“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.
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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.
