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PARTISAN REVIEW
In further bitterness, the narrator hears again his father's voice: "In a
few generations people will remember us and say,Jewish Communism was
the true Communism. Everyone was devoted, heart and soul, to the end."
As for his other parent: "My mother didn't speak much. But her mute face
said, Nothing will force us to abandon our commitment to reforming the
world."
In
Beyond Despair,
a collection of essays published a few years ago,
Appelfeld writes:
Who can redeem the fears, the pains, the tortures, and the hidden
beliefs from the darkness? Who will take that great mass which
everyone simply calls the 'dreadful horror' and break it up into
those tiny precious particles? ... In their explicit wickedness, the
murderers reduced the Jew to anonymity, a number, a creature with
no face....Art constantly challenges the process by which the indi–
vidual person is reduced
to
anonymity....
Appelfeld has brilliantly set himself the novelistic task of stripping his
prose down to a bareness that adumbrates his protagonists' lives, while at
the same time meticulously amassing details that will restore erased human
particularity. As a result, an uncanny aliveness grips the reader, Appelfeld's
high-tension trademark.
The isolated man on the train, the narrator of
The Iron Tracks,
meets
other isolated men and women in the towns-Mina, singer of songs; Stark,
whose cabin once served as their meeting place;Jacob Kron, who is writ–
ing a book on melancholy. From the
Ii
tany of names of those the narrator
meets on his rounds (we learn who is a Jew, who a half-Jew, who hates
Jews, who reveres Jews) there rises up the smell and feel of what it means
to be obsessed with Jews and with their fate.
Here is a conversation between the narrator and a man who gives him
a kiddush cup, used to hold sacramental wine:
"We aren't going to live forever. So I want to give you something
of my own, even now. This vessel, or whatever you want to call it,
belonged to my Jewish ancestors. My mother gave it to me, and [ have
kept it all these years. The truth is it has become a burden ."
"Why to me?" I tremble.
"Because you're a Jew, aren't you?"
