BORDER CROSSING: In Appelfeld’s Czernowitz, assimilated Jews speak German and eye the Hassidic mystics with suspicion. |
Aharon Appelfeld’s parabolical novel All Whom I Have Loved tells of a boy’s loss of home and family. It is a small book with a small voice, like an abandoned child singing himself to sleep with a half-remembered lullaby. Only the reader’s knowledge of what awaits the boy and his parents, secular Jews on the border of Bukovina and Bessarabia in 1938, reveals what the author’s simple language conceals, that one boy’s minute loss portends a coming catastrophe.Appelfeld’s unadorned prose (as translated here from the Hebrew by Aloma Halter) is well suited to depict the inner life of nine-year-old Paul Rosenfeld. He is a coddled only child in love with his childish parents, whose own love has failed. Henia is beautiful but insecure and needy. Arthur, once a painter of great promise, is now a drunk and bitterly obsessed with the critics.
The effects of his parents’ divorce are not apparent to Paul until his mother accepts a teaching job in a village not far from Czernowitz and the family home. Paul’s separation from his father and relocation from the town of his birth initiates the disintegration of his world and prefigures his eternal displacement. With uncomfortable candor, Appelfeld depicts the boy’s proprietary love for his mother, the sensual joy he takes in her attentions, and his jealousy when he discovers she has a lover. When he catches her creeping out at night to meet her new man, Paul exacts revenge the only way a child can, by transferring his love. Earthy, wise, and experienced, his Christian nursemaid, Halina, teaches him about nature, love, and sex — and Jewish holidays, since his parents have abandoned their heritage.
But Halina is shot and killed by her fiancé in the doorway of Paul’s house, and Paul goes to live with his father. They begin a period of wandering together, through taverns, inns, to Bucharest and back. When he’s drunk, Paul’s father flails away at the animosity directed at him because he is a Jew and because he does not act the way a Jew should.
The Ukrainian town of Czernowitz is where Appelfeld (as well as Paul Celan) was born. There the assimilated Jews speak German and eye the Hassidic mystics with suspicion. The peasants and working-class gentiles Paul and his father meet are nostalgic to the point of sentimentality about the pious Jews who once lived among them, and disapproving of the “new Jews” who “threw off the yoke of their religion” and escaped to more cosmopolitan climes.
“We loved the old Jews,” an old man says.
“And the pogroms?”, Paul’s father asks.
“The old Jews were used to pogroms. People beat them and they accepted their suffering with love.”
Appelfeld, who escaped a concentration camp at Paul’s age and roamed the forests until the war’s end, returns to frequent themes: the terrible random work of fate, the disingenuousness of memory, and abandonment. In this novel, all buildings remind Paul of the Jewish orphanage where his parents grew up and where he senses he will return.
Appelfeld’s writing is often compared with Kafka’s, but I am also reminded of the symbolic and secret language of Paul Klee’s paintings — an obscure meaning, a set of glyphs with their own mysterious grammar. I get the sense that his words are artifacts containing the memory of his vanished world, reliquaries that hold the bones of his murdered mother and lost childhood.
