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Friday, June 15, 1984
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THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
BOOKS
Aaron Applefeld captures a pre-Holocaust moment
BY DR. JOSEPH COHEN
Special to The Jewish News
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What master photo- life in Eastern and Central
grapher Roman Vishniac Europe snatched, as it were,
has done for the pre- from the obliterating hands
Holocaust Jews of Poland, of the Nazis.
Aaron Appelfeld, in his
Reading Appelfeld's The
novels, is presently doing Retreat (E. P. Dutton; trans-
for their pre-World War II lated from the Hebrew by
brothers and sisters in Au- Dalya Bilu), I am reminded
stralia. Both photographer of Vishniac not only because
and writer, through their Appelfeld's writing pos-
unique talents, have given sesses the graphic clarity,
the world images of Jewish penetrating vision, simplic-
ity and power of the cam-
era's eye, but because his
The Family
narratives, like Vishniac's
of the Late
pictures, are crucial to
memorializing a world that
ROSE B.
was wrenched out of exist-
STEIN
ence.
Announces the un-
Locked
into
that
veiling of a monument
memorialization is a vision
in her memory at 2 p.m.
of the past which carries
Sunday„June 17, at
with it a warning for the fu-
Beth El Memorial Park.
Rabbi Syme will of-
ture. That warning has to do
ficiate. Relatives and
not merely with Jewish
friends are invited to
survival but with human
join in this memorial.
survival. If the brutal
The Family
of the Late
SAM
BENDEROFF
Announces the un-
veiling of a monument
in his memory at 10:30
a.m. Sunday, June 17, at
Clover Hill Park
Cemetery. Rabbi.
Groner will officiate.
Relatives and friends
are asked to attend.
The Family
of the Late
CATHERINE
DIRENFELD
Announces the un-
veiling of a monument
in her memory 10:45
a.m. Sunday, June 24 at
Oakview Cemetery.
Rabbi Stanley Rosen-
baum will officiate.
Relatives and friends
are asked to attend.
To our beloved father
WILLIAM KAUFMAN
Daddy, we love and miss you very much.
We thank you for all the wonderful and
special things you have always done for us.
You will forever be loved very dearly in our
hearts.
All our love forever,
Patty and Terry
In memory of mother and grandmother
BETTY LEWIS
events of the 20th Century
have taught us anything, it
is that we ignore the
tragedy of Hitler's Europe
at our peril. We know all too
well that another Holocaust
will be the last sound and
light show this planet will
ever sponsor.
But a sense of doom is not
all that informs Applefeld's
fiction. The Retreat, the
fourth of the now widely
recognized Israeli author's
eight Hebrew novels to be
translated into English, is,
like its predecessors
Badenheim 1939, The Age
of Wonders and Tzili: The
Story of a Life, a remarkable
fusion of despair and hope,
weakness and strength,
cowardice and courage. His
characters, all middle-class
Austrian Jews, shopkeep-
ers, professional people and
housewives, obsessed with
assimilation, are depicted
as equally human both in
their odious rush to em-
brace Christian anonymity
and in their acknowledg-
ment, however much re-
sisted, that redemption is to
be found only in Jewish
self-sacrifice and tsedakah.
Though self-deception
may be indulged in
endlessly, it cannot,
Applefeld shows us, ulti-
mately compromise the
truth; it can only make
more complicated coming to
terms with it.
The retreat itself is a
mountain lodge not too far
from Vienna, faintly re-
miniscent of the sanitarium
in Thomas Mann's The
Magic Mountain. It is main-
tained for the benefit of a
handful of assimilationist
Jews, most of them middle-
aged men and women who
have either given up on life
or been dismissed from it.
Behind them they have col-
lectively left a trail of
broken dreams, careers and
families; ahead of them they
deceptively envision a re-
storation of order and
meaning in their lives by
following a regimen de-
signed to eradicate the root
Always in our thoughts and in our hearts.
Lois and Fred Howard, Barry,
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Dale and Connie
In loving
memory of
MAX
LANSKY
In loving memory of our beloved mother,
grandmother and great-grandmother
LIBBY ROSENBERG
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41
Who passed away June 16, 1,959, 11 days
in Sivan. Her beloved memory will always
be our inspiration. Sadly missed and al-
ways remembered by Rose and Mitchell
Kent, Max and Ann Rosenberg, Esther and
Dave Goldstein and grandchildren.
Who passed away
Jan. 16, 1978. Sadly mis-
sed and forever in our
hearts, by his wife,
daughters and
grandchildren.
Bernice Lansky,
Claire Abrams
and Wendy Yaffa
cause of all their problems,
not tuberculosis as in
Mann's famous novel, but
something they perceive as
much worse: being Jewish.
They see themselves as
convalescents and it is as
convalescents that they
view the world. By ascend-
ing into the mountains,
they believe they can escape
the evil of the plains below.
Appelfeld does not allow
either them or his readers to
maintain that illusion. As-
cension is no guarantor of
purification. The evil of the
plains is simply transferred
to the mountain hide-out.
The regimen these people
follow is mimicry of the gen-
tiles. It is saddening to
watch these bourgeois Jews
take instruction in aping
the manners of rustic Aust-
rian peasants, for it is the
peasants to whom they are
attracted rather than their
non-Jewish counterparts in
the Austrian middle-class.
While we know that the
project is foie-doomed, Lotte
The inmates, as
they are aptly
termed,
unknowingly
reconfirm their
Jewishness .. .
Schloss (a lot of loss), the
central figure of the book, a
failed actress; Herbert
Zuntz, a forgotten jour-
nalist; Isadora Rotenberg, a
spoiled aristocrat; and
Betty Schlang, a frustrated
divorcee; among others,
persevere in the belief that
assimilation is within their
grasp and that the suc-
cessful resumption of their
lives on the plains below
will follow naturally.
This self-deception pro-
vides Appelfeld's narrative
with a formidable and re-
lentless irony, for as the
story progresses, the more
these people strive toward
assimilation, with the exep-
tion of Isadora who commits
suicide, the harder their
lives become, and the har-
der their lives become the
more they are forced to rely
upon and console one an-
other. Without their realiz-
ing it, the mountain lodge
turns into a retreat of a
different kind, a besieged
ghetto under assault from
the common enemy of the
plains, the Austrian peas-
ants.
The inmates, as they are
aptly termed, unknowingly
reconfirm their Jewishness
through their acts of com-
passion and charity and
their sense of sharing a re-
lated fate.
,Compassion and charity,
notwithstanding, the sav-
age contempt expressed by
these self-hating Jews and
the several Austrian peas-
ants in their midst is hard to
swallow. It underscores,
however, the futility of
people trying to be some-
thing they are not, risking
all to gain nothing in giving
up that essential part of
their most valuable selves.
The final irony that
emerges from all this self-
deception is the reader's
awareness that these
assimilationist-prone Jews
were destined to enter the
gas chambers just as
quickly as any of Hitler's
other victims.
If we are made uncom-
fortable reading Appelfeld's
stories of these doomed, de-
luded Austrian Jews, such
discomfort must be re-
garded as compensatory.
His message is one we can
neither afford to ignore nor
afford to forget. ,
Copyright 1984, Joseph Cohen
OBITUARIES
Dr. Moshe Held, on faculty
of Jewish seminary, dead at 60
New York (JTA) — Dr. ice, from 1944 to 1946, and
Moshe Held, for 25 years a from 1947 to 1949.
member of the faculty of the
Dr. Held came to the
Jewish Theological Semi- United States in 1953, hav-
nary of America, died June ing won a State Department
9 in Beersheva, Israel, at fellowship for graduate
age 60.
study. He studied archeol-
Born in Warsaw, Poland ogy and history of the an-
in 1924, Dr. Held studied in cient Near East and com-
Israel, receiving a master's parative Semantics under
degree in comparative lit- Professor William F. Al-
erature in 1952. His student bright, then went on to the
years were interrupted by University of Chicago,
two terms of military serv- where he specialized in As-
siriology and Semitics at
the Oriental Institute.
In 1957, he returned to
Harry Badshaw
Johns Hopkins, where he
received his Ph.D. degree in
Quebec judge
Semitics with distinction.
In his scholarly career,
Montreal (JTA) — Harry
Badshaw, the first Jew to be Dr. Held had taught at
appointed a Quebec Dropsie College from 1957
Superior Court judge, in to 1966. In 1966, he joined
1950, died June 11 at 83. the faculty of Columbia
After serving more than 27 University, and in 1970 he
years, Judge Badshaw re- was named a full professor
of Semitic languages and
tired in 1977.
He had been a founding culture there. In the same
director of the Canadian year he was named a visit-
Human Rights Foundation ing professor at Jewish
and of the International Theological Seminary,
Law Association Commit- where he had been teaching
tee on Human Rights, as Bible since 1959.
well as founding president
of the Canadian Friends of
the Alliance Israelite Uni-
verselle.
Born in Russia, he was N. Margolis
brought by his parents to
Canada in 1904. He was
Nathan Hyman Margolis,
graduated in 1924 with top owner of Dave's Auto Glass
honors from McGill Univer- in Detroit, died June 11 at
sity's law school and won a age 71.
travel scholarship which
Born in Poland, Mr. Mar-
enabled him to do post- golis owned his business for
graduate work at Grenoble 50 years. He Was a member
and Sorbonne Universities. of Cong. Beth Shalom and
A dedicated Zionist, he B'nai B'rith.
participated in public and
He leaves his wife, Ethel;
private efforts all his adult two daughters, Mrs. Arnold
life to strengthen ties be- (Susan) Bloom and Nancy; a
tween Canada and Israel. brother, Manachim; four
At a dinner last year, a sisters, Mrs. Harry (Esther)
foundation was established Mintz, Mrs. Peretz (Beulah)
in his name to help sub- Flint, Mrs. Isadore (Naomi)
sidize the Keren Institute, Gruskin and Mrs. David
which trains secondary (Sophie) Lubetsky of Los
school humanities teachers Angeles, Calif.; and two
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