The Healer     by Aharon Appelfeld, Translated by Jeffrey M. Green Original title: Be-’et uve-’onah ahat Original language: Hebrew Country: Israel   Published by Trafalgar Square Format: Hardcover ISBN: 029784038X List Price: £13.00 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £13.00 Published by Grove Weidenfeld Format: 220 pages Not available for ordering

In The Healer Appelfeld takes us on a voyage to the Carpathian mountains on the eve of the Second World War.

A family is taking a journey from the urban splendour of Vienna into the wilds in search for a cure which medical science is unable to offer. Their brilliant daughter, Helga, a talented musician, has lapsed into a mental torpor from which even Viennese psychoanalysis can provide no respite.

In desperation her mother, Henrietta, persuades her businessman husband, Felix, that there might be salvation to be found amongst the healers of her ancestral mountains. The very figure of the assimilated Jew, as Appelfeld puts it, Felix is reluctant, but after repeated entreaties and in the face of the failure of medical science he agrees to the venture and the family set out on the arduous trip. On arrival at their destination and disgusted by the reminders of his own past, the poverty and absence of modern amenities such as electricity, Felix watches as his wife slots into a routine of caring for Helga and visiting the healer who instructs them both in the importance of returning to a religious life. Felix sees only imposture and superstition in this regime and clings ardently to his secularism and his memories of life in Vienna.

Cut off in the mountains by the weather, however, aspects of Felix’s personality are systematically undermined. His son Karl has been a failure at school and had been a source of shame to the father. Outside the urban environment, however, Felix begins to see qualities in his son which hitherto he had ignored. Karl’s gargantuan appetite for food and servant girls comes to be a secret source of pride, but he is stung by the son’s accusations that it is Felix who is responsible for Helga’s illness, for turning her into a ’Jewish weakling’.

During their time of exile he comes to realise that his wife too has been transformed in her efforts to affect a cure for Helga. In his increasing detachment from the familial dramas that unfold he begins to detect his own emotional neglect of the children as they grew up. His own strivings for recognition in a secular world have somehow led him here. His own selfish desire for his daughter to become a famous musician have brought about her illness.

Observing those around him, the merchants and peasants of the region, he occasionally glimpses moments of shared heritage in their mutual imprisonment in the mountains, but he still lusts for Vienna and at the first opportunity he takes Karl with him back to the big city and its cinemas and theatres. In so doing he breaks up the family. A temporary gesture, he suggests, but the story gives every indication that in clinging to his secular identity he has lost his wife and daughter forever to their faith, and himself stumbled back into a world of darkness where even healers will offer no succour. In this sense the journey of Felix’s family becomes itself an allegory for the gathering darkness. The spare prose renders a complex worldview and a haunted foreboding crackles through the book’s pages.

’After a prolonged silence, he spoke about foreign parts again, about the expanse of foreignness surrounding us on every side and destroying everything good. "We constantly retreat before that cruel invader, though we no longer have anywhere left to flee." The old man spoke in a whisper, but Henrietta caught every word. The subject was clear to her as though that language had been hers from time immemorial. He spoke of the urgent need to withdraw into our bright, warm homes. The outside is a lie. A lie. He closed his eyes.’ p141