H Hamilton £14.99 pp198

The word “memory” appears seven times on the first page of this book, establishing a theme that runs through Aharon Appelfeld’s work. Memory, in his experience, is “tangible”, physically located in the body: “The palms of one’s hands, the soles of one’s feet, one’s back and one’s knees remember more than memory.” They are parts of his flesh on which pain was inflicted during his childhood.

His conscious memory is less trustworthy: “Of the war years I remember little,” an unexpected admission from a Holocaust survivor, one of Israel’s literary giants, who has drawn on his past in more than 20 books, mostly fiction, but who bridles at being labelled a “Holocaust writer”. He does not set out, he says, to “bear witness”, to provide testimony of Nazi crimes, but to allow his imagination to transmute experience into literature. Now, in his seventies, he gives us a long-awaited, long-evaded chronicle of his life.

He describes it as an attempt to make sense of a fractured past — “fragments of a pulsing darkness”. The book is not a chronological narrative, but a stepping back and forth as he digs for these fragments, moving from one archeological site to another. He writes about forgetting as much as remembering, about the years “sunk deep in the slumber of oblivion”.

Appelfeld was born in Czernowitz, Bukovina, annexed by Romania after the first world war. As a child, he straddled two worlds, that of his prosperous, German-speaking parents who had rejected Judaism, and his God-fearing grandparents, who spoke Yiddish. He evokes a happy early childhood: devoted parents, summer days in the Carpathians, his grandmother making jam, his grandfather walking him to the synagogue. All that ended in 1939, when he was plunged into a very different world, the ghetto, which we see through the eyes of a seven-year-old boy. Philip Roth, one of Appelfeld’s admirers, has described his writing as “midway between parable and history”. Without a trace of sentimentality he can capture moments that break the heart: a music teacher from a school for blind children leads his flock of pupils through the ghetto streets dressed in their Sabbath best, Braille books packed in their knapsacks, singing Yiddish folk songs, Bach and Schubert. The cattle trucks are waiting for them at the station.

From an early age, Appelfeld was an observer, preferring contemplation and silence to talking, as he still does today. Silence helped save his life when he was 10, on the run after escaping from a camp, wandering through the forests of the Ukrainian steppes, foraging for food, living like an animal, feeling closer to the wild creatures around him than to humans who might identify him as a Jew.

The critics said of his early writing that it displayed reticence. It still does: few words in these pages are devoted to Nazi atrocities. Appelfeld’s prose is restrained and lean, reflecting his preference for “small, quiet words”. He uses them to telling effect in the account of a peasant woman living alone, who gives the hungry boy shelter. She turns out to be the village whore, mentally unstable, swinging between euphoria and violence, of which the boy is often the victim. With nowhere to go, he remains with her until a gale blows down her primitive hut, reducing it to a heap of rubble. Time for him to move on. The chapter has the force of a story by Turgenev or Gorky.

In 1949, the mentally scarred loner sailed for Haifa to start a new life. He felt dislocated in the Jewish homeland, an alien, unable to shake off Europe. As a Holocaust survivor, he symbolised weak and supine diaspora Jewry, despised at that time in the land of muscular Zionism. His German, Yiddish, Ukrainian and Romanian faded. Without a language, he struggled to master a new mother tongue, Hebrew. His formal education had ended when he was seven. Appelfeld writes compellingly about the anguished years when he was searching for himself as a man and as a writer, haunted by memories, afflicted by nightmares, acquiring a profound attachment to Judaism and the Talmud, not as a believer, but through Hebrew as the key to a long Jewish history of spiritual exploration.

Is this slim book of 198 pages the story of a life? In essence, yes, but there are some curious gaps. The boy escaped from “an accursed camp”. Which camp? How did he escape? Appelfeld’s mother was murdered, but what became of his father, last seen on a forced march? On one page, he refers to himself as an orphan, so it was baffling to read in a Jewish paper that his father survived the Holocaust and was reunited with his son in Israel. Of the writer’s marriage, wife and family, not a word. This is a humane and moving memoir, but has the author taken reticence too far?

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