The Story of a Life (18 page)

Years passed before I came to terms with myself and discovered the work of Agnon. By then I was prepared to accept my own identity. But that coming to terms, like all such processes, was not without pain.

Most of my generation decided otherwise. They invested a huge amount of effort into suppressing and eradicating their past. I have absolutely no complaints against them; I understand them completely. But I, for some reason, didn’t know how to assimilate into the Israeli reality. Instead, I retreated into myself.

For this, Agnon served as an excellent role model. It was from him that I learned how you can carry the town of your birth with you anywhere and live a full life in it. Your birthplace is not a matter of fixed geography. And you can extend its borders outward or raise them to the skies. Agnon populated his birthplace with everything the Jewish people had created in the past two hundred years. Like any great writer, he wrote not literal reminiscences of his town, not what it actually was, but what it could have been. And he taught me that a person’s past—even a difficult one—is not to be regarded as a defect or a disgrace, but as a legitimate source to be mined.

Unlike many of his generation, Agnon was not engaged in a conflict with previous generations. His youthful rebellion was brief. I don’t accept the common claim that Agnon was ambivalent about the Jewish tradition. He was certainly not fond of the religious establishment, of the fossilization, the routine, and the arrogance that can accompany religion, but
the Jewish heritage was extremely dear to him. Year in, year out, he would study Jewish texts with the diligence of a scholar. It is true that Agnon reserved a measure of irony and scorn for pompous people and for any form of vanity or distortion, but in the best of his work he lays aside satire and irony, and enters the world of his forefathers.

Sadan, Scholem, and Buber were close to Agnon, and sometimes I would meet them all in a café, on the street, or at the university. Agnon was the most entertaining. He always had anecdotes and reminiscences about people from his past whom he loved to poke fun at, and stories about contemporary movers and shakers and professors who considered themselves intellectual humanists.

What the members of this group had in common was their post-assimilationist relation to Judaism. Being Jewish was in their souls. Agnon obsessively collected old Jewish books, pamphlets, and notebooks. For hours I would trudge along with him from bookstore to bookstore, sometimes simply in search of a small Hasidic pamphlet that he had heard had been reprinted. He tried to do the impossible: to connect Judaism to the modern world.

Zionism for this group was a sort of return to Judaism, but not an Orthodox one, or one that was in any other way doctrinaire. Scholem called himself a “religious anarchist.” This description also suited Buber. They sought to raise Kabbalistic and Hasidic texts from their obscurity so as to demonstrate the importance and relevance of these texts to our contemporary generation. Yehezkel Kaufmann tried to wrest biblical study from Christian research, and Yitzhak Baer sought to demonstrate Jewish continuity since the Second Temple. Dov Sadan presented contemporary Hebrew literature in dialectic terms, as literature that emerges from the clashes between four ideological streams—Hasidism, the
Mitnagdic opponents of Hasidim, the Enlightenment, and Modernism.

As opposed to the world from which I had come, Agnon’s world appeared calm and ordered. I had come from an apocalyptic place, a world that imposed upon my writing a completely different form of language and rhythm. In Agnon’s universe, despite the destruction and the great losses caused by World War I, there were still remnants of a cultural edifice and, most important, a Jewish world that had renewed itself in the Land of Israel. But Agnon was nonetheless a guide for me. I felt that in his writing he engaged the entire Jewish experience—its development, its wanderings, and its teachings, both revealed and concealed. If one can say that the writer is the collective memory of his tribe, Agnon embodies this.

The years in Czernowitz and the years of the war formed the synapses of my reflexes and emotions. My university years shaped my critical faculties and sharpened my skill at expression. I was fortunate that the teachers I encountered became my mentors, and even after I finished my studies I continued to see them. They knew of the struggles I went through with my writing, but they never hid the truth from me, and their criticism was not always easy for me to accept. Much later, with the publication of my first novella,
As an Apple of His Eye
, Gershom Scholem grasped the palms of my hands with both of his large hands and said, “Appelfeld, you’re a writer.”

LIKE EVIL SPIRITS, people who know it all seem to be everywhere. When I began to write, it was as if they lay in ambush in every corner. Manuscripts that I would submit to newspapers would be returned to me with venomous comments attached. Editors would invite me in for a conversation just to reproach me in a paternalistic tone for having no talent and would urge me to stop writing. It seemed important to them that I face my limitations and cease to harbor any illusions.

It was not hard to undermine the little self-confidence that I possessed. Some went too far, claiming that I was writing about a subject that shouldn’t be touched, that one could record testimony about the Holocaust but not weave fantasies. Later, when my writing improved a little, they claimed, “You’re influenced by Kafka and by Agnon. You don’t have a style of your own.”

Tougher than most of them was my friend D., the son of a professor. A young man with an extremely broad education,
he was considered a literary scholar and was fluent in many languages. A full head taller than I, he was, not surprisingly, able to look down on me in more ways than one. I interpreted his way of looking at me as arrogant, and I wasn’t mistaken. And yet I still showed him my early writing. I believed that a man with his level of education would be receptive to my work and would either point out defects that I could correct, or indicate the path along which I might develop. He was four years older than I and was considered a genius at the university. His knowledge and his powers of articulation were enthralling; many succumbed to his spell, myself included. In questions relating to the humanities, he had clear, set opinions.

His comments on my short stories were restrained but hurtful, as if I were simply amusing myself by toying with something with which one should not play. This wasn’t said outright, but indirectly. His hemming and hawing confirmed what I had long been afraid of: I was aiming at the impossible. Had he said it all in just a few clear sentences, even if they were negative, it might have been easier for me. But he spoke generally, haltingly, as if trying to mitigate any injury he might be causing me. This only clarified what I myself felt: that there was some sort of discrepancy between what I wanted to say and what came out. I noticed that D.’s words were always accompanied by a smile. This smile was harder to take than what he actually said, for it revealed his thoughts: You are wasting your time.

I did have other friends, people who always made the effort to listen to me and help me. They were unassuming types who never put themselves or their egos at the forefront. Always ready with the right word, they would say things that would take root and, later, blossom. When I was in complete despair, their hands would be stretched out, an encouraging
word on their lips. They never looked down on me. They knew my weaknesses—which were fairly obvious—but they also saw the great effort that I was putting into my writing. They believed in me and supported me, and they became my writing mentors.

I didn’t always know how to learn from these friends; I didn’t even always realize that they were my teachers. Sometimes I repudiated them, when it seemed to me that they didn’t understand me. Instead, I would display a naïve reverence for the “experts,” the language conjurers. They struck me as more important than my modest friends, who had not studied at the university. I felt that, were I to cast in my lot with the scholars, they would open the doors to the Temple of Literature; and that their approval would ensure that my path would be strewn with roses. I eventually learned that they were incapable of friendship; they were much too occupied with themselves, with maintaining their own status and honing their own words, to be able to give something to anyone else.

Now, when I try to remember what D. said to me, I can recall only the flow of his mumblings; everything is abstract, and no one clear picture emerges. The fate of abstractions is that they grab you for a moment and then evaporate. Only words that create pictures can be retained. The rest is chaff. It took me years to understand this, to free myself from the false power of the sneering smile. It took me years to return to the embrace of my loyal, good friends, who knew that a person is no more than a bundle of weaknesses and fears, and that there’s no need to add to them. If they know the right word to say, they hold it out to you like a slice of bread during a war. And if they don’t, they sit beside you in silence.

WHEN MY BOOK
Smoke
was published in 1962, the poet Uri Zvi Greenberg summoned me to him. He must have been expecting someone who looked different. “You’re Appelfeld?” he exclaimed.

“I suppose so.”

“Never mind, then.”

He didn’t ask where I was from, who my parents were, where I had been during the war, or what I was doing now. He had some words of praise for my book, though I immediately felt they were rather grudging. He called my work “expression reined in” and sneered at the phrase “restrained writing,” which critics had used to describe it. “What is ‘restrained’?” he mocked. “If you have something to say, then say it, and say it loud and clear. And if you have nothing to say, then keep quiet.”

As for holding things in, he explained to me that other nations could engage in art for art’s sake, and they’ve certainly achieved some notable success in this area. But we Jews haven’t been given this skill. At most, we can imitate it.
What we have been given are vision and prophecy, and when we tap into them we create something real. A people such as ours cannot permit itself amusing descriptions or nuanced sensibility. We are all links in a generational chain that extends back to the God of Israel and to His Torah, and it is from this we draw our sustenance. Only Jews who have forgotten who they are, who their forefathers were, go astray in foreign pastures. After the Holocaust, this would be the worst thing for us to do. Going astray is a sin. Have we not seen what European culture is, with its ghosts swarming in its cellars? Are we now going to imitate them, write in iambic pentameter, and devote ourselves to descriptions of utter nonentities? At the end of his life, the great Tolstoy understood that European culture was bankrupt, but in his case there was nowhere to go. All that was left to him was a desiccated New Testament; he had to make do with this sparse fare for his remaining days. We Jews, however, have the treasures of the Torah, the two Talmuds, the Midrashim, Maimonides, the
Zohar.
What other people in the world has such a rich heritage? But we have always fled from ourselves and from our role in the world, hiding in the public parks of New York and Paris, as if those places could nourish our depleted souls. Art that doesn’t convey the beliefs of our forefathers will not save us. And without this great, all-encompassing belief, the Land of Israel will not save us, either. We must burn all the idols—the Golden Calf and all the other spiritual calves—and return to our forefathers, for without them our existence is worthless. Without them we’re little more than imitators, moles, nothings.

I realized that this tirade was not simply criticism of my slight book, but was actually leveled at our entire intellectual enterprise in Israel. From his poetry and from his manifestos, I was familiar with Greenberg’s criticism. But it was
still difficult not to take it all personally. It was as though I embodied the stubbornness and insensitivity that he had railed against and, instead of aligning myself with my forefathers and their beliefs, I was toying with descriptions and nuances in the manner of Chekhov or Maupassant. I was on the wrong path, but because I had only just set out on it, it was best to set me straight now. He spoke by turns gently and loudly, as if trying to pour his thoughts into my obdurate ears.

I have never been particularly fond of either pathos or big words. I loved and I still love to observe. The advantage of contemplation is that it’s devoid of words. The quiet of objects and of landscape flows toward you without imposing itself on you. By nature, I’m not demanding of people. I take them as they come. Sometimes I’m moved by weakness no less than by an act of generosity. The vision and the prophecy of which Greenberg spoke have always seemed to me like some ancient mantle of glory in which we can no longer wrap ourselves. But, lo and behold, when he spoke to me that evening Greenberg struck some hidden chords within me. At first it seemed to me that he had exposed my personal disgrace: neither my parents’ home, nor the war, the youth movement, the army, or even the university—none of them had been able to connect me with my forefathers and with the sources of their beliefs. No doubt there did exist profound Jewish belief, but I didn’t know the path to it.

It’s not hard to expose a man’s weakness, to instill in him self-criticism and doubt, and that’s what Greenberg did to me that evening. He hurt and angered me, but beyond that I felt the tremendous energy that pulsated within him. It was not simply an energy that empowered an individual, but energy of a different sort altogether—a collective flow that seemed to have been channeled into one man and then poured out onto me with these words: “The individual, for all
his importance, is not the main thing. The collective must precede him, because the collective is what creates language, culture, and the belief system. If the individual makes his contribution to the collective, he raises the level of the collective and that of himself, too. A creative person who does not have the power to do this will not be included in the nation’s memory.”