Badenheim 1939     by Aharon Appelfeld, Translated by Dalya Bilu Original title: Badenhaim, ’ir nofesh Published by David R Godine Pub. Date: April 1998 Format: Paperback, 160 pages Dimensions: 0.49 x 7.50 x 4.74 in. ISBN: 0879237996 List Price: $11.95 Buy online from Amazon.com for $11.95 Published by Godine: Boston Not available for ordering Published by G.K. Hall Format: 214 pages Not available for ordering

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Appelfeld’s early life was as terrifyingly eventful and shocking as his novels are terrifyingly calm and understated; born in Romania, he had lived through the murder of his mother and his own deportation to a labour camp before he turned eight. He then escaped into surrounding forests where he survived for 3 years before the wanderings (including time in the Red Army) which eventually took him to Palestine in 1946. The marks of this past are most obvious in the settings of his novels, although living all his adult life in Israel, Appelfeld’s settings are frequently the end-of-an-era resorts, spas and crumbling hotels of Austria on the eve of the Holocaust, populated by genuinely unsuspecting, strong-willed and sometimes complacent individuals who are about to be lead to terrible, anonymous deaths — Jewish Central Europe as it was never to be again.

Badenheim 1939 is perhaps his most accomplished portrait of this world as we witness an Austrian spa town — Badenheim — preparing for the summer season and annual music festival with its full range of averagely well-to-do Jewish guests, from Dr Pappenheim the Festival director to the two respectable prostitutes Sally and Gertie. This summer will be different though; what was to be a buoyant normal summer season, filled with people from the cities with the usual mix of neuroses, longings, pettiness and generosity will begin to seize up, as the Sanitation Department carries out inspections, wanting to know ’all kinds of peculiar details’. Beginning with the inspections then there are registrations (of Jews), restrictions on movement and worse... While the book opens, tellingly enough, on the chronically ill Trude through whose eyes the world takes on the pallor and translucency of life waning, it is the Sanitation Department’s invisible growth in the book which is the real and unrecognised disease taking hold on the root of all these lives, and through which everyday reality will be steadily, irreversibly and fatally transformed.

Appelfeld conveys this gradual transformation through a limpid prose so restrained yet so eloquent that it bears what is not said like a distant rolling mist, an optical illusion which one has to double-check. What is crystal clear, though, is that these Jews have no room for disbelief or scepticism. When the pressure is on, they shield themselves not exactly with lies, but with two well-worn strategies: trust that the authorities know best, have procedures, committees, appeals and reason on their side; and blame — Austrian anti-Semitism here is devolved down to the Jewish population itself, feeding on the friction between the established Austrian Jews and ’those clowns’ the Ostjuden, recent arrivals from Poland or Russia , poor pious ’riffraff’ as the woman nicknamed ’the Duchess’ witheringly puts it, and all of them ’little shopkeepers’, who are implicitly blamed for antagonising the non-Jewish population.

In response to these tensions and the enforced proximity as Jews flood into the designated area of Badenheim, some individuals revert movingly to links with animals: Karl is ever watchful over the aquarium, quick to weed out the killer fish which threatens to gobble up all the rest, and the headwaiter patiently and painfully attends to his starving dogs, which by the end will mutely long for death.

It is finally only the rabbi, a late arrival to the crowded hotel in Badenheim, who is openly sceptical about what is going on around him. Confined to a wheelchair, speaking an incomprehensible mix of Jewish languages (Yiddish and Hebrew) and ignored by all, he ’placed no faith in these delusions’ and his final emotion is one of anger.

Perhaps we too should feel anger, but the lasting impression of this gripping book is of terrifying smoothness. The transition from normality to abnormality is aided by the seeming impartiality of bureaucracy and also by active deceit: the Poland the Jews are to be transported to is advertised as some kind of holiday camp, or ’Pitchipoï’ (the child’s word in Yiddish for a faraway idyllic village). But the transition is also smoothed over by obstinate refusals to see (Dr Pappenheim’s resounding remark as he approaches the deportation train: ’If the coaches are so dirty it must mean that we have not far to go’).

The Badenheim Jews have all forged their own paths — they are secular, think of themselves firstly as Austrians, their parents have converted or they have married out, in other words, they have left a certain Jewish identity behind, and think that now they can go their own way. Particularly shocking, then, especially in an age which worships the notion of choice and which sees identity or identifications — spiritual, musical, cultural, ethnic — as attributes one can happily shop around for, is the unflinching gaze of Appelfeld on the fact that one can also be an identity one does not choose. Appelfeld seems to say that as soon as certain powers (political, economic etc.) start doling out identities — later, the obligatory yellow star — it is perilous to ignore who sets the terms and for what ends.

’The nights were now high and transparent. The hotel throbbed to the sounds of music. Even the laziest of musicians practised. No one could say anymore: "Why don’t you rehearse?" Never before had Badenheim heard such a concentration of sounds.

"Isn’t that a feast for the ear!" exclaimed Dr. Pappenheim.

"They’re driving me crazy", grumbled Mitzi.

"You wouldn’t like us to appear in Poland unrehearsed, would you? What would people say?"

The summer had not smiled on Mitzi. No suitor, no friend. This one busy practising, that one in love, that one adding up his savings. Even the dull, heavy musicians had suddenly taken it into their heads to rehearse. Fussholdt was completely absorbed in his proof-reading. Mitzi wept. Her petty vanity, cultivated with so much femininity lay in ruins around her — and without this little vanity what did she have in the world? Fussholdt again, Fussholdt and his eternal proofs. And that was all there would ever be. So what difference did it make to her if they were here or in Poland?’ p88