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Reviewers and critics often invoke Franz Kafka when interpreting Aharon Appelfeld’s narrative style. The topos has basis in fact: Appelfeld wrote about his debt to Kafka on many occasions, beginning with MASOT B'GUF RISHON (1979). Critics Yigal Schwartz, Emily Budick, Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi, David Suchoff and Emily Shacham have explicated a variety of interconnections.
The late bildungsroman HA-ISH SHE-LO PASAK LISHON of 2010 (THE MAN WHO NEVER STOPPED SLEEPING, 2017), which describes in striking detail Erwin-Aharon’s engagement with literature as a newly arrived refugee, provokes us to reconsider Appelfeld’s literary genealogy, and to reexamine how his narrative style relates to that of Kafka and others. This paper examines Erwin’s three main literary activities. First: copying. Erwin spends months and even years copying out biblical verses, in particular from Genesis, Samuel, and Psalms. I analyze Appelfeld’s fascinating descriptions of this copying as a magical and archeological process of becoming acquainted with an ancient alphabet. Second: reading. Erwin reads Agnon’s “In the Prime of her Life” and TEHILA, and Hesse’s SIDDHARTHA. But Kafka’s stories play a unique role, because it was about Kafka that Erwin’s father says, “That is how you have to write today.” I ask: does Erwin adopt his father’s imperative? Third: writing. In one of the penultimate chapters, Erwin breaks through his paralysis and writes several pages of a memoir I examine how Erwin’s reading and copying shape the mechanics of this text that unexpectedly bursts forth in the final pages—its themes, paratactic syntax and associative style--and of Appelfeld's novel as a whole.