At times, it’s difficult to imagine Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld not living like a man who has just emerged from a movie theater, stumbling from place to place and unable to properly adjust to the bright, natural light of the real world.
In “A Table For One,” an artistic and literary collaboration with his son, the gifted painter Meir Appelfeld, the elder Appelfeld chronicles his life as a novelist and patron of the many Jerusalem cafes he utilized as writing rooms, social halls and lifelines back to the Europe he recalled from his youthful days.
The book is one of two recently released — the second being “The Story of a Life.”
Appelfeld was born in Czernowitz, Bukovina (now Ukraine) in 1932. The war broke out when he was 7. His mother was killed, and he spent years in hiding, foraging in the forest and leading a life that “resembled that of a small animal fleeing from its hunters.”
He arrived in Israel, via Italy, in 1946, already feeling quite grown-up. “The impulse to play, which every young person has, was gone. While those of my age played around, I would stand on the sidelines, watching them in wonder.”
As an actual grownup, Appelfeld could not bring himself to play with his own children. The Holocaust took that away from him. It took that and so much more from the author and the damaged characters populating his many novels.
“A Table for One” is a moving, fascinating glimpse into Appelfeld’s world, his tedious and methodical approach to writing and his efforts to grab a hold of wisps of a past that exists only in memories.
And, it’s easy to imagine Appelfeld drifting throughout Jerusalem in a fog as thick and blurry as his son’s striking artwork. But it’s not necessarily so. After more than 100 ethereal pages, he offers a mea culpa: “Reading through these pages, it seems to me that I may have been too preoccupied with writing and myself, and not enough with people and events. It’s true that my struggle with writing absorbed my entire conscious life, yet at the same time I was a husband, the father of three children and surrounded by close friends.”
In this memoir, Appelfeld does indeed write of his family, his ghastly Holocaust experience and even his time fighting in several Israeli wars. But it’s his memories of the cafes that make up the heart of the book. The cafes are homes to European people and food and smells and gestures and dialects and languages that he couldn’t find anywhere else.
Appelfeld, a spiritual but not observant Jew, also revels in the dissipated vestiges of his youth he discovers in, of all places, Meah Sharim. His explanation is perhaps the most beautiful of the book’s many evocative passages:
“When the war broke out, I was seven. The fabric of our life was ripped to shreds. My mother was murdered and my father was taken from me. My childhood crumbled as if it had not existed. For years I neither saw my grandparents nor experienced the wonderful summers in which I had reveled in their presence. But one day, as if by chance, they were revealed to me as I was going up Agrippas Street on my way to Mahaneh Yehudah market, and I knew then that the gates of light had been opened to me … And I knew then I was now permitted to enter those gates and write what the heart remembered and what the eyes had seen.”
The younger Appelfeld’s paintings are a stark contrast of sharp angles and blurry, quasi-abstract details. In some, he has even scraped the paint from the canvas, shaping the thickly layered paint and exposing swaths of the textured canvas. His paintings absolutely won’t reprint on black-and-white newsprint. Sorry.
For any aficionado of Appelfeld’s work, “A Table For One” is a vital glimpse into the mind and musings of the world’s foremost displaced author. For anyone unfamiliar with his work who has felt compelled to read this far, I suggest a trip to the local library or bookstore to stock up on the man’s books.
“A Table For One: Under the Light of Jerusalem,” by Aharon Appelfeld with paintings by Meir Appelfeld (111 pages, The Toby Press, $29.95).
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