Witness

By Paul Gray

THE AGE OF WONDERS by Aharon Appelfeld Translated by Dalya Bilu Godine; 270 pages; $12.95

A boy named Bruno and his mother board a train to return home from a summer holiday. They are evidently well-to-do; their accommodations are first class and their fellow passengers fashionable. One incident mars the trip. The train stops unexpectedly, and the non-Christians aboard are politely asked to get off and show their papers to a local official. Bruno and his mother are among those who obey. Once this is done, the journey resumes. The setting is Austria in the late 1930s.

In his second novel to be translated into English, Israeli Author Aharon Appelfeld, 49, portrays the arrival of the great evil that became the Holocaust as a series of incremental tremors. Anti-Semitism first manifests itself as that petty annoyance on the train, "bureaucracy gone mad" as one passenger reassures another. Then Bruno's elaborate twelfth birthday party is sobered by the arrival of an actress-relative who has been fired by the National Theater because she is Jewish. The shy young guest of honor watches the adults argue over whether there is truly cause for worry: "Words I did not understand flew through the air like flaming torches." His childhood ending, Bruno becomes witness to the unimaginable.

The strongest impressions are made by his father, a famous Austrian writer and intellectual whose once lofty reputation inexorably declines, mirroring the growing dangers to all Jews in the country. A series of articles in a provincial paper attack his novels, calling his characters "parasites living off the healthy Austrian tradition, not their own marrow." Bruno remembers: "We couldn't even argue that the articles were written by an anti-Semite. The critic, as his name showed, was a Jew." The maligned author grows ever more frantic and tries to become more Austrian than his growing band of tormentors: "Jewish entrepreneurs should be wiped off the face of the earth, they ruin everything they touch! ... I hate the Jewish petite bourgeoisie." Eventually, he abandons his wife and son and flees to Vienna. Inevitably, Bruno and his mother take another train trip, deported with the other Jews in their town and packed into a cattle car heading south.

This first section of The Age of Wonders is a stunning novella, an elegiac distillation of incomprehension and loss. But Appelfeld then brings Bruno back, some 25 years later, to the same Austrian town. There has been a revival of interest in his father's writings, and the son is invited from Israel to assist in the arrangements for the new edition. This shorter episode raises questions that are not answered, including the fate of Bruno's parents and the means by which he escaped his own destiny on the cattle train. Also, the understandable passivity that Bruno displayed as a young boy has remained; a presumably heroic survivor, he now dawdles aimlessly in bars and coffee shops, trying to grasp a past that his earlier narrative has already captured and preserved.

This anticlimactic coda is a letdown but also a tribute to the power of what has gone before. Old friends change into persecutors and victims; a vain, talented man is pushed into a corner of self-hatred; some people slip comfortably into betrayals while others sacrifice themselves. No explanations of such behavior will satisfy, no accounting of the Holocaust will contain its enormity. Appelfeld offers something else. His prose never thunders or moralizes. It speaks in a lucid neutrality of tone that allows both the admirable and the monstrous to show themselves as they are and, as they sometimes do in life, to mingle.

--By Paul Gray

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