‘Nothing escape’s the wolf’s fangs,’ thinks the narrator of Katerina. Through an outlandish sequence of chances and choices, somehow its author did just that. Aharon Appelfeld, a child of assimilated parents, lived in the old Jewish heartland of Bukovina. In 1940, short-lived Soviet occupation gave way to Nazi control. His mother was murdered and his father disappeared. Young Aharon escaped the Czernowitz ghetto and survived as a wild child in the forests, sheltered by a village prostitute, then as the ‘slave’ of a Ukrainian bandit gang.
When the Red Army arrived he cooked for them before, via a peril-strewn route through Italy, he migrated to Mandate Palestine. In newborn Israel he laboured on the land, treated not as a heroic Holocaust survivor but a contemptible reminder of diaspora weakness. As Appelfeld (who died in 2018) once told me in an interview: ‘I was alone, in the fields of the Judaean Hills. I thought, is this my landscape? Is this my language? This was a moment of despair.’ Yet out of that desolation he began to write, in his flinty, rugged, hard-won Hebrew, a series of novels that restored his annihilated childhood world to radiant life. After long years of separation – each thought the other dead – he also found his father.
Penguin Modern Classics have issued Jeffrey M. Green’s translation of Katerina (never published in the UK before), along with Appelfeld’s luminous memoir The Story of a Life and Badenheim 1939, his more playful but sinister fable of a community on the verge of extinction. Katerina, however, is pure Appelfeld – set among humble people, swept by waves of primal emotion, expressed in a simple, exalted, often Biblical language, treading a visionary line between memory and myth.
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