If Thomas Mann were alive today he would write a book like The Healer - accurate as to detail and emotion, existential, apocalyptic, written with the ease of genius. This is a classic period piece about pre-Holocaust Central Europe by a brilliant Romanian-born Israeli writer, Aharon Appelfeld, who lost his parents in the Holocaust and who himself survived “by living in the forest.” The Healer is a complex (though deceptively, masterfully simple) portrait in soft pastels ostensively about a family of middle-class Viennese Jews on the eve of World War II, but in fact about impending genocide.
Caught by the artist's brush at the twilight of a personal tempest, the family of Felix Katz arrives in a small village nestled with in the Carpathian Mountains to seek help for his strangely ill daughter Helga who is fading from inchoate despair. An accomplished if now fatally disinterested pianist, young Helga is brought to the Healer, and elderly man of faith, by her parents, themselves assimilated secular Jews for whom this pilgrimage is a gesture of last resort, not only demeaning but baffling.
Unconscious despair
Like the protagonist of Mann's Magic Mountain, Helga is perilously near death, half-consciously suicidal as she is found nearly frozen in the forest one night after wandering away form the inn where she is awaiting the Healer. She seems to be the very antithesis of the Nietzschean “will to power,” of the misnamed “life-force” worshiped by the forces of death whose vulgar Spenglerian venom would soon destroy sensitive, artistic creatures like her with diabolical frenzy. In the novel, Helga's fate seems sealed from the outset - as if in some sinister way the imminent annihilation of her people were being anticipated in her frail body, its inevitability never questioned.
But Helga is no philosopher. Neither does she resist, intellectually or physically, the course that fate seems to have handed to her. Unlike Mann's rather similarly doomed protagonist, she seeks no penultimate refuge in love or even in its counterfeit, infatuation. She does not question the place of innocence in the universe. She suffers her semiconscious fate with equanimity. As she turns to her mother, regressively for advice and comfort, she seems to seek the womb destructively, pathetically, gently lost. It is difficult to hold her unconscious despair against her; it is rather more tempting to fault the inscrutable Henrietta, Helga's stern mother, for having brought the girl to such a state.
Unbridgeable gulf
Yet it is hard to make a judgment about Henrietta, for she is painted obliquely, unobjectively, through the eyes of her unloving husband, Felix. His volcanic, if masked, hostility against her every move bespeaks a lifelong rage against the absence of any tenderness from her. Orphaned through both a loveless marriage and the absence of religious faith, Felix is the quintessential antihero: yearning for nothing except perhaps for nothingness itself which condemned to tantalizing consciousness and an inability to rationalize his patently mediocre existence.
While no phenomenologist, it is Felix who ponders the implications of his, and his wife's,
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