The Life of a Story: Aharon Appelfeld’s Double as a Mode of Holocaust Representation (2024)

• 1 Philip Roth, “Walking the Way of the Survivor; A Talk with Aharon Appelfeld,” The New York Times, F (...)

I tried several times to write “the story of my life” in the woods after I ran away from the camp. But all my efforts were in vain. I wanted to be faithful to reality and to what really happened. But the chronicle that emerged proved to be a weak scaffolding. The result was rather meager, an unconvincing imaginary tale.1

• 2 Philip Gourevitch, “Aharon Appelfeld and the Truth of Fiction in Remembering the Holocaust,” Januar (...)
• 3 For instance, confronted by his double-figure in Operation Shylock, Roth’s narrator reflects on the (...)

1A postscript following the death of the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld in January 2018 begins with the late writer’s words: “I’m a hero in one of Philip Roth”s novels.” Written by Philip Gourevitch who recalled his conversation with Appelfeld nearly twenty years earlier over lunch at a Jerusalem café where Appelfeld liked to work, the postscript continues: “Just as Roth has his fictional double in the book, Appelfeld too is present there both as a nonfictional voice and as a character who is, in significant respects, Roth’s invention.”2 As I would like to show in this article, Appelfeld’s fictional double does not belong solely to Roth’s novels,3 but appears also in his own work. By focusing on two of Appelfeld’s late novels that followed his 1999 memoir, I will show how the writer shaped his literary doubles within an uncompromising search for an appropriate voice to tell the story of his life in the wake of the Holocaust.

• 4 Aharon Appelfeld, Ashan: Sippurim [Smoke: Story collection] (Jerusalem: Achshav, 1962).

2Born in 1932 in Jadova in Bukovina, Appelfeld, a prolific Israeli writer, experienced the Holocaust as a young boy. He lost his mother at the beginning of the war and was expelled with his father to Transnistria. After being separated in the concentration camp, Appelfeld managed to escape, found refuge in the Ukrainian forests and later joined the soldiers of the Soviet army. In 1946 he immigrated to Palestine via Italy as part of the Aliyat Hano’ar youth movement, and completed his schooling at agricultural schools in Ein Kerem and Nahalal. He served for two years in the Israeli army, and in 1952 enrolled as a student of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, during which time he began his literary activity as a poet and critic. During the years 1952–1959 Appelfeld published poems in various newspapers and literary periodicals. His first story collection, Smoke,4 was published in 1962, followed by essay collections, novels and a memoir.

• 5 I dealt with it elsewhere: Michal Ben-Horin, “The Sound of the Unsayable: Jewish Secular Culture in (...)
• 6 For a mapping of the scholarship on Appelfeld’s work, see Yigal Schwartz, Omanut Hasippur shel Ahar (...)
• 7 Alan Mintz, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (New York: Columbia University Pr (...)
• 8 Emily Miller Budick, Aharon Appelfeld’s Fiction: Acknowledging the Holocaust (Bloomington and India (...)

3Since its emergence in the 1950s, scholarship on Appelfeld’s work has pointed to its dialectical relationship with two topics: first religion (religiosity), which I will not discuss here,5 and second, the events of the Second World War and the Holocaust.6 For example, Alan Mintz, who explored the responses of modern Hebrew literature to the Holocaust, claimed that in Appelfeld’s literature “everything having to do with what the French call the concentrationary universe […] is left out. Before, after, parallel to – yes; anything but the thing itself. Especially after, as if to say that a catastrophe can be known only through its survivors and its survivals.”7 In her monograph on Appelfeld, Emily Miller Budick described his “tendency to circle around – hint at, suggest, signal toward – the major sites of suffering and violence rather than represent them directly.”8 Appelfeld himself, however, rejected the label Holocaust writer, as he seems to have explained in his memoir:

• 10 Aharon Appelfeld, Suddenly, Love, trans. Jeffrey M. Green (New York: Schocken Books, 2014).
• 11 Aharon Appelfeld, The Man who Never Stopped Sleeping, trans. Jeffrey M. Green (New York: Schocken B (...)
• 12 The concept of autofiction was first associated with the work of Doubrovsky, a Holocaust survivor b (...)

4Over the years, Appelfeld would repeat this rejection in various interviews, conversations and lectures with writers, scholars and students. Exploring the relationship between subject matter and the interwoven words and between content and form, reveals additional sets of opposition such as authentic vs. false representation, organic vs. artificial, reality vs. imagination and finally history vs. fiction. I claim that this exploration lies at the core of Appelfeld’s literary work and reaches its peak in the poetic formation of the double. These double figures appear in Appelfeld novels Suddenly, Love (2004)10 and The Man who Never Stopped Sleeping (2010),11 following his memoir The Story of a Life (1999). In both novels, which can be read as autofiction, the protagonists’ name (Ernst and Erwin respectively) is identical with or alludes to the writer’s birth name.12 However, different from previous work like the novel The Iron Trucks (1991), whose protagonist is also called Erwin, in these later novels Appelfeld portrays moments from his life experience, while describing the process of coming to writing. In this respect he tells readers the story of his life by illustrating the life of his story.

• 13 Michal Stranin and Merav Jano, “An Interview with Aharon Appelfeld: The Art is a Shield Against the (...)

6Appelfeld emphasized the significant role of the arts and the aesthetic realm in the reflection, mediation and transmission of knowledge about the Holocaust. In an interview at the Yad Vashem Institute, he discussed the conflict that is revealed in pedagogical methods of teaching about the Holocaust that are limited to disciplines such as history and sociology.13 What becomes an ethical task for Appelfeld is demonstrated in his literary work that reflects an ongoing search for appropriate modes of expressing the traumatic experience. As a result, his novels challenge the clear distinction between reality and imagination, knowledge and suggestive experience. An example of this search is found in the characters of Erwin and Ernst, Appelfeld’s literary doubles, who combine biographical and fictional elements.

• 15 Freud, Uncanny, 143. See also Otto Rank, “Der Doppelgänger,” Imago 3 (1914): 97.

8Furthermore, Freud refers to his student, Otto Rank, who coined this concept in his 1914 essay “Der Doppelgänger,” claiming: “the ‘double’ was originally an insurance against destruction to the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death,’ and probably the ‘immortal’ soul was the first ‘double’ of the body.” Later however, Freud assumes that the friendly, protective character becomes horrific. Connecting the double with the psychic mechanism of the “uncanny,” Freud concludes that what belonged to the early mental stage and has long since been left behind “has become a vision of terror, just as after the fall of their religion the gods took on daemonic shapes.”15

• 16 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (I (...)

9Both psychoanalysts developed this idea of the double while drawing inspiration from the nineteenth century literary repertoire of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, William Hauff, Edgar Allen Poe, Oscar Wilde, Guy de Maupassant, Alfred de Musset, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. On this basis, the literary critic Tzvetan Todorov claimed that in the twentieth century psychoanalysis took the place of literature in dealing with the figure of the double.16 Yet, the double also appears in twentieth and even twenty-first century literature. For Example, Eran Dorfman explores the role of the double in French writers such as Maupassant, as well as Magrit Duras, Michelle Wolbeck and Michel Tournier. Following Rank’s analysis of the double based on Freud’s work on narcissism, Dorfman points to the relationships between exterior and interior components:

• 18 Karen Grumberg, “‘The Whole Content of My Being Shrieks in Contradiction against Itself’: Uncanny S (...)

10Karen Grumberg, who explored the figure of the double in twentieth century Jewish American literature, emphasized the ideological alongside the psychological aspects associated with its nineteenth century literary forebears. Based on Robert Alter’s analysis of Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, she claims: ‘The emergence, exposure, or creation of the double points not necessarily or not only to repressed desires but also to other modes of understanding, identification, or disidentification with the (nonrepressed) self.”18 She develops this idea by calling into question the hierarchy of identities in a hegemonic culture, but also the very concept of (stable) identity:

• 20 On different approaches to the double in literature see Dimitris Vardoulakis, The Doppelgänger: Lit (...)

11The aesthetic, philosophical and psychoanalytical discourse on the double is enormously wide, and goes beyond the scope of this article.20 However, in exploring the literary embodiment of this figure in Appelfeld’s late novels, I hope to show its powerful role in the writer's attempts at poetic representation of the Holocaust: First, by questioning the lines between inside and outside as conveyed through the relationship between self and other (for instance, the fear from the other alongside the need of it; self-hatred and guilt alongside narcissist desires) and between reality and imagination. And second, by challenging the familiar categories of (national) identity and subverting stable processes of cultural socialization.

• 21 Samuel Gerson, “When the Third Is Dead: Memory, Mourning and Witnessing in the Aftermath of the Hol (...)
• 22 Dana Amir, “When Language Meets Traumatic Lacuna: The Metaphoric, the Metonymic, and the Psychotic (...)

12Furthermore, scholars of trauma have emphasized the importance of a witnessing that mediates between the experience and the reflection. For instance, Samuel Gerson defines this witnessing as an other that “constitutes a ‘live third’ – the presence that exists between the experience and its meaning, between the real and the symbolic, and through whom life gestates and into whom futures are born.”21 Similarly, Dana Amir describes a constant movement between the first person and the third person of experience or between the “experiencing I” and the “reflective I,” which enables the shift between the “position of the victim” and the “position of the witness.” This metaphoric mode of traumatic testimony involves an act of representation and the creation of new meaning, producing an integrated narrative within which the traumatic events are not merely repeated but also transformed.22

• 23 Yochai Oppenheimer, “The Art of Symptoms in the Work of Appelfeld,” in The Art of Symptoms: Reading (...)
• 24 Ibid., 44–46.

13Exploring the embodiment of trauma in Appelfeld’s literature, Yochai Oppenheimer argued that Appelfeld creates a calculated texture of symptoms rather than conscious psychological representations.23 In contrast to binary models, he suggests that symptoms reveal a liminal dimension between repression and coherent memory conveyed through poetic depictions of stuttering, distraction, frantic movements, disease and physical pains. Oppenheimer distinguishes two stages in Appelfeld’s art of symptoms: in the earlier stage, the symptom illuminates a disconnecting from the traumatic past, while in the later stage the symptom alludes to reconnecting with the past through intergenerational identification, thereby pointing to private and national recovery.24

• 25 Rina Dudai, “From Excess to Origin: Traversing Time Zones as an Act of Redemption in The Man who Ne (...)

14Rina Dudai also emphasized the crucial role of the trauma model for Appelfeld’s work in general and for The Man who Never Stopped Sleeping, in particular. Focusing on this novel, she showed how “the adherence to a transcendental mental position, based on a mystical-religious experience following extreme trauma, is a stage on the way to the reconstitution of the self, as well as the poetic self.”25

• 26 Shahar Pinsker, “The Train that Rides Inside: The Jewish Predicament in Aharon Appelfeld’s The Iron (...)
• 27 Ibid., 89.

15The duality of attachment to and detachment from the past recurs in Shahar Pinsker who claimed that Appelfeld creates ongoing life stories based on two contradictory yet intertwined models of journey. The linear model embodies attempts to escape the exilic experience associated with victimhood by taking a heroic revenge on the perpetrators, whereas the cyclical model illustrates an attempt to reconstruct Jewish life prior to the catastrophe by rescuing old manuscripts and books.26 He shows how Erwin Siegelbaum, the protagonist of The Iron Trucks, while oscillating between these two models, fails to find healing neither as revenger nor collector, neither in Bolshevism, Assimilation, and Eastern-European culture nor in Jerusalem. Nevertheless, this oscillation demonstrates a multiple, non-monolithic view of Jewish traditions.27

• 29 Theodor W. Adorno, “Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, (...)
• 30 Roth, A Talk with Aharon Appelfeld.
• 31 Aharon Appelfeld, Essays in the First Person (Jerusalem: Hasifriya Hatzionit, 1979). On Kafka’s inf (...)

17The allusion to Theodor Adorno, the Jewish German philosopher who coined the verdict that writing after Auschwitz is barbaric,29 illustrates one of Appelfeld’s central dilemmas: how to write about the catastrophe, and what would be the appropriate language for it? For Appelfeld, testifying to the disaster is entangled with the struggle of portraying his own experience. As he confessed to Philip Roth, the futile attempts of telling the “story of my life” after escaping from the camps had to do with not only the shaking impact of the historical events, but also with the feeling that words are limited and fail to represent the horror; reality extends beyond imagination.30 Later in the conversation and elsewhere, Appelfeld explained how different sources of inspiration, among them the Bible and the literature of the Austro-Hungarian writer Franz Kafka, helped him to find his voice.31

• 32 Appelfeld, Love, 33.
• 33 Appelfeld, Story, 121.
• 34 Appelfeld, Love, 223–224. According to Adam Kirsch, “For an Israeli writer to locate the Promised L (...)

20The loss of parents lies at the core of the traumatic experience during the Holocaust, which resonates with Ernst’s guilt about disconnecting himself from them before the war. Failing to “meet” both his father and mother in his dreams, he refers to his parents who disconnected themselves from their own parents and the Jewish religion when moving from the Carpathian Mountains to the city, as an “open wound.”32 These generational ruptures embedded in reenactments of private and collective breaks also occupied Appelfeld in the memoir.33 However, in contrast to the memoir, Ernst is able to work through the painful loss by reviving in writing memories from his childhood visits to his grandparents’ village. In the wake of his developing memoir, he can finally come to terms with the departure, which turns into an imagined reencounter. The return of the dead is also a return to the Jewish cultural tradition bound up with the Eastern-European landscapes (the synagogue in the Carpathian village), which he is able to do with the help of the woman he loves: “Because of some mistake we are driven from this paradise and cast into exile. But finally the mistake has been corrected and we have returned to the place where God and man dwell together.”34

• 35 Appelfeld, Love, 117.

21In both autofictional novels, this “homecoming” that occurs through the process of literary writing plays a central role. For instance, Ernst reflects on lost poetic traditions, which reappear as his own sources of inspiration. Mentioning the enormous impact that Kafka has had on him, he is also aware of the dangers resulting from the total attraction to and fascination with his voice: “Kafka’s focus was entirely inward. Even the exterior was his interior.”35 This relationship between outside and inside is translated into the aesthetic texture of writing. Only when Ernst is able to free himself from the “spell” of Kafka, whose interior took over the external, does he succeed in finding his own poetic voice.

• 37 Rina Dudai claims that this intertextual relation “brings to light the mental process undergone by (...)

24Whereas in Suddenly, Love Ernst finds his way into the therapeutic writing through the power of love, in The Man who Never Stopped Sleeping it is rather Erwin’s injury that sets in motion the process of writing through which he seems to recover. Here too Appelfeld develops the character of the protagonist, his literary double, by combining biographical and fictional elements. Among the autobiographical components are the arrival in Palestine via Naples, the youth movement and the agricultural school, the life in Jerusalem and becoming a Hebrew writer including his sources of inspiration, information about the grandparents in the Carpathian Mountains and about his parents and finally his birth name Erwin. Moreover, in this later autofictional novel Appelfeld interweaves fragments of his earlier lyrical and prose texts with Erwin's first attempts at writing.37 Among the fictional components are the injury during an engagement with snipers followed by a painful process of rehabilitation, first in the hospital and later in the sanatorium.

• 38 Appelfeld, The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping, 3–4.
• 39 In his memoir Appelfeld reflects how the language “which promised to be my mother tongue was nothin (...)

25The novel initially focuses on the act of sleeping: “At the end of the war, I became immersed in constant slumber […]. Waves of darkness carried me along, and I moved forward. Where are you heading? I asked myself. Home, I replied, surprised at my own answer.”38 This in turn reveals an additional set of oppositions: existential (deep sleep and wakefulness) and mental (unconsciousness and consciousness), temporal (backwards and forwards, day and night), and territorial (the homeland in Europe and the new land of immigration in the Middle East). The sleep that overtakes the protagonist at the beginning of the novel denies the traumatic break by returning him to the years before the war and reconnects him with the dead grandparents and parents. These encounters that illuminate Erwin’s inner world suspend his confrontation with the external environment and historical events, first by denying his family’s death in reality and second in the way he keeps experiencing the European sound (German, Yiddish, Ruthenian) and landscapes (Ukrainian and Romanian) in the new land (Israel).39

• 40 Based on binaries such as past and present, diaspora and homeland, this narrative called for the ne (...)

26The struggle for survival in the present demanded disconnection and even denial of the past in a cultural process that scholars have defined as a “negation of exile.”40 For example, as part of the national ideology, the immigrants had to replace their foreign names with Hebrew names. This complexity is shown in the novel when Erwin’s first reaction to his mentor’s suggestion to change his name to Aharon is a refusal. Slowly, but not without resistance and internal conflict, the Hebrew pushes the German aside. The sleep that protected him from the external world and reconnected him to his past life now becomes less secure as the hegemonic language takes over. Erwin’s response to this insecurity is conveyed in his attempts to write his own literary work that gradually replaces his sleep, and within which he can freely across the borders between here and there.

• 41 Appelfeld, Story, 113.
• 42 Appelfeld, Story, 111

28In his memoir Appelfeld defined the common approach to the new language as “functional,” admitting how in time it became clear to him that he needed to have “a different connection to the Hebrew, not an external connection but an interior one.”41 Moreover, following his physical immigration resulting from the violent wrench from his parents, the process of acquiring the new language further uprooted him from home: “From the moment I arrived in Israel, I hated the people who forced me to speak Hebrew, and with the death of my mother tongue, my hostility toward them only increased.”42 What the memoir reveals about the dilemma of the language, the novel exposes through an imagined conversation between the fictional double and his mother. In response to her pointing out his use of “incomprehensible words” and “secret language,” he concludes:

• 44 See Sidra DeKoven-Ezrahi, “The Jewish Journey in the Late Fiction of Aharon Appelfeld: Return, Repa (...)

29To some extent, Erwin's emerging prose in the 1950s elucidates and mirrors Appelfeld’s poetic style, which embraces in addition to the Bible, influences from Hassidic legends, partially through the relation to Kafka, and foreign languages such as the Yiddish spoken in the Carpathians and the German spoken in Czernowitz.44 At the time, however, Appelfeld’s European landscapes stood in contrast to the local landscapes portrayed in the emerging Israeli literature and hegemonic culture. Moreover, the literary representations of the Holocaust in post-1948 Hebrew literature hardly related to the suffering of the survivors and either depicted the heroic moments of resistance in the ghettos and the forests (focusing on the partisans) or simply remained silent about the victims.

• 45 Anita Shapira, “Dor Ba’aretz (Generation in the Land),” in Yehudim Hadashim Yehudim Yeshanim (New J (...)

30Anita Shapira pointed to the silence surrounding the Holocaust in the literature of the “1948 Generation,” which was intended to disconnect the Zionist heroic narrative from the victimhood associated with diasporic Jews.45 In this respect as well, the prose written by Appelfeld’s fictional double is innovative. For instance, his ambivalence regarding national identity recurs in the depiction of military service. Similar to Appelfeld’s memoir in which the military role attributed to the formation of Israeli identity constitutes a humiliating experience for the reporter, the novel continues this unheroic depiction. However, instead of focusing on the mental pain, here the narrator thoroughly depicts his physical pain. On being wounded in an engagement with snipers, Erwin has to spend long months recovering from multiple surgeries and trying to regain the use of his legs. During this period, he copies passages from the Bible into his newly acquired Hebrew when taking his first steps as a writer.

• 48 Appelfeld, Love, 225.

37In Suddenly, Love, Ernst works through the past that haunts him in the present by reviving in writing private childhood memories, which ended for him when the war broke out. The reconnection with the grandparents and parents also evokes in him the lost connection to Jewish tradition. This happens with the help of Irena who teaches him to love. The ability to look outside, towards a caring and protecting other sets in motion the writing process. Furthermore, the novel ends with Irena, who “will reinforce the house on every side. No harmful creature will ever dare to approach the window.”48 This rearrangement of an outside-inside relationship embodies the primary mechanism of the double.

• 49 Roth, Operation Shylock, 201.

39Unlike the mechanistic or somewhat functional use of the Hebrew as reflected in Appelfeld's memoir, his literary doubles seek in their language for an authentic reconnection of its different parts. Like Appelfeld, they transgress the lines between inside and outside, imagination and reality, creating a new intimate space – an interior that reverberates with the exterior, which in turn, does not block or deny what it supersedes. Appelfeld’s fictional narrators incorporate autobiographical components, similar to Roth’s who captures the radical twoness between Philip and Aharon: “because each recognizes in the other the Jewish man that he is not... because we are heirs jointly of a drastically bifurcated legacy – because of the sum of Jewish antinomies, yes, we have much to talk about and are intimate friends.”49