Book Review : Life Returns to a Holocaust Survivor

The Immortal Bartfuss by Aharon Appelfeld, translated by Jeffrey M. Green (Weidenfeld & Nicolson: $15.95; 160 pages)

Bartfuss is immortal in the sense that a stone is immortal; subject to motion, to erosion, to force, but impervious to feeling, because immortality not only implies deathlessness but its opposite, lifelessness.

For most of this stark book, Bartfuss exists entirely beyond and outside the range of ordinary human emotion, coming to life only after mortality, in the form of an unspecified illness, has finally brushed him with its grim intimations.

Distrusts Language

A Holocaust survivor, Bartfuss has been so dehumanized by his experiences that he distrusts even language, because words have the power to evoke memory. In this he is not alone--other survivors in this and Appelfeld’s previous novels are similarly affected. They talk in elliptical half-sentences, an impoverished speech drained of all embellishment, a verbal shorthand comprehensible to each other, though baffling to outsiders.

Now Bartfuss lives in Israel with his wife and two daughters; one married to a man he detests and ignores, the younger girl mentally retarded. “Lives with,” however, does not describe the bleak conditions of alienation and detachment in this household. Bartfuss has not spoken to his wife nor even called her by name in years. He sleeps alone, in a room furnished with a bed, a chair and a cupboard. Though Bartfuss is “a trader,” his business takes a mere 15 minutes a day; the rest of his time passed alone in cafes drinking coffee and smoking, the nights often spent on bus trips to a seaside resort where he walks the beach in darkness.

He has not been able to sleep since the war. During these solitary hours, “he has thoughts. It would be better without these thoughts, but you can’t repress them completely.”

There was a time, just after the liberation, when he was a sojourner in Italy; free, young, engaged in smuggling both people and goods; not yet completely inured to sensation. That was when he met and married Rosa, herself a survivor, but one of the rare ones in whom the spark of life still flared. Rosa had hidden in a Polish village for the duration of the war, exchanging sexual favors for shelter. Though Bartfuss knew her story, his contempt for her has festered with the years until now he literally cannot bear the sight of her.

Only a Pronoun

His commercial activities produce enough income to keep Rosa and the daughter Bridget in necessities, the money left on a table. To cringing Bridget and her mother, Bartfuss is only a pronoun, a baleful presence upon whom they must depend, the connection debasing both to the provider and his family.

The days pass in this manner, the chapters following the seasons, the routine varying only slightly from one month to another. We are told early on that Bartfuss is friendless, unable even to establish tenuous connections with those he had known in Europe. “On the long trip, which had taken nearly a year, to that little camp known for its horrors, he had seen many faces, but no people. Starved, crushed into freight cars, the people had learned to ignore each other, to steal and push like beasts with the little strength remaining to them.” Some have relearned their humanity in Israel, eventually finding themselves able to meet and talk, to participate in political and social activities, but Bartfuss is not so fortunate.

When he meets an old acquaintance, he averts his eyes or leaves the room, on one occasion actually hitting the other man until he collapses. Brutal and ugly as this scene is, it demonstrates a capacity for response lacking until now. Rage is at least a feeling.

And then without warning, the man who had been shot with 50 bullets and walked away is felled by a mysterious attack--ulcers, the doctor guesses, but later allusions seem to suggest a heart problem. After a brief stay in the hospital, Bartfuss is released to resume his barren life, but he is subtly altered. Not only does he yearn for companionship, but he longs to reach the retarded daughter he has ignored--Bridget, whose constrained world is similar to his own. “What do you want?,” he asks her one day, and when she tells him “A watch,” he buys her a Swiss import with a heavily symbolic name, a gold Omega. A groping, tentative relationship is made between the father, inarticulate by choice, and the daughter, inarticulate by chance.

Surge of Desire

In a bizarre surge of desire that could be the damaged life force reasserting itself, Bartfuss suddenly sees Bridget as a desirable woman and pursues her through the alleys of Jaffa. That is all--a shocking, shameful impulse resisted in time, but the effect upon Bartfuss is therapeutic. Thereafter, he is able to apologize to the man he struck, to see a woman he’d known in Italy and offer to help her, even to toy with the idea of turning his miser’s hoard of gold over to the “public good.” That night, he feels the “mighty sleep, that full sleep, which he had been struggling against for years, had gathered strength, and now it was about to spread its iron web over him.” He is no longer “immortal,” but vulnerable to human feeling; misplaced, forbidden, even warped, but human nevertheless; a start.