Shop Talk by Philip Roth Read Free Book Online Page A

novel somehow engages itself on virtually every page. We sense in Bartfuss's lonely longing and regret, in his baffled effort to overcome his own remoteness, in his avidity for human contact, in his mute wanderings along the Israeli coast and his enigmatic encounters in dirty cafés, the agony that life can become in the wake of a great disaster. Of the Jewish survivors who wind up smuggling and black-marketeering in Italy right after the war, you write, "No one knew what to do with the lives that had been saved."
    My last question, growing out of your preoccupation in
The Immortal Bartfuss,
is perhaps preposterously comprehensive. From what you observed as a homeless youngster wandering in Europe after the war, and from what you've learned during four decades in Israel, do you discern distinguishing patterns in the experience of those whose lives were saved? What
have
the Holocaust survivors done and in what ways
were
they ineluctably changed?
    Appelfeld: True, that is the painful point of my latest book. Indirectly I tried to answer your question there. Now I'll try to expand somewhat. The Holocaust belongs to the type of enormous experience that reduces one to silence. Any utterance, any statement, any "answer" is tiny, meaningless, and occasionally ridiculous. Even the greatest of answers seems petty.
    With your permission, two examples. The first is Zionism. Without doubt, life in Israel gives the survivors not only a place of refuge but also a feeling that the entire world is not evil. Though the tree has been chopped down, the root has not withered—despite everything, we continue

living. Yet that satisfaction cannot take away the survivor's feeling that he or she must do something with this life that was saved. The survivors have undergone experiences that no one else has undergone, and others expect some message from them, some key to understanding the human world—a human example. But they, of course, cannot begin to fulfill the great tasks imposed upon them, so theirs are clandestine lives of flight and hiding. The trouble is that no more hiding places are available. One has a feeling of guilt that grows from year to year and becomes, as in Kafka, an accusation. The wound is too deep and bandages won't help. Not even a bandage such as the Jewish state.
    The second example is the religious stance. Paradoxically, as a gesture toward their murdered parents, not a few survivors have adopted religious faith. I know what inner struggles that paradoxical stance entails, and I respect it. But that stance is born of despair. I won't deny the truth of despair. But it's a suffocating position, a kind of Jewish monasticism and indirect self-punishment.
    My book offers its survivor neither Zionist nor religious consolation. The survivor, Bartfuss, has swallowed the Holocaust whole, and he walks about with it in all his limbs. He drinks the "black milk" of the poet Paul Celan, morning, noon, and night. He has no advantage over anyone else, but he still hasn't lost his human face. That isn't a great deal, but it's something.

Ivan Klíma
    [1990]
    Born in Prague in 1931, Ivan Klíma has undergone what Jan Kott calls a "European education": during his adult years as a novelist, critic, and playwright his work was suppressed in Czechoslovakia by the Communist authorities (and his family members harried and punished right along with him), while during his early years, as a Jewish child, he was transported, with his parents, to the Terezin concentration camp by the Nazis. In 1968, when the Russians moved into Czechoslovakia, he was out of the country, in London, on the way to the University of Michigan to see a production of one of his plays and to teach literature. When his teaching duties ended in Ann Arbor in the spring of 1970, he returned to Czechoslovakia with his wife and two children to become one of the "admirable handful"—as a professor recently reinstated at Charles University described Klíma and his