Customer Reviews

The Immortal Bartfuss

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a remarkable book written with words hidden and unstated. For Bartfuss, the holocaust should produce "greatness of soul" either from himself or other survivors. He is frustrated by his inability to do so and give freely. Here is a highly complex character living in Jaffa, Israel. And it should be appreciated by many thoughtful readers.

The titular Bartfuss has lived a largely underground existence since surviving the Holocaust, amassing an ever increasing fortune as a smuggler even as his alienation from those around him--particularly his estranged wife and two daughters--continues apace. As a record of a man's journey from a kind of living death, this book benefits a lot from Appelfeld's terse, simple prose, which keeps the tale rolling at a brisk pace. He's the sort of writer who knows exactly what he can state explicitly and what he can leave unsaid. It may just be me, but I was not altogether convinced by the book, partly due to the somewhat abrupt ending. I will tentatively suggest that the author was only partly successful in dramatizing Bartfuss' internal conflicts... or maybe I'm just missing the point of Appelfeld's minimalist artistry. I will still recommend the book, and suggest that who anyone likes it should also seek out Appelfeld's "Badenheim 1939."

The Immortal Bartfuss is obviously the work of an accomplished and mature novelist. Appelfeld has his goal well in sight and accomplishes it with surgical precision. Bartfuss is Dostoevsky's Underground Man coping with the holocaust and old age. As we watch the Immortal Bartfuss die, and remeber how he spent his life, we sense true desolation. The holocaust has created an expectation within him, and, as he nears his end, he realizes life does not give anything to anyone for free. A very disquieting portrait of a very troubled man.

This is one of Appelfeld's finest books. Bartfuss is a survivor who for years has not spoken to his wife Rosa. She too is a survivor whose whole life is in raising their two daughters. One daughter marries but the second retarded daughter becomes an object of her parents rivalry. Bartfuss is a difficult closed person who does not have easy relations with anyone, including his friends from the camps. He is harsh and often cruel to his family but not in an overt way. He understands that they hope to get their hands on his money but the treasure is buried and hoarded.
The portrait Appelfeld gives of disenchanted neglected survivors is masterful. Bartfuss is involved with a number of women none of whom finds happiness with him. In one agonizingly poignant incident he sees a woman who he had spoken with through one night in the camps about Dostoevsky's work. This conversation had stayed in his mind all the years. When he approaches the woman who he sees on the beach in Tel Aviv she refuses to speak with him, or have anything to do with him. This is a reflection of another central theme of the work, the impossibility for the survivors of dealing in any sensible, reasonable sane way with their horrendous past and its horrendous losses. The one woman Bartfuss has a significant relationship, named Sylvia lives in longing for her parents who she last saw as a child. Bartfuss too has this kind of overwhelming longing which makes the past seem far more significant than the present can ever be.
Appelfeld is a master of presenting survivors, who somehow seem half- alive unable to permit themselves to fully live in present and in future.
This is a subdued and disturbing work by the writer who perhaps more sucessfully than any other has depicted the tremendously complex and difficult emotional world of 'survivors'.

The Immortal Bartfuss is one of the great novels of the 20th century--even though it's really a novella. In fact, this short work is far more powerful than many a mighty tome. Appelfeld has commented that writing in his adopted language, Hebrew, forced him into crafting short, elliptical statements, each freighted with meaning, almost biblical in resonance. Unfortunately, I don't know modern or ancient Hebrew, but Appelfeld's translators have consistently served his American audiences very well indeed. I usually have a problem reading translated novels; it seems to take generations for adequate translations to come about--as with Dostoevsky, Proust, Flaubert, etc. But with English translations of Appelfeld, I feel the author's clearly articulated sense of the tragic and the absurd, two narrative modes inextricably meshed in his Holocaust and post-Holocaust narratives.

Bart in German is `beard'; fuss is `foot.' Strange that an Ashkenazi Jew would have this name, especially in 1970s Israel. But this is a fable of history--after history has all but lost its sense. The gentile Germans, an Appelfeld critic once noted, used to give the Ashkenazi derogatory epithets--like `Bartfuss,' redolent of the eternally Wandering Jew. Bartfuss is scarred by the Holocaust--more appropriately, the Shoah--but he is a survivor. In many ways, he represents the Jewish people as a whole, battered by history, perpetually uprooted--but surviving, through ingenuity and fierce resolve. And yet Bartfuss is not wholly admirable. He is distant, confused, self-loathing. Perhaps these traits are what Appelfeld sees also negative cultural traits--but something he's observed intimately, something of a widespread existential crisis after the calamity of genocide and all-but-forced emigration from Europe.

To return to Bartfuss's name: critic Zilla Goodman noted [in Hebrew Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust, ed. Leon Yudkin, 1993] that his name can also be broken up into the Hebrew words bar and dfuss. Bar can mean `son,' `owner,' `bearing,' and `outside of'--quite a disparate list; but dfuss merely denotes `the printed' or `the fixed in shape or form.' So Bartfuss has multiple connotations via Hebrew, all relevant to Appelfeld's complex protagonist: he is both the son and the `owner' of ancient cultural conventions or forms. And yet, marked for extermination by the culture his people had lived among for centuries, he is also out of step with the world, `outside of' quotidian cultural conventions and norms. He became placeless.

Still, he must figure out how to continue being, which includes the inescapable fact of being Jewish. Many Ashkenazi did not feel particularly Jewish and were shocked to say the least to find themselves wearing the Star of David, the insignia given them by the Nazis that would mark them for mass extermination. This deep, historic tradition, so worn by centuries as to almost have been forgotten by many was swiftly transformed from being derided by many gentile Europeans to being a reservoir of images and symbols from which the Nazis drew to create an atmosphere of disgust, fear, inhumanity, mindlessness and horror.

Looked at through historical and linguistic lenses, Bartfuss really does become a kind of immortal--an archetype for the Jewish calamity of the 20th century. I do not think, however, that Appelfeld celebrates Bartfuss as an individual. He is deeply flawed. This novella is critical examination of a psychological attitude that is very unsettling, and this tough little fable does not end on a fairy tale note. In many ways, Appelfeld courted controversy by having this his first full-length story set in modern Israel be centered on such an unlikable protagonist.

I first read this book years ago, and found it deeply unsettling and moving. On my recent second reading, I found it an even richer experience. I have read several Appelfeld novels, and am looking forward to rereading them and reading his entire oeuvre. He is one of the greatest living novelists--anywhere.

I found this to be the most difficult and disconcerting of Appelfeld's work that I have read thus far. Bartfuss is a very unpleasant man to spend time with - both for those in his fictional world and for me as a reader. His alienation has led to the alienation of those around him - a very sad testimony to suffering and survival.

The Immortal Bartfuss by Aharon Appelfeld is very clearly a Holocaust novel, though the narrative takes place in Israel during the 1980's. Specific events of the Holocaust--and descriptions of the death camps--are strikingly absent from the text. The story concerns a man who is a Holocaust survivor. During the war he did something by way of resistance (the details are not given) that made him stand out as a hero to those who knew him. Rather than alleviating some of the trauma, his heroism left such deep scars upon his emotional psyche that he does not talk about his experiences.

Bartfuss in fact does not talk much at all, or do much of anything. He somnambulates his way through life, wandering the city night after night, making little attempts to heal the growing rift between his family and himself. He feels a terrible sense of survivor guilt but is at the same time jealous that his wife managed to rebuild her life. He channels this discontent as aggression directed at his wife for her ability to thrive in dire situations. He has some kind of underhanded business, which is how he manages to pay his bills and supply his maltreated family with the money they constantly demand from him.

I've read a lot of books like this. Exploration of trauma by omission. Monotony in the daily grind. A family that doesn't understand the depressed protagonist. And he, poor, tragic, broken man, has just about reached the limits of his sanity from the weight of it all. It is a man's story, and as an account of survivor guilt from one man's perspective, it succeeds admirably.

My problems with the text stem from a deeper, more personal anger, a sense of injustice--because I have read and witnessed too many stories like this from the perspectives of those who get the raw end of the deal. The families who don't get enough money, because the depressed father figure treats them like millstones around his neck.

Women, by and large, do not experience stories like Bartfuss. Bound in traditional roles of Caregiver, Mother, Housewife, they've never had the freedom to wander the streets like Bartfuss, night after night without a thought for the future in their heads. Kids grow fast, time is short, and you have to get enough dinner on the table to feed everyone. Whether or not women internalize trauma better is a moot point; men and women both suffer in silence, but women often don't have the privilege of "escaping" their families and drowning their sorrows at the local bar. We all feel entitled to this line of thinking now and then, but it is self pity at its most absolute, un-abating and ultimately self destructive.

This is one of the weaker books of Appelfeld in my opinion. It certainly is still an interesting novel, though if you're just getting accustomed to Appelfeld's work, I would recommend Katerina, The Iron Tracks, or Badenheim 1939.