocaust, we inevitably think in terms of the many and thus in terms of the abstract or symbolic. We lose sight of the very personal experience of the physical degradation and pain of its victims. Stripped to the bare essentials of survival, all that is left is the body, its sensations and its suffering. This experience brings a person to a regressive state: like the infant, the victim's focus is that of an intensity of bodily consciousness.

When the infant is in this state, it is still prelinguistic and is, as yet, without separate identity, existing in a sea of sameness, not knowing the difference between body/self and other bodies/outside world. In this universe, it experiences movement (most often the mother's movement, frequently a rocking sensation) and inchoate sound. When sound becomes more coherent and is sensed as a mark of difference, the process of identity formation begins. It entails a separation from the mother. When the sounds become words, become language, the sense of separation becomes more acute. This phase has been called the “Law of the Father,” because the father, as it were, enters as language to deny the child the all-pervasive harmony of total union with the mother.

Functioning adults cannot regress so far as to reenter the initial prelinguistic condition. But it is possible that, in being forced to live with an excess of bodily consciousness, the adult—with early, albeit unconscious memory of that state—will be thrown back towards it and desire its comforting incoherence. This is the case with Bartfuss. Although his connection with the sea may be explained in terms of his personal history (the stay on the beach in Italy), and similarly the need for the rocking motion of the bus may be associated with the year-long trip to the camp, it is also equally plausible that these are related to his need to return to a primal oneness. Those years of being “starved, crushed into freight cars, [where] one after another feelings were numbed” (p. 48), and all that remained was the proximity of body, charted the course of Bartfuss's subsequent desire. This may be seen in the type of sexual liaisons he chooses, which accord with the prelinguistic form of desire. Note his first dalliance with Rosa:

He said, “Come,” and she got up and followed him. It was the same the next day. … She didn't even ask his name. … They would make love for an hour or two. Afterward he would part from her without even leaving her a single word.

(Pp. 15–16)

He likes her at the beginning because of her silence—“her silence charmed him” (p. 18). Later, in Israel, his casual sexual interludes follow the same wordless pattern. Bartfuss's desires seem to strive towards the prelinguistic wholeness of the infant's world.

But Bartfuss is an adult who cannot achieve this state fully. And thus, alongside this form of regression, he is fixed in a later developmental-anal-stage. This is the mechanism by which he protects himself, as far as possible, from the invasion and intrusion of a world of which he is all-too-conscious. His anal aspect is expressed in his withholding behavior: “Over the years he developed a clipped language of refusal, protective syllables that were accompanied with a shrug of his left shoulder, all of which said, ‘Leave me alone’” (p. 15).

The anal is most evident in the way he nurtures the treasure he hides. It is noteworthy that he hides it in the dark and damp of the cellar, underground, as if in the recesses of his consciousness. The treasure gives his existence meaning:

Except for his hiding place, to which he gave a lot of thought, and except for the treasure, this alien ground would be barren. The treasure consisted of three gold bars, five thousand dollars, two necklaces, a few gold watches, a few pictures of his mother, his father's passport, and a small photograph, apparently from school, of his sister. These possessions were very dear to him. He devoted most of his pleasant thoughts to them, as if to a beloved woman.

(P. 45)

His treasure comprises artifacts from his past. Holding onto them, desiring them, keeping them hidden—all indicate the need to regress, to return to the past and hold it fast.

Bartfuss became fixed in the anal withholding phase in Italy soon after Paula's birth, when she was struck with dysentery and battled with death for a fortnight:

In those feverish days his language began to take shape, a language with no words, a language that was all eavesdropping, alert senses, and impressions. Even then he learned to mute every sensation. But more than that, he stopped thinking.

(P. 21)

And the retentive crystallizes when Rosa announces she is pregnant again (p. 22). Birth and death seem to evoke in him the fear and anger of the Holocaust and cause him to regress to earlier developmental stages. It is the second birth—Bridget's—that firmly establishes Bartfuss's regression.

While the text does not describe the bodily experience of the Holocaust itself, the traces of this experience may be observed in the recurring references to the body in Bartfuss's post-Holocaust world. People are usually described in terms of their bodies. The survivors have, for the most part, changed in their physical aspect. Most of the women in the story (as well as some of the men) have become fat. While this condition may be seen as a natural consequence of aging, and as a change wrought by living in a peaceful world, its repeated mention seems to imbue it with particular meaning.

Rosa becomes fat after the birth of her daughters, just when she ends silence and breaks into insistent nagging and demanding speech. Her broadening out is associated with her entry into motherhood and into language; and it is inscribed upon her by the Holocaust, and more specifically by Bartfuss's ongoing, repressed experience of the Holocaust. It is the result of a development of the acquisitive in her that is, in turn, a result of Bartfuss's anal denial of her and her needs. She too becomes somewhat anal and garners her own treasure, withholding her daughters—who become almost exclusively hers—from Bartfuss.

Inasmuch as Rosa becomes the mother of specific children, she ceases to be the inchoate, murmuring representation of an all-encompassing mother who is but an extension of Bartfuss. She becomes a specific mother and a specific voice. It is at this time that Bartfuss recoils from her and even tries to escape her and the children. From now on he finds her repugnant. He shudders at her description of her daughters as “nature girls” (with the sexual implication in the term), and is repelled by her use of cosmetics. She can no longer be desirable to him, and the nameless female, turned mother, turned “whore” (with her cosmetics), becomes for him the ultimate symbol of all he must gird himself against.

Theresa, too, has become fat, and her fat may also be seen as a protective mechanism. When she and Bartfuss met in the transit camp she was thin. She was the one face that stood out on the “long road” to the camp.

When everything was locked and dark, Theresa's face had broken through. There were many faces there, thin and tortured, but a clean light, tinged with deep blue, covered Theresa's. All night they spoke about The Brothers Karamazov.

(P. 49)

Then, Theresa stood out in her association with language; now she is fat and does not wish to remember or speak to Bartfuss. Fat, another form of garnering, has replaced her language. But despite her present condition and because of her earlier individuated form, she inspires in an already prepared Bartfuss the wish to remember (his chest pains may be seen as a mark of the opening up of his solar plexus, i.e., his feelings). “I wanted to exchange memories” (p. 57), he replies to her inquiry when she asks what he wants.

After seeing her and after remembering, Bartfuss begins to release the hold of the anal and move away from the early, primitive, psychological structures. He begins to think in terms of abstract qualities. He becomes desirous of altruism and aware of his meanness and withholding: “I should have been more generous. People who went through the Holocaust should be generous” (p. 73). And together with this statement comes the admission that language is unavoidable now, is more than a repressed substratum:

During the past year I've felt an undefinable kind of mental weakness. All these years I've kept myself from talking. In Italy I was consistent and sharp. But in the past year I've been flooded by talk. Words. I don't know why I'm telling you this. I never permitted myself to tell it. For my part I don't like it when people force talk on me. I hate talk. But in the past year it's been flooding me.

(P. 73)

It is at this time, too, that he begins to move away from his former refuge, the sea, and makes contact with Sylvia, the woman who provides him refuge and teaches him the meaning of generosity. Sylvia, in contrast to most of the other women in the tale, is “thin, brazen … without a trace of softness” (p. 76). She is very much in the realm of language. She graduated from a Hebrew high school, loves Jewish law and modern poetry: “She made Bartfuss feel she had words to draw him out of the mire into which he had sunk” (p. 97).

Sylvia helps him into the world of forms and human culture, and she does this by way of words (p. 97). She echoes his sentiments, telling him he should be more generous (p. 98). Thus it is that a woman who is not inscribed by Bartfuss's dual reactions to the Holocaust—she is not fat and is thus neither formless mother, nor retentive withholder—operates here much in the manner of the “Law of the Father”: she brings him back towards the adult world of social relationships and of ethics, and she does this by acting as individuated sound.

Bartfuss finally gives expression to that which Sylvia has taught him, albeit in a somewhat distorted manner. Near the end of the book he partially unburdens himself of his garnered riches when he forces his money on the impoverished Marion. Marion, too, has become fat, and she also does not remember anything.

Bartfuss is finally released from his stasis, finally redeemed from the tyranny of his body, finally accorded his secret hope: “Secretly he hoped the days would have action in store for him, sacrifice, some plunge that would purify his body” (p. 22). At the end of the tale, when Bartfuss releases his hold on the body and its psychic memories and allows them to enter language and concept, he undergoes a process of individuation and enters into the world of adulthood. It is just when he abandons his will which was formerly focused entirely on withholding, repressing, and protecting the self and its material possessions in a shell of exclusiveness, and as a result enters into the oblivion of deep sleep, that he truly becomes individual. Bartfuss can now become free of the immortality imposed on him by the communal will. He can enter the forgetfulness first of sleep, and then of death.

Notes

1. Aharon Appelfeld, Mas'ot beGuf Rishon (Essays in the First Person), (Jerusalem: HaSifriya HaTzionit, 1979), p. 90. The translations of this text are mine (Z. G.).

2. Ibid.

3. Aharon Appelfeld, The Immortal Bartfuss, trans. Jeffrey M. Green (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1988).

4. All page numbers refer to the 1988 edition.