Non­fic­tion

The Sto­ry of a Life

  • Review
By – July 21, 2015

Mem­o­ry, it seems, has deep roots in the body. Some­times just the smell of rot­ting straw, or the sharp call of a bird, is enough to take me back, pierc­ing me deep inside.” From deep inside, Aharon Appelfeld, the not­ed Israeli author, calls up a chain of mem­o­ries. They con­nect not by chronol­o­gy but by puls­ing moments of recall. These are intense­ly inter­nal mem­o­ries, but they also record the world-shap­ing years of the past cen­tu­ry as Appelfeld expe­ri­enced them. Although it is not Appelfeld’s inten­tion, his mem­o­ries reflect the expe­ri­ence of many first-gen­er­a­tion refugees who spilled into Israel to for­get the past and cre­ate new lives. When he was sev­en, Appelfeld’s world dis­in­te­grat­ed. From his com­fort­able, assim­i­lat­ed home, he and his par­ents were herd­ed into a ghet­to. His moth­er was mur­dered; he and his father endured a numb­ing march to a camp. At ten Appelfeld escaped and lived out the war in fields and forests and peas­ant huts. From a deten­tion camp in Italy he arrived in Pales­tine in 1946, a young teen-ager. Along the way he encoun­tered peo­ple who were enlarged and dimin­ished by the war — those who glowed with gen­eros­i­ty and those who exploit­ed any­one for their own ben­e­fit. The word orphan appears fre­quent­ly in Appelfeld’s mem­o­ries. He arrived in Pales­tine total­ly alone, with­out fam­i­ly, with­out lan­guage, with­out any thought or dream of Israel. Appelfeld’s strug­gles, both to wall up the mem­o­ries that sus­tained him dur­ing the war and to find a way to become an Israeli, reveal his ten­sions, an uproot­ed cit­i­zen of two not entire­ly rec­on­ciled home­lands. As Appelfeld states in his pref­ace, this short book is not a pre­cise account of his life. The read­er learns lit­tle about Appelfeld’s per­son­al life in Israel except his desire to become a writer. Writ­ers and teach­ers fig­ure promi­nent­ly in Appelfeld’s mem­o­ries, most notably a touch­ing con­ver­sa­tion with S. Y. Agnon short­ly before his death. But in the clos­ing mem­o­ries of the book, Appelfeld con­veys the sto­ry of his gen­er­a­tion of Israelis, the last to embody the hor­ri­fy­ing expul­sion from home in Europe and the strug­gle to find a new home in a strange land. Their chil­dren have heard lit­tle of their par­ents’ strug­gle. They are Israelis, brought up by par­ents who buried the past. The Sto­ry of a Life brings that past to life.

Relat­ed Content:

Maron L. Wax­man, retired edi­to­r­i­al direc­tor, spe­cial projects, at the Amer­i­can Muse­um of Nat­ur­al His­to­ry, was also an edi­to­r­i­al direc­tor at Harper­Collins and Book-of-the-Month Club.

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