Beyond Despair by Aharon Appelfeld

From the opening of the Preface:

The three lectures presented here took shape within me over the past years.  They do not present an organized body of thought, but rather reflections and feelings grounded in the tribulations of a Holocaust childhood, wanderings and displacement across the ruins of Europe after the Second World War – and a belated childhood in Israel.  I have tried to avoid abstractions and to connect my reflections to things seen.  Vision, meaning also color, scent, and sound, is the most faithful emissary of memory.  I said “memory,” and I immediately retract it.  Anyone who underwent the Holocaust will be as wary of memory as of fire.  For many years the members of my generation were concerned with the concealment and repression, or, to use a harsher word, the suppression of memory.  It was impossible to live after the Holocaust except by silencing memory.  Memory became your enemy.  You worked constantly to blunt, to divert it, and to numb it as one numbs pain.  This battle lasted for years.  People learned to live without memory the way one learns to live without a limb of one’s body.

In the first lecture I briefly describe life without memory and how memory burst forth from the prison where it had been sent.  Now I wish to say a few words about how memory becomes clothed in words.  The transition from repressed memory to words arouses suspicion and hesitation…How were you to live from now on?  These questions, like memory, became enemies…

There was no place for the individual, for his pain and despair, in the camps.  No one there said: I have a headache, a toothache, I’m in a bad mood, I’m homesick.  In the camps there was no place for a vocabulary with a domestic tone.  The individual, or rather what was left of him, was nullified, and only a barren gaze remained, or, rather, apathy.  After the Holocaust as well, there was shame in talking about oneself…

To write about the Holocaust is impossible, it’s forbidden, people said repeatedly, and you agreed with them, for this was also your own feeling…To write about oneself, one’s personal feelings, seemed selfish and vulgar……….I tried to be faithful to my memory.  Memory seemed to be the most necessary content of my experience.  But what was I to do?  For memory itself proved to be the enemy of my writing.  After I placed it in writing, my childhood experience of the Holocaust, which was in my bones,…sounded unreliable to me, more like fictional material.  Memory, in which I believed so strongly, had deceived me.  I refused to accept that and continued to write, faithful to memory.  The result was, among other things, a sentimental one-dimensional story about a Jewish boy wandering in the woods….True, it was my childhood story, but what emerged from the writing sounded bizarre, unconvincing, and even worse, invented….

The turning point occurred when, in a feeling of despair, at a certain stage I started to write not about myself and about what had happened to me during the Holocaust, but about a Jewish girl wandering the woods and villages.  That would seem to be a trivial change, but miraculously, as though with a magic wand, my compulsive memory was removed, and in its place, or alongside it, came, one after the other: the sense of alternatives, of proportion, the choice of words – all the devices the artist needs for writing.  The question facing me was no longer what happened, but what had to have happened, which  is truly the question of every artist….

It is astounding how easily true life can be falsified when it is clothed in words…