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Appelfeld's Holocaust Novels: View From the Peripheries of Disaster
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18124 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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11 / 1990 |
2,858 Words |
| Author
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Joseph Cohen
Joseph Cohen is professor of English at Tulane University
and author of voice of Israel: Essays on and interviews with
Yehuda Amichai, A.B. Yehoshua, T. Carmi, Aharon Appelfeld, an
Amos Oz, newly published by the State University of New York
Press. |
It was in 1984 in New Orleans that I first met Aharon Appelfeld. I had invited him to lecture at Tulane University. His plane arrived right on schedule. When he came through the gate, I had the feeling that the person I was greeting wasn't a stranger but a close, favorite relative. Smallish, round, with twinkling eyes, cherubic but at the same time almost impish, Appelfeld was gracious, courteous, and grave; soft-spoken, warm, and endearing; dignified yet humble.
In those first moments I thought to myself what a miracle it was that he was even alive. On their deadly march into Russia early in World War II, the Germans overran Czernowitz, Bukovina, then part of the Romanian sector of the Ukraine, where young Appelfeld lived with his parents. The Nazis killed his mother, and he and his father were sent to a forced labor camp, where his father perished.
Appelfeld was eight years old when those tragedies struck. For the next three years his life was imperiled. He escaped from the labor camp and survived by his wits, hiding in the forests and on the edges of villages, befriended only by prostitutes and horse thieves dodging military patrols and the viciously anti-Semitic peasantry alike. As a little Jewish boy, his life was worth less than a chewed-up herring head.
When the Russians recaptured the Ukraine in 1944, Appelfeld became a kitchen boy with an army field unit. The unit literally adopted him, and for the first time since the loss of his parents and home he had a measure of security. He remained with the unit for two years. With World War II over, Appelfeld, having just reached puberty, made his way to Italy, from whence the
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