Of the many challenges confronting the contemporary writer of fiction, among the most vexing is the problem of goodness. How does one convincingly portray goodness in an age when the twin presiding deities are irony and violence, when the most feared transgression is the sin of sentimentality? Can there be a place for a character who seems genuinely selfless, motivated by benevolence, decency, the desire to be of help?
The gold standard for such a character is Flaubert’s Félicité, the devoted servant of “A Simple Heart,” which, while ironically conflating the Holy Ghost with a worm-eaten parrot, embodies virtue and dignity in a woman the world saw only in terms of her function: Her mistress was the envy of all the neighbors because of Félicité’s loyalty and thrift.
Flaubert’s novella never left my mind as I read Aharon Appelfeld’s remarkable new novel, “Suddenly, Love.” In the characters of Ernst and Irena, I felt as if I were encountering a failed Flaubert, cared for in his last illness by Félicité, both of them transplanted to Jerusalem, both of them touched by the Holocaust. For the questions “Suddenly, Love” poses are not only those of Jewish displacement, Jewish memory and Jewish identity. Woven in are also questions of language, of the proper relationship of words to life.
Ernst is a 70-year-old retired investment broker, a witness to the camps whose daughter and first wife were murdered by the Nazis. He is a native of that area of Central Europe whose names change like the trickster characters of a folk tale — Romania, the Ukraine . . . it doesn’t really matter. He is an unpublished and scathingly self-critical writer, a man with a past that marks him as both victim and victimizer. Suffering from a debilitating illness, he employs as his housekeeper/nurse the 36-year-old Irena, born in a displaced persons’ camp near Frankfurt.
Irena might have first encountered life in such a place, but it is Ernst who suffers most from radical displacement. Irena always had a home with her loving parents, with whom she lived until their deaths. She never finished high school; her work was in old age homes. Because of her shyness and her happiness within the circumscribed world of her family, she rarely left the house on her own. Nearly illiterate, she is nonetheless visionary: “Since childhood Irena has had the ability to imagine things from afar, to describe places and people even though she had never seen them. Her mother had been frightened by that ability, and she used to say to her: ‘You mustn’t imagine things. People who imagine things end up being liars.’ ” The novel’s only false steps, and they are small ones, occur when we are told that Irena has been reading writers like the Holocaust memoirist Etty Hillesum.
Ernst’s life, unlike Irena’s, has been a life of large wanderings, large adventures, large abandonments. The first of these abandonments was his simultaneous rejection of both his family and his identity as a Jew. Here Appelfeld is returning to something he touched on in his novel “The Iron Tracks” — Jewish Communists whose greatest hatred was directed toward their fellow Jews. In giving Ernst a past as a young, militant Communist, Appelfeld deprives him of the easy position of the innocent victim and sheds light on a fascinating, deeply disturbing aspect of European Jewish life in the 1930s:
“By the age of 12, we had already learned to hate religious Jews. We would watch the way they hurried to the synagogue, speaking to one another in whispers, trading merchandise or promissory notes. . . . We were supposed to steal from the Jewish stores. . . . The violence was accompanied by a feeling of justice. We weren’t stealing for ourselves, but for the poor.”
Aware of his alienation from traditional Jewish religious life, Ernst asks Irena about her own practice. “I do what my mother did,” is her simple reply.
Soothed, cleansed and freed by Irena’s nearly silent presence, Ernst is able for the first time to return to his own past, most particularly as it is called up by his childhood memories of his grandparents, who lived almost archaically in the Carpathian Mountains. His own life with his parents, urbanized small grocers, was utterly stifling: Their passivity and grim silences made him feel as if his very breath were being denied. Gradually, through his acquaintance with Irena, who sits in a kind of stillness that is new to him, enriching rather than suffocating, he begins to understand the tragedy of his parents’ situation and their personal losses, living in a city that had no place for them, uprooted from the nourishment of the natural world and the traditions of their ancestors:
“My parents bore within them an ancient heritage from which they had been cut off. . . . Their behavior bespoke a nobility that had been diminished and had lost its value. Only during the past few months, in fact, did their silence palpably return to me. It was a silence born of a nobility that extended back for many generations, generations that have taught themselves this silence. They understood that life is short, incomprehensible and ugly and that speaking didn’t necessarily add to understanding. Unfortunately, my parents had lost the positive silence of their ancestors, the silence that is prayer and connection with the God of their fathers. What remained with them was only a barren silence, without any connection to heaven, just a noble despair.”
Under Irena’s influence, Ernst begins to write in a new way. “For many years . . . he has striven to tell the story of humanity itself. . . . But now he knows that literature begins at the well you leaned over as a child and with the black fear that looked up at you from its depths. From the puppy you patted that turned out to be rabid.”
This will require not only the treatment of a new subject but the creation of a new language in which this subject can be properly housed. And it is in exploring Ernst’s struggles with language that Appelfeld, with a light, supremely tactful touch, addresses the problem that is the curse and blessing of all writers: how, in Beckett’s words, to fail, “fail again, fail better.” “It’s important to him for his writing to be orderly and the details well chosen. . . . Years earlier he used to embellish the paragraphs with metaphors. Now he is striving for short sentences, factual, without adjectives. He has declared war against adjectives. Every time he encounters one, he uproots it.”
How closely this echoes Appelfeld’s own words about his language choices. “I have never been particularly fond of either pathos or big words,” he remarked in his memoir, “The Story of a Life.” “I loved and I still love to observe. The advantage of contemplation is that it’s devoid of words. The quiet of objects and of landscape flows toward you without imposing itself on you.”
In treating the largest of possible subjects — life, death, faith, language, identity, ethical responsibility — Appelfeld is one with Emily Dickinson’s directive, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” “Suddenly, Love” is a brilliantly hybrid creature: It has the real-life detail of the traditional novel, but it also makes us travel into the worlds of folk tales and magic, prayers and dreams. The deftness and clarity with which all this is accomplished is perfectly embodied in its last sentences: “She, for her part, will watch over him, wash him, prepare the food he enjoys, iron the clothes he likes and sit by his side. The doctor will come, and they will talk about writing, and she will reinforce the house on every side. No harmful creature will ever dare to approach the window.”
