Appelfeldian Territory
Emily Miller Budick

Aharon Appelfeld

The Ice Mine
Keter, 1997

It has become a commonplace in Appelfeld criticism that the one event the author does not represent in his fiction is the camp experience itself. This self-imposed and sometimes baffling (though hardly uninterpretable or uninterpreted) prohibition goes along with another prominent feature of Appelfeld's writing: that, despite several essays, he does not dwell autobiographically on his own experience of the war. Diffusing the private and the personal into his fiction, which reflects and refracts the inexpressible experience of the Final Solution itself, Appelfeld produces a fiction that obeys one of the major commandments of Holocaust writing: to preserve the decorous silence that honors the dead and respects the living, without falling silent about what can and must be said concerning the decimation of Eastern European Jewry. In two of his recently published works Appelfeld quietly and without violating the decorum of his writing breaks his two-fold reserve.

The Ice Mine takes us where no previous Appelfeld text has taken us, into the Camp itself. Nonetheless, like the majority of Appelfeld's works, it also records events preceding and following the catastrophe itself. Thus, it participates in the logic that everywhere informs Appelfeld's fiction: that what there is to be said about an extremity of suffering so horrific and inhuman as to exceed the capacity of language to represent it is best said in terms of the lived lives of those individuals who entered into and (in some very few cases) survived the horror. And that lived life is best expressed by portraying those individuals in their individuality before and after the catastrophe. One might say that a paradox of Holocaust representation is that, in striving to preserve the uniqueness of the event, it often tends to overshadow and obliterate the differences among those individuals who passed through the experience, thus depersonalizing the victims all over again. If there is any purpose above all others that distinguishes Appelfeld's fictional enterprise, it is to restore to these men, women, and children just that specific, differentiated humanness that the Final Solution would have denied them, even after the fact. In this, Appelfeld joins the tradition of great writers who understand that the challenge of art is to discover the absolutely precise figure that will convey the utter specificity of feeling, thought, or human consciousness.

In this achievement of art, All That I Have Loved is classic. It revives familiar territory for the Appelfeldian reader: the child protagonist in an assimilated, intellectual Austrian family, the father a renowned and now reviled artist who is the victim of growing anti-Semitism, the gentle loving mother, divorced and converted to Christianity to marry a man who will all-too-readily abandon her. The vignette of bewilderment and abandonment resonates with the catastrophe that we, but not they, know is about to succeed it. Rather than overwhelm and allegorize the text, this evocation of the obliterating future serves to heighten the poignancy of the fully human lives the story renders.

Thus, too, Ice Mine itself is most memorable for the community of vivid characters who inhabit the text. There is, foremost, the young narrator-protagonist himself, whose enthusiasm for life and aspirations for the future, even in the ghetto, are compelled by grave necessity to become the instruments of exacting observation. Unrelentingly and yet not without shock and desperate hope, he, like his author, records the details of the Holocaust experience. There are also, in the ghetto itself, the narrator's parents and uncle, his young bride, and her parents: human beings whose joys, frustrations, and disappointments reflect all the ordinary vicissitudes of human life-the unfulfilled ambitions of youth, to which the wife's mother retreats in a madness less mad than bizarrely commensurate to the circumstances in which she finds herself; the passions of ofttimes misguided but deeply sincere political convictions, which produce the force-field of the uncle's fire and folly; the innocence of the young lovers themselves, who are caught, like all young people, between nostalgic memories of childhood and unrealistic expectations for the future, but who, because of the war, will never be given the chance to travel the usual course of events into the responsibilities and pleasures, notwithstanding the dissatisfactions, of adulthood.

In the camp as well, Erwin's fellow prisoners bring with them the full complexity of their unique personalities. There is the religious peasant Butzi, whose generosity and self-destructive pride inspire and ultimately, albeit unwittingly, save his comrades from death; Felix, who, despite the extremity of physical deprivation that he, like the others, is suffering, stubbornly refuses to believe that his beloved wife has abandoned him and who focuses all his thoughts and energy on his returning to save her; or the former army officer, who even more crazily refuses, right till the end, to relinquish his faith in the inconquerability of the German army.

Although The Ice Mine never flinches from the extremities of hunger, physical pain, and psychological torment suffered by its characters, nonetheless, like all of Appelfeld's fiction, it eschews sensationalism. It abides by the terrible knowledge that everywhere enlightens Appelfeld's writing: that there is nothing to describe in the camp except the obliteration of reality as we know it. And it is the job of fiction, as of life, to conjure in its full humanness, just that reality the Holocaust would deny. In a sense the opening lines of the novel say it all. "We are here two-and-a-half months," reports Erwin in the lyrical prose / matter-of-fact poetry in which he writes; "and it is an eternity. The day slowly separates out into minutes and seconds, but even such tiny fragments of time as these do not pass on their own. Time stands still here. It drizzles and seeps into you, a single hour as swollen as a year of life." The "here" of the world of the concentration camp is dizzyingly nameless, its "time" oppressively without measure; and providing such historical details would add nothing to what Appelfeld wants to convey, which is the annihilation of a world through the grotesquely distorted intensification of its all-too familiar parts.

This savage defamiliarization of reality as we know, which gives us a world more human than we might perhaps want to admit, also shadows Appelfeld's autobiography, The Story of a Life. The title might more accurately be translated Life Story, since this is not the story of a life in any conventional sense, but, rather, a defiant and ofttimes lyrical yoking together of the fragments of a life and a story, where the extermination of both and the severing of the bond between them is exactly the objective of the Final Solution. The Story of a Life is no discursive narrative, intent on providing facts and figures. Rather, it evokes the losses that no manner of later happiness or success can ever recoup, but that nonetheless coexist, as they have always coexisted (even, if The Ice Mine is any evidence, in the camps) with the miracle of other human beings and of the natural world. "Even now," Appelfeld tells us, explaining his refusal to narrate his camp experience,

I cannot touch that white heat. Therefore, I will not tell about the camp. Rather I will tell of my escape and of the activities that engaged me in the fall of 1942. I am ten years old.

My arrival in the forest, I do not recall. I do, however, remember the first moment I stood there, face to face with trees laden with apples outrageously crimson. I was so startled, I immediately backed away from them. … It had been days since food had passed my lips, and here was a tree bursting with apples. I could put out my hand and pluck one. Instead, I stood there marveling, and the longer I stood, the more stationary I became.

In the end I sat down and ate one small, partly rotted apple that had fallen to the ground. Apparently I fell asleep at once; and when I awoke it was already dusk. I didn't know what to do, so I got up on my knees. Those bended knees I also continue to feel to this day, and every time I dip a certain way, I remember the sunset that dimmed the sky between the trees, and I want to rejoice.

Utterly faithful to the literal reality of the young boy so hungry as to no longer know hunger, so disoriented as not to be able to take advantage of his sudden good fortune, the passage records as well the spiritual dimensions of Appelfeld's vision: the relocation of faith from prayers and rituals to the raw prowess of the physical body, to recover and react and, finally, to speak.

Therefore, like his namesake in The Ice Mine, Erwin/Aharon Appelfeld presents himself as a keen observer of the scene around him, even before the events of the war make of his capacity to recall and recount not, simply, the quintessential tools of the writer but the necessary gifts of the witness. "Since childhood," he tells us in the introduction to The Story of a Life, " I have felt that memory is a living, bubbling, throbbing reservoir. As a boy I would sit and describe to myself summer vacation at my grandparents'. For hours I would sit beside the window and from there review my journey. Every memory of every previous vacation would return and kaleidoscope within me." But if, in the normal course of events, "memory and imagination sometimes reside together," Appelfeld suggests, "during those years of hiding it was as if they were vying between them. Memory seemed the more solid and substantial. Imagination had wings. Memory clung to the known. Imagination soared the uncharted. Memory inspired comfort and tranquillity. Imagination would toss me hither and yon and, in the end, abandon me to despair."

It has become something of a cliché in Holocaust studies to say that what stands in the way of writing Holocaust narrative is a failure of memory. What Appelfeld shows us, here and elsewhere, is that memory, however excruciating, is not the problem. Rather, as emerges so vividly in The Ice Mine as well, what the Holocaust robbed its victims of was the freedom to imagine, to fantasize, to dream. Appelfeld's prose soars. And in so doing, it takes back for the literature, the language, and the people, what the Holocaust would have taken from them forever.