“G od is in the sky,” the young Aharon Appelfeld’s grandfather told him, “and there is nothing to fear.” Appelfeld was born into a middle-class Jewish family in 1932 in what is now Ukraine; but by 1938 “the ground was burning beneath our feet”, and later he and his parents were taken to a Nazi labour camp. He managed to escape in 1942, aged 10; he never saw his parents again, and died in Israel in 2018.
Those short facts inform much of Appelfeld’s writing. He found it “annoying” to be labelled a “Holocaust writer”, but it was a designation supported by many of his books, including the three reissued this week by Penguin Modern Classics. But their approach to that infinite subject is always distanced, never direct.
His most famous novel is Badenheim 1939 (1980, translated by Dalya Bilu), a horribly effective analogy of the crushing effect of the Holocaust in wartime Europe that shows that hope can be worse than despair. Every line is weighted with bitter irony, beginning with the first: “Spring returned to Badenheim.” For the Jewish population of this Austrian resort town, this means preparing for an “invasion of vacationers” – and it seems natural to them that the sanitation department will want to become involved, to make sure that all is well.
But soon Jews must register with the department, to assist with relocating them. “We’ll be going to Poland soon,” one man tells his children. “Just imagine – Poland.
” Through short vignett.