BOOK REVIEW : A Metaphorical Tale of the Holocaust
For Every Sin by Aharon Appelfeld, translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M. Green (Weidenfeld & Nicolson: $15.95, 169 pages)
To the mind’s eye, the Holocaust is a nightmare, an earthly inferno that reminds us of something out of Dante or Bosch. To Aharon Appelfeld, a survivor and a distinguished Israeli novelist, the Holocaust is the stuff of dreams, too. His dream, however, is muted, aching, bitter but also poignant, and all the more terrifying for its subtlety.
The story that Appelfeld tells in “For Every Sin” is simple, almost deceptively so. Theo is a young Jewish man from a small town in Austria. He has survived three years in a concentration camp, and now--only days after liberation--he is making his way back home across the war-ravaged countryside. Along the way, he encounters other refugees who remind him of all that he has suffered and all that he has lost. The story of his journey back to the world of the living--if, in fact, that is really Theo’s destination--ends with a quiet revelation about the danger of a certain kind of dreaming.
Theo, like a man recovering from a catastrophic accident, struggles to regain the use of his limbs, his mind, his memory; he tries to make sense of his suffering, his insupportable losses, his destiny. To be a Jew among other Jews turned to be a terrible danger, Theo decides, and so he will separate himself from the other refugees. He will travel the high road, both literally and figuratively, and transcend the fear and squalor of the survivors who huddle together in the forests and gullies. And he will fulfill the wildest dream of his lost mother, a charming but befuddled woman for whom the church was the dwelling place of God because it was there that she heard the music of Bach and Mozart.
“Bach’s cantatas saved me from death,” Theo explains to one of his fellow refugees on the road. “That was my nourishment for two and a half years.”
Appelfeld’s novella suggests itself as an allegory. Most of what we encounter--the haunted people, the blasted landscape, the odd expressions of love and hate--are stark, highly stylized, and suggestive of deeper and more remote meanings. (Some of Theo’s experiences strike us as literally true; he remarks, again and again, on the curious experience of regaining the use of the “civilian” tongue after years of speaking in the encoded language of the camps.) But Theo’s path is mostly strewn with symbols: providential supplies of cigarettes, biscuits and tins of sardines--and especially coffee--that the survivors gather like manna; well-supplied cabins in the forests, where the victims clothe themselves in the garb of their tormentors; and, above all, a world populated only with restless survivors.
Only when Theo recalls his mother and father, both victims of the Holocaust, does the narrative take on the sound and shape of a living memory. We glimpse another level of Theo’s personal tragedy, and we recognize it as something more commonplace than the horrors of the Holocaust. His mother was an enchanting woman, charming and extravagant, but also mad. Her passions were Bach, coffee, and travel to romantic places. His father, after years of accommodating her madness to the point of impoverishment, divorced his wife on the very eve of the deportations and sent her to a sanitarium. And it is the juxtaposition of these two narratives--the rich memories of childhood, and the bleak prospects of the survivors--that provides a clue to the allegorical riddle.
“His mother’s illness had cast a spell on his childhood and youth, a spell that spread out over years and grew deeper with time. As with all spells, there was expectation, fear, and relief,” Appelfeld writes. “In the last year, on leave from the sanitarium, she would describe the world to come like a vast hall, and all along it choruses were singing Bach cantatas. At the end they served French Cognac and coffee in thin porcelain cups. All her descriptions would finally bring her to the coffee counter. As though the world had only been created to ply people with fine coffee.”
A Different Solution
“After Auschwitz,” wrote Theodor Adorno, “to write a poem is barbaric.” But Appelfeld has given us one solution to the dilemma of the artist who confronts the Holocaust. “For Every Sin” is one novel of the Holocaust in which we do not glimpse a single concentration camp or killing pit. Even the camps are identified by numbers only: “We were in camp 10,” one survivor tells Theo. “You certainly know what that means.”
But Appelfeld’s metaphorical rendering of the Holocaust, in this novella and his other works of fiction, only sharpens its unspeakable horror. In that sense, “For Every Sin” is a poem, and Appelfeld is a poet who demonstrates that writing about the Holocaust can be not only a civilized act, but an act of conscience, too.