Sadly, his work speaks to us still

THE urgent moral relevance of Aharon Appelfeld’s profound novels is one of the scandals of our age.

Reason would dictate that, by now, this 75-year-old Israeli novelist’s stunningly artful fictions ought to be read as cautionary tales. Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur make that painfully impossible. “All Whom I Have Loved” is the latest in a series of novels that Appelfeld has situated in Central Europe and on its hate-besotted eastern marches in the ominous years before the Holocaust began in earnest.

This is a writer whose books, the late Primo Levi said, left him “struck with awe and admiration.” Here in America, his fiction has found a tireless champion in Philip Roth, though he probably is best known to English-language readers for his memoir, “The Story of a Life.”

Appelfeld was born to assimilated Jewish parents in Czernowitz, a town in the Ruthenian territory that has passed among Poland, Ukraine, Romania and Moldova. The mystical and pietistic Jewish revival that became Hasidism began there; anti-Semitism is woven into the fabric of daily life. German was his native tongue.

Appelfeld was 8 years old when his mother was shot to death by invading Germans. He and his father were deported, first to a ghetto and then to a concentration camp from which the child escaped in 1940. For three years, he survived by hiding in the fields and forests of Ukraine, then he joined the Soviet Army as a kitchen worker. After the war, he made his way to Palestine, two years before it became Israel.

As a teenager, Appelfeld struggled to learn Hebrew, and his writing, like that of Joseph Conrad, Jack Kerouac and Samuel Beckett (in French), has the ecstatic precision of an artist who acquires his tools in the years after childhood. “All Whom I Have Loved” is discreetly but brilliantly translated by Aloma Halter.

During the 1950s, Appelfeld, though not religious, pursued what he calls “an authentic form of Judaism” and studied Yiddish, Hebrew and Jewish mysticism with Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem. Gradually, he moved from poetry to a series of novels engrossed with the lives of assimilated Central European Jews in the years leading to the Holocaust.

“All Whom I Have Loved” is told from the perspective of 9-year-old Paul Rosenfeld, who we meet on the cusp of his parents’ divorce. His mother is a teacher; his father an avant-garde painter. Their story begins: “My father and my mother -- their life together was not happy. They did not quarrel and they did not blame each other, but the silence in the house was as hard as ice and could have been sliced along its length.”

When they separate, Paul’s mother takes him to the village on the Ukrainian border, where she has obtained a position. A succession of local Ruthenian housekeepers makes Paul aware of his Jewishness, but his mother meets and falls in love with a Ruthenian Christian and converts to marry him. The son, now estranged from his mother, goes to live with his father, who -- after failing to reestablish his career in Bucharest -- takes the boy back to the Ruthenian hills on the border with Ukraine.

When a Ruthenian innkeeper complains to Paul’s father that the Jews have moved out of the district, the artist -- who is himself still in love with the local landscape -- replies that their neighbors’ hostility drove them out.

“ ‘We loved the old Jews,’ said the innkeeper, a faint smile spreading across his lips.

“ ‘And the pogroms?’

“ ‘The old Jews were used to pogroms. People beat them and they accepted their suffering with love.’

“ ‘You make it sound like a law of nature.’

“ ‘If you like--’

“ ‘That’s one crazy law!’ ”

Near the novel’s close, Paul and his now-embittered, drunken and nearly broken father wander the green hills near the painter’s native Czernowitz. The father buys a revolver from a peasant they meet and begins to urge the shopkeepers who give them lodging to resist the anti-Semitic gangs that prowl the countryside by night. One night, the father uses his gun to drive off a band of thieves, wounding one with a shot from the window.

Finally, the wandering pair come to stay at a particularly isolated shop owned by a man with whom the father grew up in Czernowitz’s Jewish orphanage.

The merchant has survived for years by bribing the local police, but now the authorities have made a pact with the robbers. Even the possibility of flight is gone, because the thieves have stolen the shopkeeper’s horse. The shopkeeper prevails on the pair to stay beyond their intended visit, and this exchange follows:

“It was a clear night, full of moonlight and the scent of fresh water. We sat in the yard and drank tea. Father rallied and confided to the store-keeper that he intended to return one day and draw the surrounding landscapes.

“ ‘What do you find in them?’

“ ‘Exceptional beauty.’

“ ‘I look around and see only trouble.’

“Father spoke about the need to uphold one’s honor and protect oneself. ‘We have to hit back at the thugs and the anti-Semites. We must give them back as good as they give. Yes life is precious, but there is something more precious -- self-respect.’ Father talked and talked; it had been a long time since I had heard him speak with such fluency. Hearing this flow of words, the Jew looked at him and said, ‘You’re still young; you don’t know what a nest of vipers there is here.’ ”

Later that night, Paul’s father is killed, pursuing the remnants of a raiding party he has driven off with his revolver. The boy is taken to the very orphanage where his father was raised. Life goes on, the unimaginable future lurks just over the horizon and silence descends.

Questions hang in the air. Two among many: How shall we understand his mother’s abandonment of child and history through conversion? Was the artist-father’s resistance futile, the last in a string of willful failures or a heroic vindication, a lesson to his passive victim-friend and a legacy to his son? The mother’s utter assimilation ends in tragedy and estrangement; the father’s passionate resistance ends in tragedy and absence.

Appelfeld’s own mother was killed, and the father he left behind in the camp from which he fled died there. Elsewhere, the author has said of himself: “People who lose their parents when young are permanently in love with them.”

Catastrophe and the love that may sustain one through it, are -- in Appelfeld’s view -- experiences to which only silence is equal. Elsewhere, he has written: “The hunger for bread, the thirst for water, the fear of death -- all these make words superfluous. There’s really no need for them. In the ghetto and in the camp, only people who had lost their minds talked, explained or tried to persuade. Those who were sane didn’t speak.”

It is a mark of Aharon Appelfeld’s humane genius that he has made a great art out of so profound a silence.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com