The Persistence of Exile in Aharon Appelfeld

Abstract

This article discusses the confusion of the concepts of exile and homeland in the life of Hebrew novelist Aharon Appelfeld, an author educated in the framework of Zionist ideology from the time of his arrival in British Palestine, in 1946, but who nevertheless remained attached to the world of his origins, the world of assimilated, German-speaking Jews of Central Europe. Appelfeld always felt very close to the community of expatriates from this region who arrived in Israel as refugees, before or in the aftermath of World War II. During the 1950's, he cultivated close relations with these refugees, who perceived themselves as exiles, and by this means he was able to reconstruct, in fiction, the world he had been uprooted from in 1940, at the age of 8. Two Austro-Hungarian novels by Appelfeld – Be et u've Onah Ahat and Massa al há-Horef – are also discussed here. In these novels he draws an emphatic portrait of the community of assimilated Jews in interbellum Europe. These Jews appear lost between a cosmopolitan and humanistic ideology, which rapidly disappears before the advance of fascist nationalism, and the decline of Hassidism. Suspended between two worlds which are in themselves about to disappear, these Jews resemble a new "Generation of the Desert", whose journeys take them to the nowhere of permanent exile.