It was in 1984 in New Orleans that I first met Aharon Appelfeld. I had invited him to lecture at Tulane University. His plane arrived right on schedule. When he came through the gate, I had the feeling that the person I was greeting wasn't a stranger but a close, favorite relative. Smallish, round, with twinkling eyes, cherubic but at the same time almost impish, Appelfeld was gracious, courteous, and grave; soft-spoken, warm, and endearing; dignified yet humble.
In those first moments I thought to myself what a miracle it was that he was even alive. On their deadly march into Russia early in World War II, the Germans overran Czernowitz, Bukovina, then part of the Romanian sector of the Ukraine, where young Appelfeld lived with his parents. The Nazis killed his mother, and he and his father were sent to a forced labor camp, where his father perished.
Appelfeld was eight years old when those tragedies struck. For the next three years his life was imperiled. He escaped from the labor camp and survived by his wits, hiding in the forests and on the edges of villages, befriended only by prostitutes and horse thieves dodging military patrols and the viciously anti-Semitic peasantry alike. As a little Jewish boy, his life was worth less than a chewed-up herring head.
When the Russians recaptured the Ukraine in 1944, Appelfeld became a kitchen boy with an army field unit. The unit literally adopted him, and for the first time since the loss of his parents and home he had a measure of security. He remained with the unit for two years. With World War II over, Appelfeld, having just reached puberty, made his way to Italy, from whence the Jewish Brigade brought him to Palestine. There, new problems of survival and adjustment confronted him: the mastering of a new language, the move from anonymity to selfhood and the recovery of self-worth, and the need to transform his image from that of a despised homeless waif into one of a normal Jewish adolescent growing up in the Holy Land. None of it was easy for a boy who in the Ukrainian forests had become, he told me, “crippled with fear,” afraid not only of the Germans but of everything that moved.
That lovely term “the Holy Land” conjures up nineteenth-century visions of ecclesiastical and literary jaunts (Mark Twain's for example) to the land flowing with milk and honey, the birthplace of three great religions, of accounts of visits to the forbidden city of Petra and other exotic places, but for Appelfeld, Palestine at the time of his arrival in the mid-1940s was something else again. It was rapidly turning into one more combat zone. When the Israelis made their bid for independence in 1984 he was sixteen, old enough to carry a gun. He was mobilized. This first tour of duty was followed by service in the Sinai Campaign, the Six Day War, and the Yom Kippur War.
Sustained periods of military service tend to make veteran soldiers tough, cynical, and insensitive. In Appelfeld's case, they have softened him. Not weak, he is a man of peace, of compassion, and great sensitivity. When he hasn't had to go to war, he has savored life as a husband and father and as a professor of literature at Ben Gurion University in the Negev. His love of humankind suffuses his stories and novels. Like most of us, he is a product of his life experiences. Since these have been more extreme than those many of us have confronted, it is understandable that he has returned time and
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