A review of Aharon Appelfeld’s “Poland, a Green Land”

Acquiring Hebrew, the language of his new home, was a slow and painstaking process for Appelfeld. He felt that it was forcing him to erase his past, to forget his roots, to destroy all traces of connection he felt to his murdered mother. It was like losing his home all over again. But he was also very drawn to it, and over many years he immersed himself in reading and studying Hebrew literature and poetry, along with Yiddish and religious texts. He began by writing poems and gradually found his way to the masterful Hebrew prose he became known for: a careful way of finding the right words to both preserve his inner silence and to break it so that others could understand. Interestingly, it was his affinity with the minimalist European masters of “intellectual displacement” — Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Albert Camus — that became his most notable literary trait. Appelfeld’s niche was to be a soft-spoken Israeli writer in exile, at home. Between his harrowing themes and the pain in his soul, his writing created a fragile protective layer of contemplative detachment, for both reader and author. In perhaps his most famous novella, “Badenheim 1939” (1978), Appelfeld conjured up a fictional microcosm of European Jews enjoying their annual spring holiday in a beautiful Austrian spa town, in complete denial of being selected and ultimately deported to their deaths.

The hero of the novel “Poland, a Green Land” (published in Hebrew almost 20 years ago and now appearing in an English translation by Stuart Schoffman) is a middle-aged Israeli businessman, Yaakov Fein, who was never interested in his Polish-born parents’ story of surviving the Holocaust in hiding. He could be the son of one of the characters from “Badenheim 1939,” if they had somehow survived the war and moved to Tel Aviv. Yaakov grows up as a secular Israeli without any connection to his parents’ Diaspora roots, excelling as an officer in the army and successfully running the fashion shop he would inherit. The problem is that he would also inherit the roots he rejected and, one day, feel the strong urge to visit the Polish village where his parents and grandparents lived. The unspoken bond between his parents’ past and his own present suddenly manifests itself, possibly not unrelated to the fact that his marriage is emotionally hollow, and he feels estranged from his wife and his two adult daughters.

Yaakov arrives in Poland like most Israeli and other tourists, admiring the country’s many attractions and pleasures. After a few days in beautiful Krakow, he hires a reluctant taxi driver to take him to his parents’ village, called Szydowce (which means Jew Town). It is just a dot on the map, and Yaakov is told that no one lives there. The driver drops him off at a random small house that Yaakov points to, and quickly disappears. The door is opened by two beautiful women, mother and daughter. Magda is the very welcoming and hard-working owner of the farm surrounding the house. Yaakov is offered a comfortable bed and daily delicious meals, as a tourist in search of his family’s roots.

As he begins to explore the stunning countryside and meet the locals, the picture changes. It turns out that Magda, as a child, knew Yaakov’s family very well and even learned some Yiddish from his grandparents. She and Yaakov grow closer as the novel progresses, in passionate contrast to his cold relationship with his wife. Other inhabitants of the village, however, increasingly see the Israeli visitor as a threat and a reminder of the atrocity inflicted on the village’s small Jewish population during the war. The residents feel both complicit in the atrocity and doomed by its aftermath, blaming the Jews — then and now. Yaakov Fein discovers that the past and the present are not two separate entities but a continuum of events and emotions. As he observes the local river he is drawn to every day, he finds that “the waters revealed things that were hidden from him or that he didn’t want to know.”

Despite some stilted dialogue and a highly stylized characterization of Yaakov and Magda’s sexual relationship, “Poland, a Green Land” is a compelling novel. It is written with Appelfeld’s characteristic economy of language and powerful imagery, taking the reader on a journey to a man’s hidden urge to understand his parents’ past, and thus his own life. In a conversation with Philip Roth in 1988, Appelfeld said: “At first I tried to run away from myself and from my memories, to live a life that was not my own and to write about a life that was not my own. But a hidden feeling told me that I was not allowed to flee from myself, and that if I denied the experience of my childhood in the Holocaust, I would be spiritually deformed. Only when I reached the age of 30 did I feel the freedom to deal as an artist with those experiences.”

With deep wisdom and sensitivity, this novel mirrors and realizes this insight, by exploring the tragic consequences of denying one’s inner truth. Appelfeld’s unique literary achievement is his ability to also include the perpetrators of the crimes against humanity and their descendants in this psychological link between past and present.

Elena Lappin is the author of the story collection “Foreign Brides,” the novel “The Nose” and a memoir, “What Language Do I Dream In?”

By Aharon Appelfeld. Translated by Stuart Schoffman.