by “God is in the sky,” the grandfather of young Ahron Appelfeld told him, “and there is nothing to fear.” Appelfeld was born into a middle-class Jewish family in 1932 in what is now Ukraine; but by 1938 “the ground was burning under our feet”, after which he and his parents were sent to a Nazi labor camp. He managed to escape in 1942, aged 10; he never saw his parents again, and died in Israel in 2018.
Those brief facts inform Appelfeld’s writing. Being labeled a “Holocaust writer” was “upsetting”, but it was a designation supported by many of his books, including the three reissued by Penguin Modern Classics this week. But their approach to that infinite subject is always distant, not direct.
It is his most famous novel Badenheim 1939 (1980, translated by Dalya Bilu), a very effective analogy of the crushing effect of the Holocaust in wartime Europe which shows that hope can be worse than despair. Each line is loaded with bitter irony, starting with the first: “Spring returned to Badenheim.” For the Jewish population in this Austrian holiday town, this means preparing for a “holiday invasion” – and it seems natural to them that the sanitation department will want to get involved, to make sure everything is fine .
But Jews must register with the department soon, to help them resettle. “We’re going to Poland soon,” one man tells his children. “Imagine – Poland.” Three short vignettes of the characters of the town – each scene ending with another nail hammered in – terror encroached passively. “It seemed that another time, from somewhere else, had invaded the town and was quietly establishing itself.”
Uneasiness is well considered i Badenheim 1939. The irony of writing about the Holocaust may seem like a strange subject, but if anyone is qualified to judge, it’s Appelfeld. He is not accusing Jews of willful blindness to what was to come; what was coming was far beyond human reason. “Kill your common sense and you might start to understand,” says one character. It reminded me of Primo Levi’s early experience in a concentration camp, when a guard whisked away an icicle that Levi had broken to quench his thirst. When Levi asked why, the guard replied: “Hier ist kein warum.” Here there is no reason.
Appelfeld’s time in the labor camp is ‘a pulsing darkness that will always be locked inside me’
Appelfeld’s 1989 novel Katerina (translated by Jeffrey M Green) is stranger still than Badenheim 1939but ultimately no less satisfying. It opens in a simple, fable-like style – “My name is Katerina, and I’ll be 80 years old soon” – as it tells the story of her life as a Ruthenian (East Slavic) growing up in the 1880s. She is taught to be suspicious of Jews – “nothing is easier than to hate the Jews” – but when she becomes pregnant and is taken in by a Jewish family, she questions her prejudices. But anti-Semitism, we know, does not lie down quietly.
Although Appelfeld’s restrained style is perfectly suited to the distractions Badenheimfor a novel like Katerina – filled with horror and violence – doesn’t work so well at first. But as Katerina’s story moves into the 20th century, and turns into a chilling allegory, it achieves a satisfying force that overcomes the weakness of style.
There is much to be learned about Appelfeld’s approach to writing in his memoirs A Life Story (1999, translated by Aloma Halter). First of all, he distinguishes between the memory and the imagination of a writer, which, with the right handling, are not in tension with each other but in a synthesis.
Appelfeld’s early childhood was a time full of joy – overflowing with bowls of strawberries, and Jews who “furnished their rooms with expensive and uncomfortable furniture” – which was suddenly cut short. But we don’t get a direct insight into the time Appelfeld spent in the labor camp. It refers to a “pulsing darkness that will always be locked within me”. What happened there is “printed within my body and not in my memory”: a physical response, not a conscious intellectual response.
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After escaping from the camp, he lived in circles before moving to Israel after the war, where “oblivion found fertile ground”. For many Jews, the land represented “the obliteration of memory, a complete personal transformation and a complete identification with this narrow strip of land”. This tells us a lot, and explains Appelfeld’s disdain for the “idealization” he found in much Israeli literature; he learned Hebrew there but only under protest. (His family spoke German and Yiddish.)
Appelfeld’s honesty and clarity are models for other writers to emulate. Perhaps it was the loss of his mother tongue in part that locked those years in the camp in Appelfeld’s memory. But Hebrew gave him a way to write these books – beautiful books full of pain – and we can be grateful for that.
• Badenheim 1939, Katerina and A Life Story is published by Penguin Modern Classics (all £9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order copies for £9.29 each at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
