Aharon Appelfeld

La lecture de l'écrivain Aharon Appelfeld, qui, enfant juif, a fui sur les routes de l'Europe, orphelin et sans protection, sert de support à la réflexion du vécu de jeunes exilés venus en France. La nécessité du silence, de la croyance et du deuil se fait ainsi mieux comprendre

La Règle du Jeu, numéro 71, dossier "La dépression : mal du siècle ?", 2020.

L'article consiste en une analyse de la symptomatologie d'un épisode dépressif majeur à travers des auteurs comme Philip Roth, Kafka, Stéphane Mosès, Alain Ehrenberg, Aharon Appelfeld, Yehuda Amichaï et Claude Olievenstein.

Hébreu, du sacré au maternel (Abstract in English)


Prefaces by Pierre-Marc de Biasi and Julia Kristeva

How is a new mother tongue formed? What are the materials and the circumstances that permit the appearance of a “new” mother tongue? According to what process does an ancient language appear and “modernize” in order to be adopted and practiced by its speakers? An everyday language whose basis is spiritual, cultural and religious, Hebrew allows one to assess the genesis of a contemporary mother tongue. Proceeding with an archeological search which leads us from the present to the most ancient strata, the author dialogs with two of the greatest Israeli writers, Aharon Appelfeld and Sami Michael, enters into the lexicographic “factory” of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, and returns to the philosophical foundations of secular Hebrew by means of a new reading of Baruch Spinoza’s Compendium of Hebrew Grammar.


“Rarely has a work been produced with such skill and originality over such vast fields, and, by means of an interdisciplinary approach, responded to political and ethical challenges which are as current as they are essential.”
Julia Kristeva

“From psychoanalysis to semiotics, from intertextuality to the history of ideas, from genetic criticism to philosophy texts, this text prompts us to a happy and generous effective transdisciplinarity as to a veritable intellectual feast.”
Pierre-Marc de Biasi

This article examines the use of central elements of the Jewish religious repertoire and transcendental realm, such as prophecy or revelation, within the aesthetic secular realm of musical avant-garde and modern Hebrew literature. By focusing on two case studies, I attempt to shed new light on the question of Jewish secular culture. Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), an Austrian Jewish composer, was born into an assimilated Viennese family and converted to Protestantism before returning to Judaism in the 1930s while escaping to the United States. Aharon Appelfeld (1932–2018), an Israeli Jewish writer, was born in Czernowitz to assimilated German-speaking parents, survived the Holocaust and emigrated to Israel in 1946. My claim is that in their works both composer and author testify to traumatic experiences that avoid verbal representation by: (1) subverting and transgressing conventional aesthetic means and (2) alluding to sacred tropes and theological concepts. In exploring Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron and Appelfeld’s Journey into Winter among others, this article shows how the transcendent sphere returns within the musical and poetic avant-garde (musical prose, 12-tone composition, prose poem, non-semantic or semiotic fiction) as a “sound” of old traditions that can only be heard through the voices of a new Jewish culture.

טקסט של הרצאה שנתתי בדיוק לפני שנה בערב שהתקיים לכבוד אפלפלד, בנוכחותו, באוניברסיטת תל אביב, ביזמתה היפה של נחמה ורבין. היה ערב מאוד מיוחד, בעיקר בדברי התגובה של אפלפלד, שאני חושש שלא הוקלטו. עבורי - השיחה איתו אחר כך היתה גם השיחה האחרונה בינינו, והיא היתה נרגשת ומשמעותית מאוד.
בכל אופן - הקובץ כאן הם הדברים שלי באותו הערב. פחות חשובים, אבל גם כן משהו.
תודה ליעקב מאיר שהזכיר לי היום את הטקסט הזה והציע לי להעלות אותו.
במבט לאחור יש בזה גם סוג של הספד, למורה אהוב וקרוב.
תהא נשמתו צרורה בצרור החיים

Immigration highlights the question of language and raises the dilemma of the relationship between the mother tongue and the language of the new land. For writers this question is even more crucial: should they write in the language of the place and its readers? Immigration to Israel is not exceptional, of course. What choices are open to those writers, and how are they to convey the complexities inherent in the formation of an Israeli identity? This paper focuses on two writers who demonstrate the role played by the " chosen language " in the cultural construction and deconstruction of Israeli identity. Tuvia Ruebner emigrated from Bratislava, Aharon Appelfeld from Bukovina. Ruebner shifted from German to Hebrew and back to German; Appelfeld wrote only in Hebrew. In both cases, their arrival in Israel enabled them to survive. However, the loss of their families in Europe continued to haunt them. Inspired by Walter Benjamin's concept of 'translation' and responding to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of 'minor literature' , the paper shows how their work conveys a mul-tilayered interrelation between national and foreign languages, and between images of exile and homeland, past, present and future – all of which shed light on contemporary issues of Israeli identity.

This review essay, on the late Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld's novel "Blooms of Darkness", was published in SHOFAR: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, in 2011. I include it here, along with an earlier essay, "Aharon Appelfeld and the Problem of Holocaust Fiction," as an act of homage to a man I met only once or twice, and knew only slightly, but whose work I admire immensely.

The article reinterprets 'The Iron Tracks' by Aharon Appelfeld as a work of Lurianic Kabbalah adapted to the world after the Shoah. It is a reality of collapsed transcendence in which no divinity or ethics hold universal validity. As in Lurianism, this world contains entrapped sparks of former transcendence: dispersed Jewish survivors, artefacts of Jewish life and a Jewish Communist organization. Appelfeld portrays a post-survival world based on permanent repetition and unrepented guilt. The gist of his novel, however, lies in the slim possibility of redemption which the main protagonist, Erwin Siegelbaum, opens up with an act of vengeance on a war criminal.

En dan nu Het tijdperk der wonderen (oorspronkelijke titel: Tor ha-pela'ot, Tel Aviv 1978, uit het Hebreeuws vertaald door Kees Meiling, Ambo/Anthos, Amsterdam 2008, 240 pag., €19,95). Het heeft alle ingrediënten in zich van een goede Appelfeld. Het bestaat uit twee delen, waarvan het eerste in de jaren 1930 speelt en het tweede zo'n dertig jaar later. De hoofdpersoon is dezelfde: Bruno, eerst in de gestalte van een jochie, zoon van een Oostenrijks-joodse schrijver, later als een volwassen man, woonachtig in Jeruzalem. De beide delen verschaffen voldoende hints naar de periode die daartussen ligt (die van de oorlogsjaren) om te beseffen wat daarin is gebeurd. Opnieuw toont Appelfeld zijn meesterschap: hij beschrijft de Sjo'a zelf niet, alleen de aanloop ernaartoe en de herinnering eraan, toch is die zwarte periode alomtegenwoordig in het boek.