The Story of a Life: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Aharon Appelfeld, the highly regarded Israeli novelist and Holocaust survivor, has written a hauntingly beautiful book.

It begins with a loving description of his childhood years with his parents in Czernowitz near the Carpathian Mountains and with his grandparents whom he visited in the country every summer. That all ended with the Nazi invasion in 1941 and the murder of his mother. After months of confinement in a ghetto, Aharon, his father, and the other Jews who had not yet been shot or starved to death were forced to march across the Ukraine to a slave labor camp.

Appelfeld writes sparingly about the ghetto, the forced march to the labor camp, his escape from the camp, and the deaths of his parents. "I have forgotten much, even things that were very close to me--places in particular, dates, and the names of people--and yet I can still sense those days in every part of my body."

He describes in somewhat greater detail the time he spent hiding alone in the Ukrainian forest. The strongest imprints the war years made on him, he writes, were intensely physical ones, like hunger for bread. "To this very day I can wake up in the middle of the night ravenously hungry. Dreams of hunger and thirst haunt me almost on a weekly basis. I eat as only people who have known hunger eat, with a strangely ravenous appetite."

He writes that his novels hardly begin to capture what he went through. "I've already written more than twenty books about those years, but sometimes it seems as if I haven't yet begun to describe them. Sometimes it seems to me that a fully detailed memory is still concealed within me, and when it emerges from its bunker, it will flow fiercely and strongly for days on end."

In the Ukrainian countryside the animals he met did not scare him. "I was sure they would do nothing harmful to me. I became familiar with cows and with horses, and they provided me with a warmth that has remained with me to this very day. Sometimes it seemed to me that what saved me were the animals I encountered along the way, not the human beings. The hours I spent with puppies, cats, and sheep were the best of the war years. I would blend in with them until I was part of them, until forgetfulness came, until I fell asleep alongside them. I would sleep as deeply and as tranquilly as I had in my parents' bed."

When from time to time he came out of hiding and worked for peasants in exchange for food, he learned how to pass himself off as a gentile orphan. Those years made him distrustful of the world around him ("even today, I stop and listen every few paces").

After the war he struggled to build a new life and learn a new language in Palestine, soon to be Israel. He immersed himself in Yiddish and Hasidic literature and began writing, but in the late 1950s he gave up trying to be what an Israeli writer was supposed to be and instead became "an emigre, 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."

He closes his memoir with a moving chapter about the New Life Club in Tel Aviv, which Holocaust survivors from Galacia and Bukovina established in 1950. "There was no one with whom I was close in Israel, so I'd go there to drink coffee, play chess, or listen to a lecture." Since its members spoke Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German, and Romanian, the club became a substitute home for him.

When Appelfeld's first book, Smoke, was published in 1962 to good reviews, some members complained that his characters were too grayish and too obsessed by the past. Where were the heroes? Where were the ghetto uprisings? they wanted to know. "Only later did I understand: it was hard for some people to be taken back to those places and forced to relive those experiences. The moment I understood this, I was no longer angry."

Since each club member carried within him a double and sometimes triple life, the club was important to Appelfeld for literary as well as social reasons. "I borrowed a little from each of their lives." In fact, it sometimes seemed to him "that all my writing derives not from my home and not from the war, but from the years of coffee and cigarettes at the club. The joy I experienced when it was in its heyday and the pain I felt when it collapsed--these feelings are still very much alive within me."

Part of the credit for the literary artistry of this compelling memoir goes to Aloma Halter, who translated it from the Hebrew.

--Reviewed by Charles Patterson, Ph.D., author of ETERNAL TREBLINKA: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust

Applefeld is one of those writers much loved by critics but without a great legion of readers. I never somehow really 'got into ' his fictional works. This memoir however was different and I was deeply moved by it.

His story of his childhood in Czernowitz, the relations within his family, his special connection to his mother who was murdered by the Nazis , his being torn out of his childhood world, and sent with his father on a death march, his escape and life as a child in the forest and with a prostitute who makes him her servant and alternately terrifies and fascinates him, his hiding, and moving about , his finding his way to the ship which will bring him to the new home in the land of the Jews, his difficulties in accomodation , his being an outsider here even where he is supposed to be at home- all this is told with great restraint and power. Applefeld himself seems to radiate a certain kind of calm, the calm of what he has described himself often as ' the observer' the one who ' waits and looks' and tries to understand. His early efforts at writing are also described here and the contradictions between what others expected of a ' Holocaust writer' and what he himself had to give. The sense of loneliness is palpable in the last pages of the book where he tells of his coming to belong in the club made of those from his former home - region .The dissolution of this club with the years is the loss of a second home.

As with Oz in his also remarkable memoir " A Tale of Love and Darkness" Applefeld does not delve into the present reality, into the world of the new family he has made. He says he walks around and at times ' he is back there' and this work gives a real sense of what that ' there' is. I have not in this review really come close to touching on the richness of this memoir, its emotional depth. It also has great horror in it, and there is one scene one story that sticks out in my mind and which bothers me even now as I write this. It is about one camp that Applefeld came to. In this camp the Nazis had a special kind of corral in which they would throw babies, who would be devoured by German shepherds. When I think of this I wonder what the words ' forgiveness' and ' humanity ' can possibly mean. This fills my heart with such horror and sorrow, I don't know what to say. I apologize for picking out this one detail and emphasizing it so strongly .The work has many scenes and much perception of and wisdom about life. Applefeld has written a masterful and moving work. He is one person who survived the horror and has conducted himself in his life with quiet courage and great human dignity .He should be seen as a hero in the creation of Literature, not only for the Jewish people but for Humanity as a whole.

Reading Aharon Appelfeld's The Story of a Life gives the reader a the strange sensation that what is happening is both too real and hard to believe.

This is not to say that what he writes about did not happen. It just strains the reader's ability to believe that human beings can sink to such levels of depravity (and they can, we know this to be so). And there is no greater barometer on how low human nature can sink than the treatment of our or other people's children. The instinct to protect children is strong within us. We more readily slow our car when we see a small child on a bicycle than an adult. A lost adult looking for directions may be an irritant, a crying child that has lost a mother is worthy of our support and tenderness.

Appelfeld's mother was shot early in the war, and he and his father were forced to march for two months across the Ukraine to a camp. There, Appelfeld escaped, and he lived for two years in the forests and fields, sometimes living with abusive peasants, but most of the time alone in forests. This memoir reads as one long depredation. Appelfeld is abused by nearly everyone he meets. But he always provides counter-examples of people who gave him support at critical moments --- moments that helped him survive.

He also touches on a topic that nearly all survivors of great traumas experience: how words seem to degrade memory. Appelfeld has written nearly 30 works on the war years, but still struggles to couch it in language. The Holocaust defies mimesis. How can the unimaginable be couched in such a pedestrian thing as language?

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