Aharon Appelfeld, a prolific Israeli novelist who died in January, based most of his works on his own childhood experience of the Holocaust. In Adam & Thomas, published in English translation in 2015, he tells the story of two Jewish boys—one religious, one secular—who spent the war years hiding in a forest. Amy Newman Smith examines the book’s central conceit:
In writing the book, Appelfeld seems to have split himself and his life story between the two title characters: resourceful Adam, a boy of the land whose knowledge of the forest keeps them safe and fed, and bookish Thomas, a doubter in both faith and his own abilities. In the novel, alert Adam cannot survive without inward-looking Thomas. Appelfeld himself seems to have needed the memories and teachings of both his assimilated parents and his observant grandparents to carry him through the war and the difficult years after. The split is doubly fitting, because at its heart, Adam & Thomas explores a theme that has fascinated Appelfeld—Jewish survival as “a people who lived for more than 2,000 years among aliens, and by being so different, developed a kind of character that is very different from the character of the surroundings,” a character marked by both “restlessness, a permanent alertness, a kind of insecurity” and “deep belief . . . deep philosophy, mysticism.” . . .
Although the Holocaust is a near-constant presence in Appelfeld’s work, it would be false to characterize him simply as a “Holocaust writer.” As Alan Mintz observed, “Everything having to do with what the French call the concentrationary universe—the transports, the camps, the Einsatzgruppen, the fascination with the Nazis and the paraphernalia of evil, that is to say, the entire stock-in-trade of conventional Holocaust literature—all this is left out. . . . ”
Instead, [in this work and others] Appelfeld gives us archetypes for the Jews the Nazis tried to eradicate: the Ostjude and the assimilated Jew who longs above all for “an artistic experience,” the Jew who asks for acceptance in a voice that is “soft and conciliatory” and the one who demands admittance in a tone that is “clear and sharp.”
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/3043/not-of-this-world/