Revisiting Appelfeld’s Earliest Stories

• In Event: Aharon Appelfeld’s "Secret" Languages

Abstract

Revisiting Appelfeld’s earliest stories, I will attempt to show some principles of the author’s early craft. The renewed encounter with these stories, reveals his stylistic and linguistic hesitations as he gropes for a way to tell a story. The almost abstract metaphors for writing, which are all on the continuum of simple, manual actions like knitting or packing, provide a window into Appelfeld’s perception of art as labor. His lower-class heroes, says Yigal Schwartz, are unable to form any kind of emotional or libidinal connections. They don’t yet have a grasp on their new lives after the war, wandering almost mutely in a liminal space. Al Filreis argues that this kind of amnesic space is made into a theme throughout these first stories.  I will focus my discussion on two short stories in particular: the untranslated “Smoke” and “Bertha,” which is available in English. The first is characterized by its visceral imagery, its unidiomatic Hebrew, its intense self-consciousness about the weight of proper nouns, and its fragmented, awkward narrative movement that sometimes seems deliberate.  Despite its different setting and focus, “Bertha” shares some of the qualities of “Smoke,” but in addition, its imagistic structure serves as a blueprint for the untranslated novel, THE SKIN AND THE GOWN, which Appelfeld wrote more than a decade later. 

Author

• Nili Rachel Scharf Gold, University of Pennsylvania