BOOKS
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Appelfeld makes this obsessive, grayed-out pursuit end in a stalking and
shooting that feels as flat and affectless as the unending round of train trav–
el that precedes it. Such revenges are doomed to be emptied out by the
horror of events that created the need for revenge in the first place. The
reader is made to feel the heartbreaking inadequacy of the act after so
many years of bi tter loss, devoid of mother, father, home, and every joy.
How can such loss be avenged by seeing a man, crippled and bent with age,
fall face down in the snow?
In Appelfeld's novels, there is no ray of hope or light of the self–
transcendent sort offered by ordinary novels. All is as dark as an eyewi tness
Holocaust report. Why, then, do we read these novels? We read Appelfeld
for the mastery that alone can illuminate the misery of history. Like the
perermial rider of the train, he goes over and over the ground, emerging at
certain stations to deal with what lurks there. Linguistic and structural
mastery is one form of transcendence. Great imagining, without the lies of
forced emotion, is another. Of such paradoxes Appelfeld creates his art, the
novelist's austere balm for civilization's mortal wound.
NORMA ROSEN
Life after Death
AFTER THE HOLOCAUST : REBUILDING JEWISH LIVES IN POSTWAR
GERMANY.
By Michael Brenner, translated by Barbara Harshav.
Princeton University Press. $24.95
When Nazi concentration camps were liberated in the winter and spring of
1945, Jewish survivors from across Europe were still not quite free.
Instead, they, along with many non-Jews, became Displaced Persons, and
were transferred to a series of
DP-Lager
within occupied Germany, the
majori ty in the American Zone. In 1946, the number of Jewish DPs
increased from 40,000 to 145,000, and by the summer of 1947, approxi–
mately 182,000 Jewish DPs were living throughout Germany. As Michael
Brenner has noted in his compelling account,
After the Holocaust: Rebuilding
Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany,
"It
is surely one of the ironies of history
that it was Germany, of all places, that became a haven for Jewish refugees
in the firs t years after the war."
Although for many Jewish DPs-indeed, for a clear majority–
Germany served merely as a way station
en route
to Palestine or the United
