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Aharon Appelfeld and the Counter-NUSAḤ in Israeli Writing

Sun, December 16, 10:00 to 11:30am, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Beacon Hill 2 & 3

Abstract

Both because of his Shoah-related fictions and because of his atypical twentieth-century Hebrew style, Appelfeld was initially resisted by Israeli readers. Even some leading critics like Dan Miron were initially skeptical of Appelfeld’s fiction. Why were some readers so disturbed by pathbreaking stories and books like BADENHEIM 1939? Today most scholars of Hebrew literature recognize that BADENHEIM made a major contribution to the emergence of Israeli fiction.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Aharon Appelfeld further explained to me why his fiction provoked resistance from many Israeli readers. First, he pointed out that most of his characters don’t even speak Hebrew; their dialogue in stories and novels are implicitly translated from Yiddish, German, Polish, or Russian. Second, unlike most Israeli literati, Appelfeld emphasized the importance of hasidic writers like R. Nahman’s scribe, Nathan Sternharz. Appelfeld saw the quiet greatness of Sternharz’s Hebrew, even in the Yiddish-inflected (and sometimes “ungrammatical”) Hebrew of his letters to his son (`ALIM LE-TRUFA).
Appelfeld was a leading proponent of the counter-NUSAḤ in modern Hebrew, at odds with the tradition that many critics praised in accordance with Bialik’s theory of “Mendele’s NUSAḤ.” Appelfeld never attempted to follow the “High Road” that was inspired by the elite, neo-biblical MELITZA of the late-eighteenth-century Berlin MASKILIM (e.g., Isaac Euchel and Aharon Wolfsohn). Nor did he try to emulate the authors who began with MELITZA but ultimately transcended it and thereby supposedly “revived” modern Hebrew at the end of the nineteenth century (e.g., S. Y. Abramovitsh). Instead, Appelfeld followed the “low road” that was typified by hasidic writers (e.g., Sternharz) and their parodists (e.g., Joseph Perl and I. B. Levinsohn). That heritage has too often been scorned, even though it provided one basis for colloquial Hebrew in the twentieth century. Hence Appelfeld was not only an original Israeli author; he was one of the few critics who had a different perspective on the history of originality in Hebrew writing.

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