The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping By Aharon Appelfeld
304 pp.; $17.68 New York, NY: Schocken Books; 2017 (hardcover; translated from Hebrew by Jeffrey Green) ISBN-10: 0805243194; ISBN-13: 978-0805243192
Although we still do not really know its exact purpose, it appears that the prime function of sleep resides in the processing of learning as well as the related phenomenon of memory: both memory retention and, even more germane to this book, memory cancellation. This strong semiautobiographical tale by late Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld makes such a case by showing how a traumatized youth learns with time how to forget his difficult past, in effect slowly awakening to a new life.
Erwin, the novel’s first-person narrator and one who both remembers and tries to forget, not so loosely follows the author’s own unbelievable life story. Both character and author were born into a middle-class Jewish family in Romania. Shortly after the advent of World War II, their lives were brutally and suddenly shattered. At age 9, soldiers from the pro-Nazi Romanian army burst into the family home, murdering the boy’s mother and grandmother within his earshot. This fact is only tangentially alluded to in the novel, but for those many readers familiar with Appelfeld’s work, the recurrent parallels between the fictional character and the author’s own experience will be clear.
Bedbound with the mumps at the time, still Appelfeld jumped out the window and found his father, both of whom were subsequently captured by collaborators and transported to the Ukraine, where they were separately interned. The real Erwin (Appelfeld) managed to escape from the camp. Because he was blond and fluent in Ukrainian, he was able to hide his Jewish identity from the Germans and their many collaborators, mostly anti-Semitic Ukrainian peasants. For several years, the boy worked as a shepherd and farm laborer while living with prostitutes.
As does the protagonist, after liberation and with nowhere else to return to, Appelfeld joined a group of young Jewish boys cared for by welfare agents from pre-state Israel (until 1948, still called “Palestine”). After recovery, similar to his fictional counterpart, the author moved to Israel and served in the Israeli army during the country's war of independence.
A GRADUAL AWAKENING
At the story’s beginning, Erwin is carried along by a group of wandering refugees, all fellow Jewish Holocaust survivors. He spends much of his time asleep, waking only occasionally to eat and then falling back into a dreamless hibernation. He describes the solicitude and many kindnesses of those fellow traumatized refugees who carried and cared for him as they wandered across a shattered Europe.
After gradually awakening, Erwin joins a group of stateless young men, their European homes (and homelands) destroyed and their families wiped out, training in order to turn their backs on the continent and the people who rejected them and, in the end, to start a new life. In this scarred battleground, although the guns had fallen silent, these children attempted to get themselves smuggled into pre-state Israel because they had neither families nor homes to which to return. At the time, the British Mandatory Authorities, through the offices of the Royal Navy, kept a strict quarantine against these pathetic survivors struggling to find a new home. Today’s irony is intense (albeit taking place in the opposite direction) as the European Union, via its navies, attempts to stem the flow of refugees from the Syrian bloodbath toward the continent.
The book deals with many themes, of which a critical one is language: both its loss and its acquisition. Although Appelfeld’s mother tongue was German, he also spoke Yiddish with his maternal grandparents, and they represent a comforting memory for the book’s protagonist that he struggles to retain. Both Erwins (the author and protagonist) also speak Romanian, Ukrainian, and Russian. Both struggled to but were ultimately able to master Hebrew, the language in which all 20 other Appelfeld novels are written. In this way, Appelfeld joins a select group of authors who wrote in a language other than their mother tongue: Joseph Conrad, Jack Kerouac, and Samuel Beckett among the best known.
Hebrew language acquisition is a critical goal for Erwin. Similar to his fictional father, a failed author, the boy has the heart and soul of a writer. As a young man, he wants to escape devastated Europe; to do so, he feels the need to also leave his previous languages behind. Acquiring Hebrew is not only a critical tool for his new life, but taking on this new tongue symbolizes his transformation from an erstwhile victim into a “new Jew”: not a stateless wanderer but, rather, a young man rooted in a rejuvenated homeland.
Appelfeld’s style is very spare, reminding one of George Orwell. He treats his readers with respect, assuming that they know the basic facts of Europe’s Jewish genocide and the Israel–Palestine conflict. No horror stories are told; rather, they are only briefly alluded to, and tangentially at that.
HISTORICALLY LITERATE
The Nazis are not specifically named, nor are (other than tangentially) their multiple European collaborators. Likewise, Arabs are not alluded to, and the tragic (ongoing even today) strife between Jews and Palestinians is not mentioned (except again ever so minimally). This is part of Appelfeld’s magic: so much expressed by saying so little. He assumes his readers to be historically literate. Of interest, despite the terrible things Erwin and his fellow displaced persons have experienced, there is not one word about vengeance: only looking forward, albeit constrained by the past.
As a young geriatrician, I had the privilege of looking after elderly World War I veterans, many of whom were traumatized by their experiences in the trenches. Initially, and with trepidation, I asked these elderly men to tell me their stories. To my surprise, none ever refused. In fact, these old soldiers expressed gratitude for my interest. I am sorry they are gone.
Fast forward 40 years. I now enjoy the privilege of caring for aging Holocaust survivors (a third of Israel’s elderly population) and being allowed to listen to their stories, all of which would beggar anyone’s imagination. Like the war vets, I have never had a Holocaust survivor push back when asked about his or her life story.
Despite the cri de coeur of “never again,” we do not seem to have learned much. Since the Holocaust, in my view the most egregious (but not sole) example of modern genocide, there have been many episodes of mass murder and its relative, ethnic cleansing. Examples of these outrages include the Cambodian atrocities, the Balkan wars, Rwanda, and, most recently and still ongoing, the recurrent genocides against the Yazidi people by Islamic fanatics—perpetrated by ISIS as well as its local Sunni collaborators. This is to say nothing of the ongoing slaughter in the Syrian civil war taking place just a few hundred kilometers from where I sit in Jerusalem.
PLUS ÇA CHANGE
Sadly, it seems that our species slips all too easily into mass murder, with world history, both ancient and modern, scarred by so many horrifying examples. Our job, at a minimum, as practitioners within the health care system is to listen to victims’ stories and then, of course, help in any way we can. Perhaps the best way to decrease the death and destruction is to raise and nurture the political will to prevent these atrocities or, at best, stop them early.
Appelfeld’s fine novel offers powerful insights into one Jewish boy’s struggle to begin life in an “old–new land.” Such novels can help us—in my view, sometimes better than any scientific study—to understand the experiences of these victims, whenever and wherever we find them.