The Story of a Life by Aharon Appelfeld

Author:Aharon Appelfeld [Appelfeld, Aharon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-10-23T16:00:00+00:00

18

I TURN THE PAGES of my old diary. They are a yellowish-green, some have stuck together, and my uneven handwriting is already blurred. For many years the diary lay in a suitcase, unopened. I was afraid of these notebooks, afraid they would reveal fears and character flaws that I’ve been trying to hide from myself for years.

It is 1946, the year I came to Israel, and the diary is a mosaic of words in German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and even Ruthenian. I say “words” and not “sentences” because in 1946 I was not able to connect words into sentences, and the words were the suppressed cries of a fourteen-year-old youth who’d lost all the languages he had spoken and was now left without language. The diary became a hiding place where he could pile up the remnants of his mother tongue and the words that he had just acquired. A “pile of stuff” is not just a figure of speech; it described my soul.

Without language, everything is chaos and confusion and the fear of things you needn’t be afraid of. Without language, one’s naked character is exposed. Back then, most of the children around me stuttered, spoke too loudly, or swallowed their words. The extroverts among us spoke too loudly, and as for the introverts, their voices were swallowed up in the silence inside them. Without a mother tongue, a person has a defect.

My mother’s native tongue had been German. She loved the language and cultivated it, and when she spoke it, the words had the sound of a crystal bell. My grandmother spoke Yiddish, and her language had a different ring, or, rather, taste to it, for it always brought to my mind plum compote. The maid spoke Ukrainian, with some of our words and some of Grandmother’s thrown in, too. I spent many hours with her every day. She wasn’t strict with me; all she wanted was to make me happy. I loved her and her language. To this day I carry the memory of her face in me, even though at the crucial moment, when her help was as vital to us as the air we breathed, she fled our house along with our jewelry and cash, which she stashed in the pockets of her dress.

Another language, which we didn’t use at home but which was the most common on the streets, was Romanian. After World War I, Bukovina, the country of my birth, was annexed to Romania and the official language became Romanian. We spoke only broken Romanian and never mastered this language.

Four languages surrounded us and lived within us, complementing one another in a strange way. If you were speaking German and you were searching for a word, phrase, or proverb, you’d use Yiddish or Ruthenian. My parents tried, but couldn’t maintain the purity of their German, because words from all the languages that surrounded us flowed imperceptibly into our own, insinuating themselves. These four languages merged into one, rich in nuance, contrasts, humor, and satire.

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