blind to our human condition

"Appelfeld has taken this group of people spending their summer in a 'city of leisure' as an instance of the way we all of us try to keep ourselves occupied, to amuse ourselves, in order to shut up what might be too painful to acknowledge: our failures, our losses, and the inevitable march of time. It was Eliot, after all anything but a Jew, one might say, who wrote: 'Human kind cannot bear very much reality.' Appelfeld's book merely exposes a common topic of modern philosophy, one that Kierkegaard and Heidegger for example, devoted their lives to exploring and alerting us to. We live 'inauthentic' lives, say these philosophers, evading the facts of our human condition, the chief of which is death. Man needs to recognize this and change himself radically, for only thus will he, in effect, truly be able to live.

Appelfeld's take on this is typically Jewish. 'Dear Doctor Professor Heidegger', writes Saul Bellow's hero, Moses Herzog, in the novel of that name, 'I should like to know what you mean by the expression ''the fall into the quotidian". When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it occurred?' And he answers these questions himself when later he says: 'No philosopher knows what the ordinary is, has not fallen into it deeply enough'. In other words, man is more varied and complicates than Heidegger imagines. No single act can free him from his 'inauthenticity', from his confusions and contradictions. The hinhabitants of Badenhein, from this perspective, are only human beings, struggling, as all human beings do, with the complexities of their fate. Appelfeld is shocking because he does not take sides. He may be critical of Dr Landsmann for trying to dissociate himself from the fate of his fellow Jews, for insisting that there has been 'some mistake', but what of Samitzky, Dr Pappenheim, even Peter, who tries to hide at the last moment to escape deportation? Far from satirising these people, or being critical of them for not seeing what was coming, the book gives us a sense that history has simply caught them in its trap. By putting them under the microscope Appelfeld reveals how all of us are similarly caught, even if in less tragic and obvious ways, by the traps of history: we struggle to escape, to lead more meaningful lives, but we also struggle to deny that anything is wrong, and we go on living, blind to our human condition.

               Gabriel Josipovici, introduction to Aharom Appelfeld, Badenheim 39, (tr.) Penguin Modern Classics, 2005, pp. xiii-xiv.