BOOKS
141
In this respect, writers like Appelfeld and the Eastern dissidents
have come out of a situation less favorable to living and more favor–
able to writing- except, of course, where rigid censorship throttles
all independent work. Hence their fiction has less to do with the
minutiae of living. For the terrors of the holocaust and communism
have brought them to the abyss of contemporary experience. If, like
Dostoyevsky, who saw the connection between pathology and poli–
tics, the dissidents have created a fiction at the junction of history
and psychology, it has been because they have been part of a world
where history and psychology meet.
Appelfeld's subject is nothing less than the holocaust. And if his
treatment is somewhat oblique, almost allegorical, it is, I presume,
because the holocaust is too big, too gruesome, too mindless, to lend
itself easily to normal narrative procedures. Thus
Badenheim
is not an
actual account of any recognizable element of the holocaust. What
Appelfeld has captured in his semi-imaginary story of vacationers at
a summer spa preparing for their shipment to the East on a cattle
train is the peculiar combination of the political destiny and the
unconsciousness of that destiny among German and Austrian Jews,
particularly of the middle class. Indeed, it is a combination of
awareness and lack of awareness characteristic of so many people
and so many questions. It was in a vague way the state of mind of
American Jews and, in fact, of American opinion at the time of the
holocaust. And it is also the condition of our thinking about most
critical problems today. Appelfeld catches it by never bringing in the
holocaust-except by suggesting, but no more than suggesting, its
terrors at the end of the novel- but by seizing its essence. Thus un–
consciousness is rendered through the highly stylized frivolity and
pettiness of the characters and what they do; while consciousness is
conveyed by a haunting sense of doom, mostly atmospheric and
metaphoric. For example, the East as destiny and destination is
constantly referred to, sometimes grimly, but mostly as a new land,
somewhere in Poland, full of hidden promise and unknown dis–
appointments, particularly for the Polish Jews in Badenheim to
whom the whole thing means going home again to end their lives.
The effect is to create a mood of sadness and pity and helplessness,
building slowly to the end, which comes suddenly and is unnerving,
in the way events that are not directly experienced hit us.
Yet there are no political figures, no Nazis, no Jewish leaders
among the central characters. Who are these people who by some
miracle of the imagination convey the essence of the holocaust? - a
