Chair: Ladies and gentlemen, this is a long, long way from when we first started and we had to beg people to come and possibly 20 or 30 people would attend the lectures. Welcome to so many of you.
This evening is dedicated to the memory of the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai who passed away four years ago. Israel’s best-known poet, whose work has been translated into many languages, was born in Wurzburg, Germany in 1924 and moved with his family Eretz Yisrael in 1935. He was a prolific poet and the recipient of many literary prizes at home and abroad, including the prestigious Israel Prize.
Although he always insisted that he wished to be considered as just an individual expressing his own personal experiences, his poetry, as is often the case with Hebrew literature, reflects also the experience of the collective.
It has become a tradition at Jewish Book Week that we open this evening with the reading of one of his poems. The poem entitled Temporary Poem of My Time published in 1989 which Ely Hornig is going to read to us tonight in its English translation illustrates some features of Amichai’s poetry.
[Temporary Poem of My Time
Yehuda Amichai
Read by Ely Hornig]
Chair: Before I introduce this evening’s speaker, I wish to thank especially Carmela Shamir: a very big thank you. She is the relatively newly-appointed Cultural Attaché of the Embassy of Israel who helped to co-ordinate and arrange this evening. I also wish to thank her office, the Embassy, for sponsoring this evening. Thank you very much, Carmella. It is your first Jewish Book Week and we hope to see you at future Book Weeks here.
Now it gives me really great pleasure to introduce Aharon Appelfeld, the guest speaker of this evening. Appelfeld shares a great deal with Amichai. Both are leading Israeli authors who have received the most prestigious literary prizes in Israel as well as international recognition abroad. Significantly, both were born in Europe and their mother tongue was not Hebrew. Both reflect in their writings the collective traumas of Jewish history in the chaotic 20th century. However, unlike Amichai, Appelfeld arrived in mandatory Palestine only after the war, in 1946.
At the age of 14, he arrived unable to speak properly any one language. Remarkably, having learned Hebrew with great difficulty, he started writing and publishing in the 1950s. His has been the most sustained and acclaimed treatment of the Holocaust in Hebrew fiction. Although he lives in Israel, he mainly portrays Jewish life in Europe before and during this catastrophic period in Jewish history and chronicles the impact of the Holocaust on the human psyche.
His characters are never fully repatriated in their ancestral homeland and their gaze turns inevitably towards Europe, leading them back home in desperate and repeated efforts to recover language and memory. It is widely acknowledged that Appelfeld has expressed the nightmare of dislocation and its narrative possibilities more fully than any other contemporary Jewish storyteller.
Today, we celebrate also the publication in Hebrew of his 40th book, just published. (His books are for sale here and may I request that after the lecture, if you want his book signed, you collect them from here on my right and then make your way to the main hall to pay at the cash desk.) Also, I wish to tell you that Appelfeld will open the session by speaking for a while. I will then ask him a few questions and then we will open it to the floor for you to ask as much as you want. Thank you.
Aharon Appelfeld: Thank you, Risa. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Fifty-nine years have passed since the end of the Second World War and now it seems to me that we are entering a new period in our relation to the Holocaust. The change is more and more visible because the survivors are departing from the world.
The survivors were, and remain, the thread of everyone who writes about the Holocaust, whether a historian or a writer. The survivors stand on watch to see that the events were told in the proper order, that places and names were not omitted, that details were not distorted. For the survivor it was important to have the Holocaust be told in precise detail.
I have often been reprimanded by survivors either for imprecision or for describing what happened during and after the Holocaust in a manner critical of their weakness. For the survivor, chronicle memory was an anchor to which he clung with all his strength. Imaginative writing on the Holocaust has been regarded as, and is still, an act incommensurate with the gravity of the subject. You often hear that on the Holocaust one doesn’t play with words or forms but rather one tells things as they were, as precisely as possible.
The entry of any creative element other than memory into this subject is forbidden. It is no coincidence that more writing about the Holocaust is in the realm of history. Psychology, theology comprise a tiny portion. Very little imaginative writing has been produced about the Holocaust. True, plenty of sensationalist literature on the subject has been written but literary works containing an inner truth are very uncommon. A child could number them.
Memory and commemoration were the power that drove the survivors. The urge to tell everything, not to leave any corner neglected, to surround the horror from all sides, has never been forgotten by the survivors. Now we stand close to the threshold of the period in which the story of the Holocaust will have to stand without survivors. As long as the survivors live among us the Holocaust has a most palpable presence. The Holocaust had a given name, a family name, a town and a village.
With his presence, his silence, the survivor gave expression to the horrors. You met him in the street, in his home, at the memorials: actually everywhere. The continued presence of the survivor among us brought the Holocaust out from the unbelievable to that of the visible. If you doubted what harm a person was capable of doing to his fellows, to what depths of barbarity a person could reach, the survivor came and told you.
Now the survivors are slowly departing from the world and a fear is felt. How will the story of the Holocaust be continued without them? In other words, how can we preserve the individuality and the intimacy that the survivor gave to the dreadful experience.
Now approaching the front is a different kind of survivor: all those who were children when the war broke out. Their memory is a different memory and their expression of the event is different. For all those years child survivors were not counted as survivors and their memory has not been regarded as memory. To understand the character of a child’s memory it is important to understand the nature of the adult survivor’s testimony.
A rich body of testimony has been written about the Holocaust. When you check the nature of the testimony you quickly realise that it lacks introspection. Most testimonies are actually chronicles. All that was revealed to the Jew during those years was beyond his reason and his soul. He had been at the very point where the horror took place and once he was free he wished to see it as a nightmare, a rift in life that had to be healed as quickly as possible, a horror that does not deserve a spiritual reckoning but only a curse.
While the adult survivor recounts and reveals, at the very same time he also conceals for it is impossible not to tell and it is also impossible to admit that what happened did not change him. He remained the same person, bound to the same old civil concepts.
Holocaust testimony must be read with caution so that one sees not only what is in it but also and essentially what is lacking in it. The survivors’ testimony is first of all a search for relief. He has done what he is supposed to do.
What transpired between him and the dread horror during years of suffering? What changed within him and what will be his way of life from now on? You will not find, it seems to me, answers to those questions.
To avoid misunderstanding I shall immediately add that the literature of testimony is undoubtedly the authentic literature of the Holocaust. It is an enormous reservoir of Jewish chronology.
Now we are coming close to those who were children during the Holocaust and their testimony is different. The children did not absorb the full horror, only that portion of it which children could take in. Children lack a sense of chronology, of comparison with the past. While the adult survivor spoke about what had been before the war, for the children the Holocaust was the present: their childhood and youth. They knew no other childhood or happiness. They grew up in dread. They knew no other life.
While the adults fled from themselves and from their memories, repressing them and building up a new life in place of their previous one, the children had no previous life. Or, if they had, it was now effaced. The Holocaust was the “black milk” as the poet, Paul Celan said, that they sucked morning, noon and night.
That psychological aspect also had ideological significance. The Holocaust is mostly conceived even amongst its victims as an episode, a madness, an eclipse that does not belong to the normal flow of time. A volcanic eruption of which one must beware but which indicates nothing about the rest of life. The Holocaust as life, as life in the most dreadfully concentrated form, from both the existential and social point of view. That approach was rejected by the victim.
The numerous books of testimony that were written about the Holocaust are, if you will, a desperate effort to force the Holocaust into a remote recess of madness: to cut it out from life. In another case, to envelop it in a kind of a mystical aura, intangible, which must be discussed as a kind of expression that cannot be expressed in words but rather in prolonged silence.
In the case of children who grew up in the Holocaust, life during the Holocaust was something they could understand for they had absorbed it in their blood. They knew no other. They knew man as a beast of prey, not metaphorically but as a physical reality with its full stature and clothing. His way of standing and sitting. His way of caressing his own child and beating a Jewish child.
The children would sit for hours and observe. Hunger, thirst and weakness made them observant creatures. Rather than the murderers, they observed their fathers and older brothers in their weakness and in their heroism. Those visions were stamped upon them in the way that childhood is stamped upon the matrix of one’s flesh.
The war revealed to us, to our surprise, that even the most dreadful life was nonetheless life. In the ghettoes and camps, people loved, sang sentimental songs and discussed political party programmes. Evening courses in German and French were given and people drank cheap coffee if they had any in the afternoon. On the threshold of death, a man still sewed on his buttons. The closer death came to us, the greater was our refusal to admit its existence. Everyone held on to his little hopes: mostly trivial matters such as enjoying a cigarette, for example.
I remember a young man who absolutely refused to be deprived of his maths textbooks. He solved problems all the time. He did not want to miss out on the second year course. Those strange maths exercises, done between deportation and deportation, made him a tranquil person. In the camps and in the ghettoes, people played cards a lot, also dominoes and chess. Sometimes, in the good forgetful moments, it did not seem like a death ghetto but rather like a summer camp for all grown children deeply engrossed in their play.
When the people who were adults during the war came to tell their stories, their emphasis was on the chronicle: names, places, dates. Their sensations and feelings were formed in general terms and without introspection. For the child survivors, the war was their full life. They could not speak about the Holocaust in historical, theological or moral terms. They could speak only about fears, hunger, callousness, cellars, people who were good to them or people who treated them badly. The power of their testimonies lies in their limited horizon.
But through their limited horizon, we learn a lot about cruelty, generosity, hatred and love. They sucked the war years through their bodies. For them, Holocaust was life, the only they knew. No wonder that their testimony was rejected by the grown-up survivors. It was seen by them as fantasy, distortion, diminishing the gravity of the subject. And now, when the denial of the Holocaust is growing, you often hear that fantasy should be taken out from Holocaust testimony and that one should cling more and more to the facts.
It is difficult for people to accept that every situation, even the most clear-cut, produces different testimonies and not just the children’s recollections.
Now we have a body of testimony, oral and written, by child survivors and it is no doubt different from the testimony of the grown-ups. Their testimony is closer to literature. Their recollections are tiny and when they came to recall what happened to them during the war, they mobilised fantasy, sensations and feelings to reconstruct their past. This kind of testimony should not be seen as factual testimony but rather a reconstructed testimony.
During the war, I did not see many children. Instinctively I understood that I shall be on my own. But after the war I met a lot of children. They were part of the masses of survivors wandering on the beaches of Yugoslavia and Italy. The war years in the forests and monasteries had moulded their faces and expressions. Some of them sang well. I say ‘well’ but even so their voices were generally cracked. Their songs were the remnants of melodies from Jewish homes mixed with scraps of the monastery organ music. It all came together in them in a new kind of melody that only children in their blindness could create. You could call it innocent or just inelegant. They stood up on the crates and sang. At the end of the performance they would pass around their hats and ask for payment.
Violent managers quickly took them under their protection and they would drag them from camp to camp. There were also girls. I remember one of them very well. Her name was Amelia. She was about ten and she would perform every night. Her repertoire was a mixture of Yiddish songs and forest noises. Her thin birdlike body always seems as if it were about to fly away.
There were child acrobats who walked tightropes with marvellous skill. In the woods they had learned about how to climb the highest, thinnest branches. Among them was a set of twins, boys of about ten who juggled wooden balls. There were also child mimics who would imitate animals and birds. Dozens of children like them wandered around the camp while the adults tried to forget what happened and to forget themselves. To get back into the fabric of life, the children moulded and refined their suffering as perhaps can be done only in a folksong.
I have discussed the fate of the children because it was from them in the course of time that artistic expression arose. It is strange to say so but one must say so: there was a need for some kind of unmediated relationship, simple and straightforward, to those horrible events in order to speak about them in artistic terms. Neither sublimation nor apologetics and not glorification but rather a way a person speaks about the events of his life, as terrible as they may but still an old life.
That way of speaking, if one may say so, was the children’s. That is the way they expressed themselves when they were in the ghetto and afterwards in the liberated camps and something of that unmediated quality remained with them even after they grew up and saw themselves as human beings and as Jews.
Over the years the problem, and not only the artistic problem, has been to remove the Holocaust from its enormous inhuman dimension and to bring it close to human beings. By its nature, when it comes to describing reality, art always demands certain intensification, some exaggeration. However, this is not the case with the Holocaust. Everything in it already seems so sorrowful, unreal, as if it no longer belongs to the experience of our generation but to mythology.
Thence comes the need to bring it down to the human realm. That is not a mechanical problem but an essential one. When I say “to bring it down”, I do not mean to simplify, to attenuate or to sweeten the horror, but to attempt to make the events speak through the individual and in his language. To rescue the suffering of the huge numbers from dreadful anonymity; to restore the persons’ given and family names and to give back the tortured person his human form which was snatched away from him.
Child survivors cannot recollect the Holocaust the way adult survivors do. Their contribution is bound to their experience but their limited experience is a profound one. No wonder that what we call ‘Holocaust literature’ began from them.
Thank you very much.
Chair: Your very, very moving narrative about the children reminded me so much of so many of the children who appear in all your stories. I feel as if I got to know them. But what I would like to ask you now, Aharon, is this: you gave a voice just now to the child survivor. You gave them a collective voice. I wish to pick up a little thread and ask you to tell us about your own personal childhood, before the war or during the war, whichever you are more comfortable with.
Aharon Appelfeld: You are asking me about my childhood. It’s a long story. You can stay here for a long time.
I was born in a town called Chernowitz. It’s a town between east and west. It’s a town that up to the First World War was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. A beautiful town with a lot of Italian architecture and a river called Prut that divided the town. I grew up in an upper middle-class Jewish family, a deeply-assimilated Jewish family. I was the only son in the family and very much spoilt.
I remember there was this wonderful vacation with my parents. We travelled through Europe: Budapest, Vienna, Berlin. It was in the ‘thirties but we still travelled. I remember very well my home, my parents. My grandparents were living in the suburb of the town and they were a bit more of observant Jews still. I saw them mainly in the vacations and I marvelled at their way of life. We were totally assimilated Jews. My parents did not deny that they are Jewish, but it was never an issue in our home.
So I grew up – and then came suddenly to war. I say “suddenly” because my parents, assimilated Jews, were sure that they are Europeans. My mother language was German of course. My parents spoke French. So we spoke a lot of languages. The local population were Ukrainian so we spoke Ukrainian. The neighbours were Polish so we spoke Polish. When I grew up, it became Rumanian so we spoke Rumanian. French was the language of the intelligentsia of course. So, with the wonderful Latin gymnasium [school] in the town and a large university, 50 or 60 per cent of the staff were Jewish and the students were Jewish.
Then, suddenly, the war broke out. I say “suddenly” because we saw ourselves as Europeans. We never saw ourselves in a Jewish context. We were sure that we belonged to this wonderful community called the European community. Then suddenly, I was on vacation with my parents, with my grandparents, and suddenly we heard shooting. The Germans entered. It was 1940 and they went from house to house and killed the Jews. It was a kind of resort and they went from house to house and they killed the Jews. On their way, they killed my mother and my grandmother. I survived and my father survived. Then came the ghetto. We lost our home, our wonderful home, and you are pressed into one room, all together, into a ghetto.
Then I and my father were sent to a camp in the Ukraine. It was a long journey, first by train and then by foot. Most of the people died on their way to that concentration camp. So, I was with my father. I was lucky. My father was a strong man and could take care of me. We came, just a very few, to the camp. Then I was separated from my father. They took my father to … [unclear] and I remained alone.
So: death, illness, weakness all around me. It was before Auschwitz so there was not yet an industrialised death. Just that people were killed and that they were dying.
So I decided to leave the camp at night. I went under the fence. They were not electric fences. I was in the woods for a while and then I was looking for food, for work. It was 1941 and I was eight and a half years old. This spoilt boy who came from a very affluent family was suddenly alone in the woods. I went from peasant to peasant asking to be accepted. No-one wanted to accept me.
So then I saw that there were, far away from the village, there were huts, all kinds of huts. So I moved to these huts. These were on the outskirts of the village and here were living the insane, the criminals, the prostitutes. All kinds of people on the margins were living outside the village.
I knocked on a door and a young woman opened the door and I said to her that I wanted to work, to help. So she accepted me. You know, it was a home of one room, one large room with a small kitchen. My job would be to go to the village, the main village where the decent people lived, to buy food, to bring food and to clean the home.
What was this woman? … It puzzled me. But quickly I learned that she had her plans. One night, a client, a lot of yelling, a lot of crying, and I slowly understood what her profession was. Slowly I had a lesson about the body, what the body means. What the body of a woman means. What the body of a man means. So, because it was one room and I was like a small animal, everything was open. I was with her. And her clients, you know, all the peasants who came from the village.
I was raped, because these were not quiet sessions with discussions. Peasants, real peasants. Ukrainian peasants. Huhh. [Chuckles dryly.] So I finished first grade at home. This was my second grade in the language about – you know. I learned a lot about the way they speak. You know, I had never heard such language in my home. Terrible language. It was wonderful to leave this home and to be outside and to bring the products from the village to her, serve the clients, clean the home.
So I was with her for quite a time, always in fear that someone will say to me: “You are Jewish”. Actually, my face was not Jewish. I spoke Ukrainian quite well because the maids in our home were Ukrainian, so I spoke quite well Ukrainian. My face (don’t look at it now!) was round and blond. I was very blond and had quite blue eyes. So I could stand as a Ukrainian child. And I was with her.
There were also beautiful moments, you know. In the evening, when there was a winter storm with no storm inside, she would tell me so: “You know, when I was young, in Kishinev, young students, Jewish students, would come to me, you know. And they are not like those peasants, those terrible peasants. They used to bring me all kinds of presents: chocolates, all kinds of delicious things.”
So these were the quiet days when I was with her alone. But then again, after the snow came her clients. It was terrible.
One day, a peasant, one of her clients, approached me and said to me, “What are you doing here you bloody Jew? What are you doing here?” I froze. I was sure that this is the end. … but he left.
But I knew that if someone was keeping an eye on you, then you should leave that place. This was instinct. All the years, you know, I was not an intelligent boy but I had very sharp senses. This probably saved me. So I left her and I went to another village.
In another village I understood indirectly that I could not ask for shelter or a haven in a normal home because a decent person would not accept a dubious child, or would need a child. So I was adopted by (I don’t know how would call them!), perhaps ‘horse thieves’. It is a profession. It is a very complicated profession. You have to learn a lot: this is a real profession.
So I was with them and my job was this: they used to throw me through the small windows in the stables. They used to throw me into the stable and I went into the stables and opened the gates. So you can imagine what that means. You are in this mud with the horses and if the owner of the horses should catch you, that is the end of your life.
So I was with them for a couple of months and I learned this profession. [Chuckles.] Not a particularly Jewish profession! So I was with them. And I have learned a lot, you know. It is very interesting. Once someone asked me how I became a writer. If you are with a prostitute for a time and then with horse thieves, this is a wonderful training to become a writer! [Chuckles.]
You know, a young writer once came to Chekhov and asked him, “Mr Chekhov, I want to be a writer and I want to understand people. How can I understand people and begin writing?” So Chekhov said to him, “You know, people, it’s a difficult issue. They have nothing. You can never see inside them. So you cannot learn from them. I have some advice for you. Take two dogs home and stay with them for a year or two: a female and a male, two dogs. You will understand a lot about human beings!”
So I have learned a lot, I have learned a lot, you know. Because we are all upper and middle-class Jews and in a middle-class home, as you know, everything is closed. You speak delicately, you speak nicely, you have nice language. But you will never see a naked body in your home somewhere. So I was privileged at the age of eight and a half to see all kinds of naked bodies and I got a first-rate anatomy lesson!
Then, these people were criminals. I spent time with all kinds of criminals, you know. If I were to tell all my experiences about all the criminals I met, we would be sitting here for at least a week.
So I have learned a lot, and it is very strange to say this but it was a kind of preparation to becoming a writer. Because from middle-class people, average people, normal people, good people, good Jews – what can you learn about these things? So here I was surrounded by these people. They spoke about everything. They cursed life. As you say in Russian, ‘their tongues were not bound’. So I was with them, moving from one to another. Then, in 1944, came the Russian army and liberated us. I knew that the Russian army would be good for me so I joined the Russian army in 1944 as a kitchen boy.
In 1944 I was eleven and a half years old and I was working in the kitchen of the Russian army. This was a drunken army, a cruel army. They were good to me because I had food. There were some Jews in the Russian army but this was a cruel army, you know. I have seen so much in this war, such a lot. I learned to drink vodka. I learned to smoke. And I have learned to be a small soldier, cleaning, peeling potatoes.
So I was with the army and I went through Europe with this drunken army, this drunken cavalry. I went through Europe, from Mohyliv-Podilskyy in the Ukraine to Yugoslavia and Italy. So this was another lesson in my life.
I went from Yugoslavia to Italy and then back to Yugoslavia and then I came to Israel in 1946. I was thirteen and a half years old. I finished my first grade at home. No education. I had lost touch with my parents. So I came alone, to a hot country, not knowing exactly why I came to Israel. I knew that it was because no-one wanted to accept us orphans. Who needs an orphan? So I came to Israel in 1946 and I worked in a kibbutz at all kind of farming.
It took me a long time to know where I was and it was not only that I was an orphan but I was a lost person. I was a lost person. What was wonderful was that I absorbed the Hebrew language and slowly the Hebrew language became my language. True that I spoke a lot of languages, but I spoke all of them badly. I could not write in them. So with Hebrew I was lucky. It became my first written language. I have written a lot about it. I began to write a kind of diary and the paper became my friend. I could converse with it and tell it about my life. This was my beginning as a writer and I am very grateful that there is something known as paper and a pencil.
So this is my long answer to a short question.
Chair: Before we open the floor for questions I would like to ask you just one more question, Aharon. The thing that moved me most, I think, was when I read in one of the interviews in the Israeli press that you regard all your writing, and that was 38 books at the time, as one long journey back home. That shocked me because I am an Israeli, born in Israel, and you are an Israeli author. It was the first time for me personally and for most of my generation that we suddenly grasped that indeed, despite the fact that you are an Israeli citizen, that you serve in the army, that you pay your taxes, you are on a journey with your writing back home. I would like you to say something about it because in Israel people sort of grumble, very cruelly, that so little of Israeli background is in your stories. Perhaps you could say just one or two things about that?
Aharon Appelfeld: It’s wonderful to be here in England. Such a quiet audience! In Israel, even in the streets, you know, I argue with people. I am not arguing: they are arguing with me. They say, “Appelfeld, I have just read your book. A terrible book! Why are you writing the way that you write?” So, a lot of argument. So, back home. You see, I came to Israel. I ended up the first part of my life. When I came to Israel I was thirteen and a half years old, an orphan with no parents, no education, nothing. I understood quickly, not really quickly: it took me a bit of time to understand, that without parents, without grandparents, without my street where I was born, without my home, without my state, I will be a lost person. A person with no identity. So, to remain a sane person, to remain a person with an insight, I began to explore myself, who I am. This is the way home, Risa. Who I am, who are my parents, where were they born? Why were they assimilated Jews, wonderful assimilated Jews? Why were my grandparents still Jews? Where was I born? I explored these issues in many of my books and this is how I work: because I lost my home when I was a child.
But then I came to Israel. Wonderful! A Jewish language! I am surrounded by Jews who love me. Fine. They argue with me. Fine! But still, you know, every person should have his parents, should have his grandparents.
So this was a long journey home, you know, to reveal my home. It’s only when you reveal your home that you are a person who stands on his two legs. Otherwise you are a lost person. Your life is lost. So this is a long journey. It is my experience before the war, during the war, after the war. My life in Israel. Most of my life, the only life, in Israel.
So, if you wish, I am a Jewish writer. Because, you see, what happened to the Jewish writers was that, being in America for instance, they became more and more American Jewish writers. In Israel, they became more Israeli Jewish writers. I am just a Jewish writer. Just a Jewish writer. I don’t pretend to be something else, you see.
Because in America, Saul Bellow explained to me very well. He told me that in America Jews were afraid to be called ethnic writers, Jewish ethnic writers. They wanted to be in the mainstream. And the main thing is that you are an American writer. They wanted to be in the mainstream. In Britain too, the same. To be in the mainstream means not to be a Jewish writer. Call me a Jewish writer. I’m only a Jewish writer, and very proud that I’m a Jewish writer because, you see, Hebrew is a wonderful language. It is a language that I have learned in the street, of course. I was in a kibbutz for a long time. But mostly I have learned it from the Bible. This is a very spare language with very short sentences. The unsaid is more important than the said.
So through the Hebrew language I came to my parents, to my grandparents. But, more important, I came to Jewish history, to Jewish writing. Everything that is Jewish is somewhere connected to Hebrew. True, I studied Yiddish too. So Yiddish is another language that is very convenient. Would you like me to speak with you in Yiddish?!
So I love to write Hebrew… .
Chair: We’ll open the floor for questions now – and not embarrassing questions please!
Questioner 1: First of all, you didn’t mention the Russian year from 1940-41 in Germany. Secondly, have you gone back?
Aharon Appelfeld: … You are from Germany? … I have not spoken about the Russian years because it is a long story. I have spoken about other things. And yes, I have been back. I have even written a piece about my visit back. It was very strange to come to a town where there are no more Jews there. Actually, a destroyed town, neglected very much. And all the blond Ukrainians with their huge women are there. I was used to the small Jews, you know, who were moving very quickly. So no more Jews anywhere. It was very strange to stroll in the streets there, to meet all kinds of ghosts there still. I have written a lot about it, my visit to Chernowitz, but it is more what I have in my insight rather than what I have seen. Nothing to be seen, you know. There was a beautiful temple [synagogue]. It is now a cinema. All the streets that I love have been demolished. So why stay there long? So I went back to Israel.
Questioner 2: I would imagine that your writing has been a form of therapy. Did you also undergo psychotherapy yourself?
Aharon Appelfeld: Thank you very much! You know, after being with such a woman, whom I told you about, and all those criminals, thieves and so on, after wandering for so many years, after writing forty books, do you need psychological therapy? [Chuckles.] I don’t think so. You know, sometimes we think that writing is a kind of psychological therapy. You know, therapy is wonderful: “You should go to a therapist”. But writing is something different. It is something you have to organise. You have to think about it.
Of course you have to come with the baggage of feelings, imagination, experience in life: this is a wonderful thing. But then you have to organise it. It is something different. It’s a craft and I am a craftsman. I consider myself as a craftsman rather than of psychological matters. When you are writing a novel, it means it has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. You have to know that every sentence is an important matter: every word should be in place. Especially an experience like my experience which tends to be (how to say it?) ‘sentimental’. And you should not be sentimental.
So this is work that you have to think about, every sentence. Years ago I used to smoke two packets. Now I am not smoking at all. I used to smoke two packets every day so every sentence was a cigarette. Every sentence was a cigarette! So, no, I don’t think that it’s therapy. You see, being with so many wonderful people in the Ukraine, that’s the real therapy …
Questioner 3: I’d like to ask you about the problem of writing in Hebrew. I’m not quite sure when you first wrote in Hebrew but you are writing in a language the thought processes of which are rather different from the languages that you grew up with. There must clearly have been some difficulty between those old thought processes, or those present thought processes, and the new language in which you were writing. At what point did you begin to feel that you were actually writing in the thought processes of the Hebrew language?
Aharon Appelfeld: You see, I was lucky because Hebrew became my first actually written language. I came to Israel with many languages. I spoke them badly and still speak them badly. But the first written language was Hebrew. It was something that was difficult: to study and to adopt it. It was not easy for me. But then, when I could master the language, it was wonderful to be close to the biblical Hebrew. The Bible, and I mean the prose in the Bible, became actually my teacher.
This factual language has no adjectives. There are no adjectives in the Bible. There are just facts: factual prose. That is strong, you see. In the European languages you have a lot of adjectives. The adjectives want to steal you. They want to steal you. They want to bribe you, all the adjectives. In biblical Hebrew you do not have this kind of bribery. It’s a very factual language, a very short language. And very spare in words. Very, very spare in words.
In the Bible you do not have actually any external, you know, explanation of something. No external, nothing of the external. We do not know whether Abraham, for instance, was a very tall person, whether he was big, fat. Nothing about this, nothing. We do not know anything about the external. We just speak in the Bible about the soul, yes? Just the naked soul. And this is something that I’m learning every day. Every day I like to read, like a pious Jew, some chapter of the Bible. You see, I take with me, on a journey to England, I am taking with me the Hebrew Bible. And I read every day a chapter or two. And I understand more and more why Jews clung so much to this wonderful book. And for me, it’s just, you know, it’s a textbook.
Questioner 4: I’d like to say first that it’s great to have an author in front of an audience like this who is so open and so personal that for the audience it is great to listen to what you’ve said. Particularly the way you brought out a lot of the stranger, funnier sides perhaps of your past experiences. I was wondering, in connection with that, as someone who seems to enjoy a joke or seeing the funny side of things, what place humour has, a Jewish writer, as you said, as a writer about the Holocaust, what place does humour have in your work?
Aharon Appelfeld: You see, humour – of course I like very much humour. … you know, I’m not a humorist. I’m not a humorist because my experience in life was a very harsh experience. So I have more and more irony than humour, you know. I wish I could have more humour but, you know, you cannot, about the Holocaust, you see. It’s very limited when you are speaking about humour. It’s too serious a matter. It’s too painful. But there is room for irony, you see. So, irony. And I use it, this tool that we call irony.
Questioner 5: May I first say, on a purely personal note, how moved I am, not only by what you say but the way in which you say it. You talk about the Tanach [Bible] being an inspiration and clearly that is reflected even in your English, which is spare but all the more impressive for that. I’d like to ask a question which may be a bit too personal and if it is then please don’t answer it. But I would like to ask, when you talk about your journey home, how you recognise the milestones on the way and when you have arrived? Was it your feeling at home in Israel or is it your feeling at home in the Hebrew language? Was it your search for your grandparents and what dictated their lives? How far back did you go and where did you feel at home?
Aharon Appelfeld: Thank you very much. You see, I have to expand a bit. I came to Israel in 1946, after the war. In Israel there were less than a half million Jews. I mean the native people: less than half a million Jews. From 1945 to 1955-56, a million and a half people came to Israel, immigrants. Half of them came from the camps. Half of them came from Arab states. So actually we are a country of refugees. Israel is a country of refugees. Every second person is an immigrant. Every second person, or his children, is an immigrant. Where they were born, it doesn’t matter. This is a country of immigration.
The feeling was, in 1946, there was a very strong feeling that you have these wonderful native Jews: they are in the kibbutz; they are in the town; they are wonderful; they are so good. And we are the refugees. What do we know? What do we understand?
And this was a false picture actually. Because the dominant in Israel is actually the refugee, the people who came. This is a society of uprooted people. Even their children who were born in Israel are still immigrants. So this is an uprooted society and I represent this uprootedness, you see. I am not alone in Israel because every second person is a refugee. Everyone. I still remember, you know: I love to sit in the cafés, you see. And, you know, you have less good cafés in Jerusalem but in the 60s there were wonderful cafés in Israel. I used to sit there for many hours.
But sitting in the cafés, in the 40s, in the 50s, there were immigrants telling their stories, you know, or sitting just silently and listening. Those were wonderful days and evenings, you know. They became part of me, those immigrants. I understood. They belonged to me. I have to tell their story. They probably tell my story. So it was wonderful, you know, meeting those people.
Because there was a feeling, Ben-Gurion gave the feeling that those people who came after the Holocaust to Israel are ‘the dust’. He quoted ‘the dust’. They were not dust. They were people who came after terrible experiences. They have been through hell. But they have not lost the image of human beings and they had the image of God in their faces. Wonderful people. Just seeing the most famous generals: the children of Holocaust survivors who became generals, high court judges, scientists, musicians, industrialists. These are the immigrants who came after the Holocaust with a lot of energy, with a lot of pain, with a lot of terrible memories.
So, I come back to your question. What does it mean, ‘going home’? Going home is not something that is connected with territory. Going home means firstly that you are going back to yourself, back to your family, back to your grandparents, back to this tribe called the Jewish tribe. This is going back home. So I am going back and going back to the Jewish tradition, everyone in his way. So it is a long journey.
Questioner 6: You told us how you had missed all your formal education from the age of eight and a half and I wondered how this had affected you. Had it actually helped your writing? Did you try and recover some of this lost education? Do you still feel it?
Aharon Appelfeld: Yes. You know I just finished my first grade at home. But then I was a professor at university for thirty years! [Chuckles.] So I’m the only professor in the world that has finished only the first grade!
You see, it’s very important for a writer to be serious. For a writer, it is very important, the physical understanding of human beings. The external. But then of course, the soul. And I am trying to do my best. To study. To learn. And I am good at studying, you see. It is not enough to be a survivor of the Holocaust. You have to study and you have to learn permanently. And I am trying to do my best.
Questioner 7: You may not wish to comment on this, but we attended at the new and improved Yad Vashem … a wreath-laying … only a couple of months ago. Do you feel that that is a suitable way of remembering the Holocaust?
Aharon Appelfeld: To put it bluntly, monuments can never commemorate actually. Monuments are monuments. They are stone. They are buildings. It’s important, you know, and this was my feeling always, that people should be affiliated to the Holocaust. But not only to the Holocaust, because the Holocaust, maybe it’s, I don’t know another word to use, but maybe the ‘peak’ of Jewish suffering.
It’s important for Jewishness. Jewishness is a civilisation, an old and ancient civilisation. To understand it, you know, sometimes I have the feeling – I was in Poland a couple of years ago and I felt, Oh, how wonderful it is to be Jewish! Thank God that I am Jewish and thank God that I am a Hebrew writer. It is such a wonderful civilisation. Such wonderful writing. Such wonderful thinking has been done by Jews. I mean, religious and non-religious Jews. Even converted Jews. You know, it is wonderful to be a part of this tribe, the whole Jewish tribe.
And sometimes in Israel, you know, in Israel they mainly want to be Israelis. I am an Israeli. I’m very proud I’m Israeli. Israel is fine. It’s wonderful. You are born in Israel, wonderful! I give you a medal! You are born in Israel! But imagine a Jewish experience, you know. My experience is post-1948. … It’s still so, you know, it embarrasses me, you know, because it’s so large. It made me, you know, feel wonderful because it’s so deep and so profound.
Thank God that I am a Jew and I am a Jewish writer.
[After much applause] – I am going to stay in England!
[End]
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