The Story of a Life (14 page)

My diary is stuttering and impoverished, and yet, at the same time, it is full to bursting. What it does not have is longing, guilt, sketches that are drawn from observation, or sexual yearning. Beyond all this, there’s a desperate attempt to connect precious childhood memories with a new life. This was a perpetual struggle, one that was waged across a broad front and included: my education, which had terminated in the first grade; my puny body and low self-esteem; a memory that had been commanded to forget but refused to do so; and the ideological complacency that sought to make me into a man of narrow horizons, which I refused to be. In another way, this struggle was also to safeguard that core of myself that was being asked to be something he didn’t want to be and couldn’t be. But above all, I fought to acquire the language and to adopt it as my own tongue. At a very early age, and before I
knew that fate would push me toward literature, instinct whispered that without an intimate knowledge of language my life would be superficial and impoverished.

The attitude at that time regarding language was overwhelmingly functional: “Build up your vocabulary and you’ve got a language!” This approach tried to uproot you from your world and implant you in a world you could barely grasp. One must admit that, on the whole, it succeeded, but, alas, at what price—a memory that had been eradicated and a soul that had been reduced to superficiality.

BETWEEN THE YEARS 1946 AND 1948, I was in the Aliyat Hano’ar Youth Movement, and between 1948 and 1950, I was an apprentice at the agricultural school founded by Rachel Yana’it at Ein Kerem, on the outskirts of Jerusalem. After that, I attended the Hannah Meizel Agricultural School, in Nahalal, in the valley of Emeq Yizre’el. For four straight years, I lived close to the earth, certain that I was fated to become a farmer. I loved the earth and, in particular, the trees that I took care of. During those years, my days had a simple routine: rising at dawn, intensive work from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m., a full and savory breakfast, and, after that, a long stretch of work. I loved the afternoon nap on hot summer days. In those years, part of me was, indeed, numb. The war had settled inside me like a stone, and I grew increasingly close to the earth, to the Hebrew language, and to the books I was reading with great thirst. To be as faithful as possible to those far-off years, I’ll quote some passages from my diary just as they were written (apart from the correction of some very minor grammatical and spelling mistakes).

DECEMBER 30, 1946

Today I learned the art of pruning. Sometimes it seems to me that I haven’t come here, but was born here. I love the earth and the trees so much that it’s hard to describe it as a new love. Were it at all possible to erase the war years from my soul completely, I would blend in more easily with the earth—there would be no barrier between us.

JANUARY 17, 1947

Today there was a military call-up, and so I was assigned to the vegetable garden. This work requires many people. Annuals make me despair. You plant them and almost immediately you have to pull them up. In an orchard you care for trees over several years: you delight in their growth, in their new life each season.
“For man is like a tree of the field,”
I read in the Bible. Only a man who plants trees can understand this.

ANOTHER ENTRY, UNDATED

Today I picked Santa Rosa plums, and it was good that I was alone. Working with lots of people confuses me, and, even worse, I cease to feel and to think. Only when I’m truly alone do I connect with the earth and grow inside.

AND ON THE SAME PAGE

During the morning break, the instructor, M., asked me casually where I’d been during the war. The question so surprised me that I stood there open-mouthed. “Many places,” I recovered sufficiently to say, and looked for an excuse to escape further questioning. For some reason, M. did not let the matter rest, and I felt trapped, caught. And mute. A great anxiety gripped me, and my memory shut down. I didn’t know what to answer, so I repeated, “In many places.”

AUGUST 13, 1947

Every night I tell myself: Forget more and more. The more I forget, the easier it will be to blend in with the earth and with the language. There are many obstacles. Last night I had a long talk with the instructor S. We spoke German. It’s been years since I’ve spoken German, and yet I still spoke it fluently. It seems that it’s impossible to uproot one’s mother tongue.

I had this dream: Mother, Father, and I are bathing on the banks of the Prut. Two long barges pass in front of us. Mother and Father are so young that they look more like high-school students than parents. For a moment I’m amazed at their transformation. Mother gives me a hug and says, “It’s a masked ball, soon everything will be as it was.”

The morning reveille shattered my dream.

AUGUST 20, 1947

Last night, there was a lecture in the dining room. A middle-aged man wearing a blue shirt spoke about the Jewish “weakness” and praised the partisans and the illegal immigrants who make their way to Israel, and decried the black marketeers ensconcing themselves in Jaffa and Tel Aviv. “We must change!” he urged us. “We must become farmers and fighters.” While I found myself identifying with his words, I was put off by him. He seemed like the sort of man who would not hesitate to use physical violence. Let’s hope I am wrong.

In dreams I’m still on the road, being pursued and falling into deep pits. Last night, one of my pursuers grabbed me by the ankle and pulled me into a deep pit. I plunged in. It was a relief to awaken and find I was unharmed.

IN MY NAÏVETÉ I believed that my previous life had died within me and what was going on inside me was no more than
the last gasps of visions of the past. During most of the daylight hours I would be outside, plowing, harrowing, pruning, or grafting in the nursery. This way of life seemed to me so real, so right, that anything else seemed external, or irrelevant. In those days I harbored another feeling, which had been implanted in me in my grandfather’s home in the country, and at times in the forest, when I lived there alone—something like a religious sensibility.

I come from an assimilated home that had not a trace of religious belief. There was plenty of serenity and attentiveness, and we all treated one another with sensitivity—but it was all done on a rational basis. Formal religion was thought to lack real feeling; it was considered vulgar and ill conceived. This, apparently, was due more to the
Zeitgeist
than to personal experience, for my mother’s mother kept her religious feelings hidden and displayed no obvious affectations. Grandfather loved Mother very much, and I never heard him preach to her or try to coerce her, even though he knew that our urban lifestyle was far from kosher. I knew—or, more exactly, I often felt—that my mother harbored a hidden affection for the faith of her forefathers, even though this affection was never tangibly expressed. Moreover, at home we carefully avoided words that might be construed as expressing belief. All such expressions of belief were dubbed
magia
, or hocus-pocus.

I loved Grandfather and Grandmother’s village, their spacious wooden house, the acacia trees growing next to it, the orchard, the rows of vegetables in the garden, and even the toilet that was outside the house, a kind of little wooden outhouse covered in ivy. There was mystery in everything. It was not surprising that I felt that God dwells only in the countryside. In the village I would walk with Grandfather to the synagogue, listen to the prayers, and gaze at the wooden lions above the Ark that housed the Torah scrolls. In the village
God dwelt in every shady corner and under the heavy boughs of the acacia trees. In my heart I was sometimes amazed that Mother and Father didn’t see what was so clear to me and to Grandfather.

Later, when I escaped from the camp and lived in the forest, this sense of mystery came back to me. I was certain that God would save me and return me to my parents. If truth be told, throughout the war my parents were mixed up in my mind with God, as a kind of heavenly choir, accompanied by angels, that was supposed to come and save me from my wretched existence.

These visions faded away at the end of the war, when I found myself crammed in among masses of other refugees. During most of the war, I had been by myself and hadn’t spoken to anyone. I’d been sustained by visions and fantasies. Sometimes I would give myself up to them and forget that I was in danger.

My days in the youth movement were hard for me because, among other things, I was suddenly surrounded by children of my own age and I was forced to speak. Both the presence of those children and the need to speak were in fact so hard for me that on more than one occasion I was ready to run away. My diary from the years 1946 to 1950 is full of longing for the days when I had been alone, surrounded by trees and vistas and living a silent life that didn’t impose speech on me.

The time I spent in the forest and with the peasants had compelled me to be silent and alert. Had I grown up in my home, I suppose I would have developed a normal flow of speech. My parents didn’t talk a lot, but there was a culture of conversation at home. My parents were sensitive to language, and I would often hear them discussing the meaning of a word or a phrase. During the war, when I was forced to hide my
identity, the first rule was silence. After the war, when people saw that no sounds issued from my mouth, they assumed that I was mute. By then I really was almost mute.

The years 1946 to 1950 were years of verbiage; when life is full of ideology, words and clichés abound. Everyone talked. Sometimes it seemed to me that everyone had attended a school for preachers—only I hadn’t studied there. Not only did people chatter away in the home, in the street, and at meetings, but the literature of the period was also full of excess verbiage. The literary writing overflowed with words. It seemed as though you could not read a book without having a dictionary right next to you, as was the case with the works of S. Yizhar and Moshe Shamir, among others. My diary is full of admiration for these stacks of words and descriptions; I was certain that I would never be able to write correctly.

Someone who finds it difficult to talk needs a diary. When I look through my diary, I discover that it’s full of unfinished sentences and an obsession with precision. More than the words themselves, the gaps between them are eloquent. At any rate, my diary is not a text that flows easily, but, rather, a mode of expression that is full of inhibitions. I say this without looking for excuses, but to understand my own process of maturation.

My early writing was more about holding back than about flowing; it was a sort of continuation of the diary. Something of my way of speaking clung to it. The perpetual fear that something flawed would slip out and betray me, so typical of the way I spoke even years after the war, also found expression in my early writing. None of my attempts to improve the flow helped. My writing was like walking on tiptoe—distrustful and hesitant.

During the 1950s, I wrote little, and what I wrote I would then ruthlessly erase. I turned the tendency to use
words sparingly into a golden rule. In those years, books were brimming with descriptions of landscapes and people. “He paints on a broad canvas,” people would say approvingly. What was broad was considered epic. The first rejection letters I received from editors said simply, You have to fill it out, you have to expand, the picture isn’t there yet. There’s no doubt that my writing during this period was full of flaws, but not for the reasons that these editors cited.

During the late 1950s, I gave up my ambition to become an Israeli writer and made every effort to become what I really was: an émigré, a refugee, a man who carries within him the child of war, who finds talking difficult and tries to speak with a minimum amount of words. This effort culminated in my first book,
Smoke
, which appeared in 1962.

Many editors paged through the manuscript before I found a publisher. Every one found a different flaw. One claimed that you shouldn’t write imaginatively about the Holocaust; by contrast, another contended that you shouldn’t write about the weaknesses of the victims but should emphasize the heroism, the ghetto uprisings, and the partisans. Some claimed that my style itself was flawed, not “normative,” meager. And for some reason, all of them wanted to make corrections—to add something or to take something away. These editors overlooked the book’s virtues and its authenticity. As a result, I also couldn’t see these qualities; furthermore, I was convinced that everything I was told was true. It’s strange with what ease we adopt criticism. Criticism that originates from within oneself can be destructive, but there’s nothing as destructive as criticism that comes from others. It took me years to free myself from this and to understand that I, and I alone, can best steer my course.

Smoke
was, however, favorably received. Critics said things like, “Appelfeld doesn’t write on the Holocaust but
about its margins. He isn’t sentimental, he’s restrained.” That was considered a compliment, and I was happy about it. However, even then I was labeled a “Holocaust writer.” There is nothing more annoying. A writer, if he’s a
writer
, writes from within himself and mainly about himself, and if there is any meaning to what he says, it’s because he’s faithful to himself—to his voice and his rhythm. Theme, subject matter—all these are by-products of his writing, not its essence. I was a child during the war. This child grew up, and all that happened to him and within him continued into his adulthood: the loss of his home, the loss of his language, suspicion, fear, the inhibitions of speech, the feelings of alienation in a foreign country. It was from these that I wove my fiction. Only the right words can construct a literary text, not subject matter.

I do not pretend to be a messenger, a chronicler of the war, or a know-it-all. I feel attached to the places I have lived in, and I write about them. I don’t feel that I write about the past. Pure and unadulterated, the past is no more than good raw material for literature. Literature is an enduring present—not in a journalistic sense, but as an attempt to bring time into an ongoing present.