The Language of Delusion

The Lost World of Unspoken Horrors: Aharon Appelfeld’s Holocaust Universe
by Dvir Abramovich
Hybrid, 2024, 96 pages, $19.99

“Thirteen Selwyn Street, Elsternwick,” I told the Middle Eastern-looking cabbie. Making our way through Melbourne’s Jewish neighbourhood, I was anxious about what might happen when we got there. As we pulled up, the cabbie slowly read aloud, “HO-LO-CAUST MU-SE-UM”. Then he turned and looked at me. “So, the Holocaust happened?” “Yes,” I said, “it happened.” I was conscious that at that very moment hundreds of people from the Jewish community, along with members of other ethnic and religious communities, were gathering on the steps of the Melbourne Town Hall for a rally under the banner, “Never Again is Now”.

The cabbie continued, “So, what’s in there?” “Photographs,” I said, “records of people whose families were murdered by the Nazis, also accounts of people who survived.” He took a long look at me, but I could not make out if he was genuinely interested or was about to launch into an anti-Semitic tirade. I was anxious to pay the fare and leave. “How much does it cost to go in? Is it free?” he asked. “Yes,” I ventured, “you should go in and see for yourself.” And then I leapt out of the cab, getting myself ready for the launch of a book about one of the greatest writers to emerge from the Holocaust.

Aharon Appelfeld was a uniquely powerful yet unusual voice in the Holocaust oeuvre, which now numbers publications in the thousands, shattering the near silence of the two decades that followed it. His spare yet powerful observations of the encirclement of Jews in Europe, told in fictional stories, are notable for the blindness or outright denial which he attributes to its Jewish victims, even as all the signs of their fate were looming. Badenheim 1939, the book that made his international reputation, is about a spa town in which well-to-do Jews who regularly take the waters are duped by a fake “Sanitation Department” which claims to be improving facilities but is in fact taking them to their deaths.

It is a dark satire about assimilated Jews who were tricked into believing that the society they so admired had their welfare at heart.

Appelfeld was one of them, or more accurately was the child of parents who were. He claimed he did not even know he was Jewish as a boy, since his parents embraced the communist ideology of a religion-free world where Jews could live as equals with Germans, Poles, Russians, everyone. But as the Nazi occupation gained ground, that hope evaporated and the boy was forced to flee alone and live in hiding with witches, thieves and prostitutes, and finally as a cook in a Russian forced-labour camp. His mother Bronia was murdered by Nazis on the street outside their home and the searing memory of her screams haunted Appelfeld all his life, his books endlessly dwelling on the futility of “fitting in”.

For Dvir Abramovich, author of The Lost World of Unspoken Horrors: Aharon Appelfeld’s Holocaust Universe, which includes essays on Appelfeld’s books The Age of Wonders, Iron Tracks, Katerina, To the Land of Cattails, and The Story of a Life, no message could be more apt for what Australia and the Western world are witnessing today. The comfortable acceptance that Jewish civilians have come to expect in liberal societies, including the once lucky country of Australia, has been shattered by anti-Semitism on a scale not seen since the days leading up to the Holocaust. The difference is that then “the final solution” for the extermination of the Jewish people was discussed in secret and disguised with euphemisms. Now, it is brazenly shouted by young mobs, who think nothing of calling for the elimination of Israel, the very existence of which was due in no small measure to Dr H.V. Evatt, the Australian Minister for External Affairs, who recommended to the UN Special Committee the establishment of the Jewish state seventy-seven years ago, which was endorsed by the UN General Assembly in November 1947.

The history of the Jewish state, just like that of the Holocaust, is undoubtedly unknown to these deniers of Israel’s legitimacy. They are but the latest iteration of the five Arab states’ war in 1948-49, by which they expected to destroy the fledgling Jewish state. They lost, but have since used the motley collection of Circassian, Turkish, Jordanian, Syrian and Lebanese Arabs, renamed Palestinians in 1967, to ceaselessly prosecute the original war of rejection. Hamas, the proxy of Iran, along with its collaborator Islamic Jihad, has simply continued that war, lobbing thousands of missiles into Israel and amassing assault weapons in its underground city of tunnels ever since it ruled Gaza from 2005. October 7, 2023, was to be its definitive, perhaps final, assault on Israel.

That history is also lost on the current generation of those affected by wokeism. If Aharon Appelfeld’s novels about Jews who could not distinguish their friends from their enemies have relevance today, it is to the sons and daughters in their early thirties, who have been caught up in the woke causes of their cohort—anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism, anti-war, anti-religious movements—all of which have demonised the State of Israel and Zionism. Today, it is a fact that many Jewish (and non-Jewish) parents of millennials cannot talk to their children, whose fellow travellers among the Greens have put climate change and anti-Zionism on the same ticket. The Greens are implacably opposed to Israel, and in their heartland in Byron Bay, anyone bold enough to raise an objection is shut down and threatened with expulsion.

Jews who remain loyal to their Greens cohort are now faced with a choice to embrace its ideology that has re-badged anti-Israel terrorists “freedom fighters” and the current war against Hamas “genocide”.

They are the new generation of willing dupes who “fit right in” to Aharon Appelfeld’s universe of delusion that leads directly to the extermination of Jews. “F*** the Jews”, “Gas the Jews” and “From the river to the sea”, heard everywhere in pro-Hamas rallies on campuses and at the Opera House, even before Israel responded to the devastating October 7 attack, are now the rallying cries of the woke crowd.

Dvir Abramovich, an Israeli Australian, who is both Director of the Jewish Culture and Society program at the University of Melbourne and Chair of the Anti-Defamation Commission, is keen to share Aharon Appelfeld’s insights into the language of self-deception. Appelfeld, who at first resisted and then painfully learned Hebrew when he migrated to Israel as a German-speaking youth, wrote all his forty-three books in Hebrew. It would be a kind of liberation for him. Jews, he observed, were left speechless when they replaced their mother tongue with German, which morphed under the Nazis and became “a bundle of canards and fabrications”. The result was that they “lost any standards or procedures of thinking”. In other words, the unreality of the Nazified world enveloped and suffocated the Jews, who were unable to find the language to voice their suspicions, and so reverted to silence. Rendered mute, they were complicit in their own demise. Psychologists call this a severe case of cognitive dissonance, where one is conditioned to accept the unacceptable.

Appelfeld has been criticised for allowing his post-Holocaust vantage point to judge the Jews of Europe too harshly, as if they should have been able to anticipate their own annihilation. In any case, that scenario does not apply to most Jews today, who have learned the lessons of the Holocaust. Like Dvir Abramovich, who as an outspoken critic of anti-Semitism was key to Victoria becoming the first jurisdiction to ban public displays of the swastika, Jews are standing up to the hate-filled marches, university encampments and the doxing of “Jewish creatives”. They are calling for the application of existing laws against hate-speech, the arrest and punishment of those who deface businesses, schools, graves and synagogues and harass Jews on the street. At the launch of Abramovich’s book, dozens of members of the audience arrived directly from the rally at Melbourne Town Hall.

Indeed, if assimilation was the bogey word of the past, which implied Jews should not presume to share in the dominant culture lest they be enveloped and betrayed by it, the reality today is far different.

Jews in Australia have been full participants in Australia’s history, its highest institutions, government and social organisations, that is, they have assimilated to a high degree, but they have also maintained a robust religious and communal life. Sir John Monash, the most revered Australian military leader in the First World War, was president of the Zionist Federation of Australia while also being President of Rotary. Such loyalties were not mutually exclusive. Jewish involvement in Australian life at every level is recognised by its many friends, including the Australian Christian Lobby, who organised the “Never Again is Now” rally at the Melbourne Town Hall and a similar one in Sydney’s Domain several weeks earlier.

The delusion which Aharon Appelfeld attributed to those who wish to “fit in” does not apply to most Jews in Australia today, but it accurately describes our government institutions who appear to be playing to the mob, folding before the unruly behaviour of activists, including pro-Hamas unionists who take their orders from X, and as Opposition Leader Peter Dutton aptly described them, “believe a little anti-Semitism is OK when it is never OK”. The language that has rendered our leaders to be apologists, including university vice-chancellors who think belligerence and hate speech are what universities are for, is a language that no longer communicates truth but its opposite, the mute posturing of the weak and the self-deluded. Dvir Abramovich’s introduction to Appelfeld’s world of unspoken horrors might help them recognise themselves.

Rachael Kohn, author and broadcaster, was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Australian Catholic University in May.