BOOKS
145
The Immortal Bartfuss
by Aharon Appelfeld takes place at the
other end of the human spectrum - in the post-Holocaust world that
barely conceals its self-questioning, far from the smug and self–
reassuring chatter of English suburbia . Appelfeld's fiction , like Less–
ing's, is also spare, and resonant with meanings and references that
lie behind the text. In fact the unbearable weight of the Holocaust
hangs over this short novel about survivors in Israel who cannot
recover their lives. Bartfuss, the main character, is immortal be–
cause he survived. He lives with another survivor and their two
daughters in an empty, paranoid, quarrelsome household.
In Italy, after the Liberation, Bartfuss, and many of the other
people in the novel, lived on the margins of society, engaged in il–
legal trades and transactions. In Israel, they have no human relation
to their new country or its inhabitants . For Bartfuss, even sex is anx–
iously meaningless, as he falls into chance encounters with women
who also are drifting through the cracks of society. His accidental
meetings with men, too, are fraught with unarticulated memories of
the experience that dehumanized them . There are moments when
Bartfuss seems to recapture his feelings in relation to his mentally
retarded daughter. But they fade into the grayness of Bartfuss's life
as he wanders from one gratuitous meeting to another. Indeed, in
the unconnected nature of his associations and his conversations
with the survivors he meets on the street or in cafes , Bartfuss seems
to be a reincarnation of Camus's Meursault or Gide's Lafcadio and
Edouard, though unlike Gide and Camus, Appelfeld has his anti–
hero formed in the cauldron of the Holocaust - which makes his acts
not totally gratuitous.
It
is impossible to summarize the narrative, for, in a sense ,
there is no narrative . Bartfuss drifts every morning from his house
where, while he is away, his wife, his two daughters , and his son-in–
law search for his secret money hidden in the cellar. He stops for cof–
fee in a few cafes, talks to some vagrant women, wanders over to the
sea where his mind sinks into its immense turbulence, goes back to a
cafe, bumps into an old surviving crony who also worked some
racket in Italy . He stops some women, all survivors from Italy, who
do not remember him. Limply he trudges home , wraps himself in a
blanket and falls into a death-like sleep.
Behind the mood of the novel is the memory of the Holocaust,
though it is not clear - as it should not be in a work of fiction - how
widespread Appelfeld feels the effect of the Holocaust is on the lives
of the survivors. Obviously, however, the Holocaust has been in-
