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Badenheim 1939

Aharon Appelfeld

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Dec 05, 2023
Category: Fiction

When Aharon Appelfeld, one of Israel’s greatest writers, died in 2018, The Times gave him the “great writer” obituary. But the odds that you know his name or have read him are small. Only a handful of his 40 books were translated into English. .

More remarkable than Appelfeld’s shelf of books is the simple fact he lived to write them. Born in Romania in 1932, he was a quiet boy, an only child. He was just 8 when the Nazis shot his mother right in front of him and deported him and his father to a concentration camp in the Ukraine, at which point they were separated for twenty years. Aharon escaped to Russia, where he was a shepherd. In 1944, at 12, he joined the Russian Army. Looking back, he wrote: “In the Holocaust I was a boy who lost his parents and lived the life of an animal, I should have been taken to a madhouse immediately afterward. Or to a hospice.”

When the war ended, he made his way to Italy and, finally, to Palestine. He spoke so many languages he couldn’t express himself in any. And he had only a year or two of schooling. But he managed to enroll in college in Jerusalem and, soon after, to begin writing stories in Hebrew.

Appelfeld has one great subject: understanding what happened to his people. “I’m dealing with a civilization that has been killed,” he has said. “How to represent it in the most honorable way — not to equalize it, not to exaggerate, but to find the right proportion to represent it, in human terms.” What kept him from depression, bitterness, suicide? “I’ve never been an angry person. This is what saved me.” [To buy the paperback of “Badenheim 1939” from Amazon, click here.]

“Badenheim 1939” — the first of Appelfeld’s books to be translated from Hebrew to English — is a precise, even-handed tale that fills just 150 pages. As it should be; this is a simple story of a single season in a resort town favored by Jews. As the novel begins, Spring has arrived. So have the musicians. And the first tourists.

Dr. Pappenheim is the local impresario; he’s all bustle. Expect to see him at the Post Office, sending telegrams and opening letters. But this season is unlike all others. For one thing, the Sanitation Department has increased powers — it’s now authorized to undertake “independent investigations.” For reasons not made clear, these investigations include the construction of fences and rolls of barbed wire. Appliances appear, “suggestive of preparations for a public celebration.” The visitors to the resort expect “fun and games.”

And, indeed, the office of the Sanitation Department is starting to look like a travel agency, thanks to the new signs: “The air in Poland is fresher” and “Get to know the Slavic Culture” and “Labor is our Life.” There’s plenty of time to think about those signs; walks are now forbidden, guests must stay on the grounds of the hotel. It’s a nice break in a dull day when the Sanitation Department puts maps on Poland on sale. [It wasn’t until I read Timothy Snyder’s Holocaust history, Bloodlands, that I understood the significance of Poland in this book. As it happened, the Germans killed very few Jews in Germany; the infrastructure of the law was still operational there. But in Poland, the Germans had destroyed every institution; they could kill anyone there. Americans currently concerned with the rule of law in the United States will understand the significance of that and will read — as how can we not? — “Badenheim 1939” as a metaphor and warning.]

The Post Office closes. Just as well. No mail is arriving — and who knows if letters are getting out? But more people suddenly show up, all of them Jews. Here for the Music Festival? Apparently not.

And now it’s Fall. The cakes of summer are no more. Ditto cigarettes. Lunch is barley soup and dry bread. Concern? Bad dreams? Of course. But no one can really believe that what is happening is more than an inconvenience. At worst, a mistake.

At last a train appears at the station. An engine with four filthy freight cars. The last paragraph shows how the worst thing you can imagine can be sold to you as something else. How easily you and yours can be lost. And, in one of the greatest sentences ever to end a book, how you can go to your doom still believing it’s all going to be okay.

BONUS

In 1988, Philip Roth wrote a long appreciation of his friend in the New York Times. There was also a Q&A. These responses are particularly relevant.

Every summer we, like all the other petit bourgeois families, would set out for a resort. Every summer we tried to find a restful place, where people didn’t gossip in the corridors, didn’t confess to one another in corners, didn’t interfere with you, and, of course, didn’t speak Yiddish. But every summer, as though we were being spited, we were once again surrounded by Jews, and that left a bad taste in my parents’ mouths, and no small amount of anger. Many years after the Holocaust, when I came to retrace my childhood from before the Holocaust, I saw that these resorts occupied a particular place in my memories. Many faces and bodily twitches came back to life. It turned out that the grotesque was etched in no less than the tragic. Walks in the woods and the elaborate meals brought people together in Badenheim – to speak to one another and to confess to one another. People permitted themselves not only to dress extravagantly but also to speak freely, sometimes picturesquely. Husbands occasionally lost their lovely wives, and from time to time a shot would ring out in the evening, a sharp sign of disappointed love. Of course I could arrange these precious scraps of life to stand on their own artistically. But what was I to do? Every time I tried to reconstruct those forgotten resorts, I had visions of the trains and the camps, and my most hidden childhood memories were spotted with the soot from the trains.

It is generally agreed, to this day, that Jews are deft, cunning and sophisticated creatures, with the wisdom of the world stored up in them. But isn’t it fascinating to see how easy it was to fool the Jews? With the simplest, almost childish tricks they were gathered up in ghettos, starved for months, encouraged with false hopes and finally sent to their death by train. That ingenuousness stood before my eyes while I was writing ”Badenheim.” In that ingenuousness I found a kind of distillation of humanity. Their blindness and deafness, their obsessive preoccupation with themselves is an integral part of their ingenuousness. The murderers were practical, and they knew just what they wanted. The ingenuous person is always a shlimazl, a clownish victim of misfortune, never hearing the danger signals in time, getting mixed up, tangled up and finally falling in the trap. Those weaknesses charmed me. I fell in love with them. The myth that the Jews run the world with their machinations turned out to be somewhat exaggerated.