Blooms of Darkness by Aharon Appelfeld
Blooms of Darkness
by Aharon Appelfeld, translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M. Green,
Alma Books, paperback, pp 280, ISBN: 978-1-84688-148-0, £12.99
Jane Stewart
Towards the close of Blooms of Darkness, award-winning Israeli writer’s Aharon Appelfeld’s most recent novel to be translated into English, the young protagonist, Hugo, becomes aware that a fellow refugee to whom he speaks, ‘bears a horrible secret within him, and that all of his words and movements are meant only to distract people from his secret’. The man, one of many similar ‘secret-keepers’ newly-emerged from concentration camps who are unable to speak of the horrors they have witnessed, is emblematic of this compelling novel’s preoccupation with the various ways in which painful truths are withheld, and of the many different forms of muteness and silence it explores.
Eleven-year-old Hugo’s accelerated passage into adulthood under the extreme stress of hostilities in Romania during the latter years of World War II, and his move from prepubescent innocence to sexual awareness under the tutelage of a mature woman, are delicately charted. He has managed to elude capture because his mother, unable to find anyone else to look after him when she has to flee yet unable to take him with her, has placed him in the care of Mariana, an old school friend now turned prostitute. Mariana conceals him for months on end inside a large closet in The Residence, the brothel in which she lives and works, and where she entertains German officers just at the other side of the wall from Hugo’s hiding place.
The narrative slips dexterously between present and past tenses, conveying the immediacy of Hugo’s danger and drawing the reader close to the boy’s consciousness as he becomes cocooned within the necessary silence of the closet. An imaginative and intelligent boy, he loves reading and ‘likes to listen to words’, but, during the long, cold, dark hours of solitude in his hiding place, he is unable to turn to the adventure story books and school work his absent mother has sent with him. Instead, he resorts to inventing his own singular form of companionship so that, ‘it isn’t words that speak to him but silence. This is a difficult language, but as soon as one adopts it, no other language will ever be so effective.’
Bereft of companionship, Hugo finds solace in vivid dreams about his family which come to him whilst asleep in his hiding place and in equally vivid ‘enchanted images’ he conjures up of his school friends, Otto and Anna, of his parents and grandparents, and of idyllic family holidays spent in the Carpathian mountains before the euphemistically-named ‘Actions’ against Jewish people began. At moments of extreme danger, as German search parties move ever closer, he attempts to make sense of his precarious position and displacement from his former life by writing letters to his friends and mother in his notebook – letters which are all the more poignant because it is apparent that they will never be read by the intended recipients. Later, as Mariana becomes increasingly repulsed by the demands of her clients, and Hugo’s ‘earlier life slips far away from him’ because he is no longer able to summons visions of his family, they find comfort in each other’s arms.
This masterly book is strangely uplifting, despite its themes and subject matter. These might have proved unremittingly heavy in the hands of a less accomplished author, but Appelfeld, who is widely regarded as one of Israel’s foremost writers about the Holocaust, deploys a simple, direct, pared-down style which succeeds in leavening Blooms of Darkness with optimism. One minor quibble with the British edition under review concerns the failure to edit a few American English expressions which seem at variance with the period and setting, such as ‘marching in place’ instead of ‘marching on the spot’ and the persistent use throughout of ‘closet’ instead of ‘cupboard’. Fortunately, such vestiges of an earlier edition in English published in the United States in 2010 do not detract from the potency of Appelfeld’s narrative or from his haunting exposition of what being Jewish in Europe during the 1930s and ’40s connoted. Shielded by his parents and then by Mariana from the truth about the onslaught against Jews in Romania and elsewhere, Hugo finally comes to understand the grim secret which has been withheld from him, a realisation conceptualised figuratively by Appelfeld, with characteristic luminosity, as ‘(t)he word “Jew”, … a mysterious term, cut off from time and place, hovering above the earth like a little hunted bird.’
