VENGEANCE WAS HIS

IN AHARON APPELFELD'S NOVEL, A SURVIVOR SEARCHES FOR A MURDEROUS NAZI OFFICER

Author: By Bill Marx

Date: SUNDAY, February 15, 1998

Page: E1

Section: Books

Appelfeld's oblique technique suggests that, for him, re-creating (or imagining) the death camps is an act of aesthetic hubris, an attempt to fashion reassuring order out of a chaos that not only denied its victims elemental humanity but also eradicated Eastern European Jewish culture. The reticence also grows out of the writer's own hellish experience: As a child of 8, he escaped from a camp, and his books recapitulate his own trauma, his own disengagement from and return to the world. In interviews, Appelfeld insists that he could not articulate his wartime experience except through various fictional doppelgangers.

Eleven of Appelfeld's novels have been translated into English, each presenting a shattering experience of dissolution and re-creation, terse dramas of personal and cultural breakdown that may or may not be followed by a tenuous rebirth. In early novels, such as ``Badenheim 1939'' and ``Age of Wonders,'' the author portrays the Jews as an assimilated collective, a tribe of smug dreamers blind to the dangers of being different, even as they watch friends and neighbors hauled off to the unknown. Self-denial -- for the sake of political universalism or cultural assimilation -- was represented as a destructive temptation for European Jewry. But this double-edged view garnered these books praise and controversy, the latter summed up in critic Ruth Wisse's charge that Appelfeld's books are ``pitiless moral fables, more damning of the victims than the crime committed against them.''

His most recent novels, including ``For Every Sin'' and ``Katerina,'' focus on individuals who undergo dissolution and tentative resurrection by coming to terms, through memory, with an apocalyptic past. Though more haunting than his earlier fiction, these novels have raised fewer critical hackles, perhaps because the transparency of Appelfeld's initial parables has given way to the obliqueness of his stylistic influences -- the Bible and Samuel Beckett. In a postwar Europe violently cleansed of Jews, Appelfeld's survivors are paradoxical ghosts: They search for signs of life while embodying a dead culture's silence, aphasia souls wrenched out of time, their dreams gripping them with savage force.

``The Iron Tracks'' boasts one of the most repressed of Appelfeld's homeless keepers of the faith. For 40 years after the war, Erwin Siegelbaum has traveled by train through the small towns of a virulently anti-Semitic Austria, finding solace in drink, warm baths, unfeeling sexual affairs, and the dream of murdering the Nazi who killed his parents, communists who had rejected their Jewish ancestry. Siegelbaum makes a living by finding antique Hebrew books and artifacts that his wealthy backers send back to Jerusalem. More important, his annual contact with former communist comrades and Austria's beleaguered Jews is part of an attempt to conjure up a makeshift congregation, an effort to maintain ``a strange hopefulness. As if our end were not extinction but a sort of constant renewal.''

Of course, Siegelbaum's ritualized pilgrimage is a parody of community as well as religious illumination. His annual trip isn't about rebirth but about withdrawal: It's a metaphysical mopping-up action propelled by fear and forgetfulness. ``I am a creature of the tracks. Every time the whip lands on my back, I board a train and flee,'' confesses Siegelbaum. Self-inflicted wounds -- guilt over surviving his parents, communism's betrayal of Judaism -- mingle with a paranoia memorably articulated by the peripatetic narrator's rich friend, Max: ``Our people must not sleep in a room without a secret exit, he said. I agree with him with all my heart.'' This is a nightmarish version of faith built on persecution, some of it imagined, some of it all too real. (At one point, Siegelbaum runs into a crippled German veteran who says that not enough Jews were killed in the Holocaust.)

When exile is predicated on looking over your shoulder, religion defined by the hatred seething around it, exhaustion becomes a way of life. Appelfeld's prose lacks the lyric intensities of Beckett's, but his simple language is filled with the resonance of the unsaid, the fatiguing pressure of the withheld. Siegelbaum's laconic memories of the Nazi labor camp are attempts to ward off emotion: ``Mother worked in the sewing shop, and at night she would bring me pieces of bread at great risk. I asked her not to do it, but she wouldn't listen. One night she, too, was shot near a fence.''

By the end of ``The Iron Tracks,'' Siegelbaum's 40-year cocoon has crumbled. His political and religious friends are dead or are relocating to Israel; the bits and pieces of Jewish history that provided a lucrative excuse for his train trips are impossible to find. His business competitors have learned where to look for the best pieces. Siegelbaum allows himself to discover the home of the Nazi officer, named Nachtigel, who killed his parents, and shoots the old man in cold blood.

The assassination brings no lightning stroke of revelation. ``As in all my clear and drawn-out nightmares, I saw the sea of darkness, and I knew that my deeds had neither dedication nor beauty,'' concludes the now purposeless Siegelbaum. Appelfeld's courage as a writer is that he refuses to offer comfort or closure -- aside from finding words for inarticulate pain, his characters provide little inspiration. His wandering Jewish undead are not only the remnants of faith but the faith in remnants. In ``The Iron Tracks,'' Appelfeld goes one step further than the acceptance of dissolution in his earlier books. Here he suggests that revenge is futile because it is too late, that nothing can bring peace to a people who have been displaced out of their world.