Appelfeld, Aharon. Badenheim 1939. Translated by Dalya Bilu. Boston: Verba Mundi, 2009.
Ref Article:
- Budick, E. M. "Literature, Ideology, and the Measure of Moral Freedom: The Case of Aharon Appelfeld's Badenhaim Ir Nofesh." MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 60 no. 2, 1999, pp. 223-249. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/22834.
Ref. Book:
- Sicher, Efraim. The Holocaust Novel. London: Routledge: 2005.
This work is an allegory of European Jewry on the eve of its annihilation. This work has an affinity with both Kafka and Agnon. There is a surreal quality to the story of assimilated Jews in Central Europe who arrive at a summer resort for their annual vacation.
Quoting from : Page 71 – Description of Applefeld – Badenheim 1939:
Surreal is the literal characteristic of the Nazi regime of the language of sanitary measures for their systematic persecution, deportation and killing of the Jews. These Jewish intellectuals on their annual vacation to Badenheim 1939, represent the blind naivete of a highly educated elite who did nothing in time to avert their fate and flee in time. However, Applefeld’s irony is more focused on “the immersion of these intellectuals in a culture that had rejected them, but was never the less theirs.”
Applefeld seeks understanding, not forgiveness of the delusion that allowed these Jews to maintain their optimism to the end, believing that deportation to Poland might in the end be a good thing…
Page 223-234, Budick, quote:
The construction of the agency of the Final Solution as the unseen, natural continuation, for Jews and Nazis both, of an ongoing cultural logic, no more to be disputed or opposed than nature itself, comes into vivid focus in the concluding paragraph, which serves as a paradigm of the novel as a whole. Just as critically, it identifies what it is within culture that can release us from its determinism:
Their amazement was cut short. An engine, an engine coupled to four filthy freight cars, emerged from the hills and stopped at the station. Its appearance was as sudden as if it had risen from a pit in the ground. “Get in!” yelled invisible voices. And the people were sucked in. Even those who were standing with a bottle of lemonade in their hands, a bar of chocolate, the headwaiter with his dog—they were all sucked in as easily as grains of wheat poured into a funnel. Nevertheless Dr. Pappenheim found time to make the following remark: “If the coaches are so dirty it must mean that we have not far to go.”
This paragraph produces an almost perfect model of the cultural determinism that pervades the text. The action is propelled not by human will or desire but by a logic embedded in objects and events, in culture, even, perhaps, in language. “Voices,” unidentified and dissociated, order the Jews onto train cars that have appeared from nowhere, erupting from within the scene rather than appearing from outside it, so that for little or no reason the people are “sucked in as easily as grains of wheat . . . into a funnel.” [End Page 234]
