Homescapes of Childhood: Aharon Appelfeld’s Life Stories of czernowitz

Abstract

When Aharon Appelfeld’s autobiography Sippur Haim [The Story of a Life] appeared in 1999, certain critics expressed disappointment that the text did not contain fuller and more concrete historical information about Appelfeld’s rather remarkable life, especially his early childhood years before and during the Holocaust. In fact, absent from the story are almost all of the usual markers of an autobiographical text: those detailed and often poignant pieces of factual data, both private and public—dates, events, and the names of “places and individuals”—which, Appelfeld says explicitly, he will not give us (The Story of a Life, 2004, 91).¹ “During the course of the war,” he explains later in the text, “I was in hundreds of places—in railway stations, in remote villages, on the banks of rivers. All these places had names, but there’s not one that I can remember” (2004, 151). Indeed, Appelfeld refrains from even naming the city of his birth until chapter 23 of the book, although this is a piece of information that he surely does remember. The initial omission of the name of his birthplace, Czernowitz, suggests that Appelfeld is being slightly disingenuous concerning the degree to which memory alone determines what information he does and does not give, and when and where, in his memoir. The story of his life is, for Appelfeld, very much a constructed story, the contours of which he feels free to determine for himself the same way that any writer does.