Aharon Appelfeld, _Badenheim 1939_, trans. Daly Bilu

THIS HAS BEEN on my "one of these days" list since 1985. My tipping point was reading Roth's essay on how he introduced Saul Bellow to Appelfeld (at Bellow's request) and how the newly-acquainted novelists conversed delightedly in Yiddish.

The narrative opens in the spring, and Badenheim, a summer resort town within a hundred kilometers of Vienna, is readying itself for its annual influx of tourists. For a short while, we seem to be in Stefan Zweig territory--impresarios, Austrian pastries, various bourgeois comforts, the illusion of an eternal present sometimes created by the resumption of summer routines. Soon enough, though, a hint of Kafka enters, that peculiar tension of the very precise and  the ominously vague: everyone is worried about investigations by the Sanitation Department, even though we do not know what they are investigating.

Turns out the Sanitation Department is investigating family genealogies--that is, the only hygiene in which they interest themselves is racial. We eventually grasp, too, that everyone who has wound up in Badenheim is Jewish. Highly assimilated, used to thinking of themselves as quite different from the Ostjuden of Poland and Russia, not even particularly religiously observant or conscious of difference, but nonetheless Jewish, which is why the powers that be are organizing trains to take them all, willingly or no, to Poland. They board, telling themselves things will be fine in Poland, maybe better than in Badenheim. The novel ends as the train pulls away.

I've seen the book described as an allegory of the Holocaust, which does not sound quite right, as it seems silly to say a forced relocation of Jews to Poland is meant to stand in for a forced relocation of Jews to Poland. Where is the allegory in that? At the same time, the novel is not standard realism, either. A lot of the texture of the novel feels realistic, but the setting and the characters never appear transcribed from life--they seem more elemental, more archetypal than that. (Appelfeld grew up in Bukovina, far from Mitteleuropa, so this is not a memoir of childhood turned into a novel.) Some kind of hybrid of novel and parable, perhaps? It reminded me somewhat of Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things and Kazoo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, both of which post-date Badenheim 1939 and may have been influenced by it.

Great book. I'm baffled, though, by the date in the title. There is no date in the Hebrew title, which I'm told translates as approximately "Badenheim the resort-town." German-speaking Jews were not being sent to Poland until a few years later; in the summer of 1939, Poland was yet to be invaded, the death camps yet to be constructed. There are no references to any particular year within the novel itself. So why "1939"? Appelfeld (who died only last January) must have been okay with the addition, but it seems regrettable, an explicit pinning-down that is alien to the tone of the narrative.