330
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Black rage," Hersch tells us, "is in as a cultural style for white middle–
class kids."
There must be some young people in the Reston, Virginia communi–
ty Hersch writes about who see beyond the circumscribed world of their
friends and their school, who read, explore the past, and dream of a larger
future, who will invent, extend, and preserve something worth preserving.
One hopes so, but they are nowhere to be found between the covers of this
book and nothing it tells us about the schools where they spend most of
their adolescence suggests their presence. And as long as American public
education fails to provide at least the opportunity for some light to shine
through the thickets of mediocrity that surround the schools, some
inducement for those who can to rise above the ordinary, it will fail those
of the young who might profit from what used to be meant by a liberal
education.
It's this paucity of intellectual experience that most strikingly charac–
terizes the young lives that are described in this book. Like the unreliable
narrator of fiction (think of Ring Lardner's "Haircut" or Kazuo Ishiguro's
The Remains
of
the Day),
Patricia Hersch has told us something beyond what
she intended.
RITA KRAMER
Going O ver the Ground
T HE IRON T RACKS.
By
Aharon Appelfeld. Schocken Books. $21.00
The ten translated novels of Aharon Appelfeld have explored extraordinary
corners of Holocaust darkness. Jews trapped in denial of their pariah status
deceive themselves in
Badenheim
1939, Jews obsessively concerned with
returning to their "homes" where they will be caught in the killing
machines stumble to destruction in
To
the Land of the Cattails,
and Jews
whose post-Holocaust lives are hardened and cruel live blindly like the
protagonist of
The Immortal Barifuss.
In his latest novel,
The Iron Tracks,
Appelfeld explores the necessi ty and the inadequacy of revenge.
A man at first as featureless as Kafka's K. rides trains through the
Austrian countryside, descending at certain out-of-the-way stops on his
itinerary. He is grateful for pitifully small comforts in one village or anoth–
er-a good buffet served in the local inn, a welcome cup of coffee at a
station, here or there a familiar face. He keeps a strict schedule, savoring
sameness, though sometimes he breaks down, gives way to melancholy,
