The other side of that debate was maintained by a classicist, Thomas Rosenmeyer, from whose scholarly learning and humane curiosity I have often directly benefited. But on that occasion, his strenuous defense of the right of authors to represent the Shoah in their fictions, and his insistence that for all its singularity, the Nazi genocide was as proper a subject for narrative retelling as any other historical event, struck me as unconvincing. The incommensurability between the experiences to be represented and the means of representation, the unattainability of any fitting decorum to mediate between the author's words and the world of the Shoah, appeared to me absolute, even though I was never persuaded by Adorno's argument that artistic representation is an "injustice done to the victims." But the risk that fictional representations of the Shoah will be absorbed by what Leo Bersani, writing more globally but also, I think, less luridly than Adorno, has called "the culture of redemption," seemed to me a genuine one. Underwriting a redemptive view of art is the assumption that "a certain type of repetition of experience in art repairs inherently damaged or valueless experience. Experience may be overwhelming, practically impossible to absorb, but it is assumed . . . that the work of art has the authority to master the presumed raw material of experience in a manner that uniquely gives value to, perhaps even redeems, that material."The hazards described by both Adorno and Bersani appear to leave a certain thematically weighted and deliberately chosen silence as the only ethically unsullied response that art can make to the Shoah.

But in spite of the appeal of such a principled silence, I became increasingly convinced that categorically refusing to represent the Shoah in fiction is a far more menacing position. On one level, I found myself resistant to the idea that anyone, whether a survivor of the camps or not, should undertake to speak for the whole category of Hitler's victims and generalize a set of principles, whether ethical, religious, or aesthetic, on their behalf. Such a scruple troubled me not only with regard to Adorno's formulation, but still more forcefully with Emil Fackenheim's attempt to derive a new, 614th commandment for contemporary Jewry that takes account of its situation after the genocide. In the original wording of his 614th commandment, Fackenheim, perhaps the most distinguished philosopher of the Shoah, proclaims, "The authentic Jew of today is forbidden to hand Hitler yet another, posthumous victory ." To the scarcely disguised coerciveness of Fackenheim's taking upon himself the decision of who are "authentic" Jews, and then enjoining upon them the requirement to live their Jewishness to the full precisely in order to deny Hitler a "posthumous victory," a frivolous answer might be that having contested most of the earlier 613 commandments, it is hardly surprising that Jews would not be particularly eager to embrace a new one. But beyond the dubiousness of promulgating new commandments, there is something that cries out to be resisted in Fackenheim's invocation of the murdered babies and Muselmänner of Auschwitz in his writing. No one can speak for those murdered, and no one can determine what would count as a further betrayal of their suffering. The freedom to chooseone's own philosophy, faith, communal affiliation, and historical sense, as well as one's mode of remembering and representing that memoryis precisely what Nazism made impossible for Jews, and although the affirmation of that freedom can do nothing for the victims of the Shoah, it is the only coherent rejection of the Nazi principle of nondifferentiation among Jews.

But to focus specifically on the issue of the moral legitimacy of aesthetic representation of the Shoah, I suspect that almost everyone who has wrestled with this question and decided against any prohibition of fictionalizations has come up with similar arguments. Nonetheless, it is important to make explicit the basis of one's conclusions. For me, the following considerations finally prevailed over my initial agreement with Adorno's interdiction.

Since the generation of survivors will soon die out, to prohibit anyone who was not actually caught in the Shoah from representing it risks consigning the events to a kind of oblivion interrupted only occasionally by the recitation of voices from an increasingly distant past. Any tribal story, if it is to survive as a living part of communal memory, needs regularly to be retold and reinterpreted. To keep silent would be still worse than a necessarily denaturing, because too "composed," speech, since it was precisely with the permanent silence of universal disbelief that the SS used to taunt the Jews in the campsif any prisoners were to survive, the Nazis boasted, no one would believe their account. "Many survivors," Primo Levi writes, "remember that the SS militiamen enjoyed cynically admonishing the prisoners: 'However this war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world will not believe him. There will perhaps be suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed: they will say that they are the exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you. We will be the ones to dictate the history of the Lagers.'" Even among themselves, the SS usually maintained a complex rhetoric of indirection, bureaucratese, paranomasia, euphemism, and displacement when referring to the Shoah. Thus, for example, the murder squads organized by Heydrich were called Einsatzgruppen (task forces) while the delicate phrase Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) was the standard term for physical annihilation. Even in Himmler's notorious speech of October 3, 1943, delivered to his senior officers at Posen, he first carefully refers to the Judenevakuierung (the "evacuation" or "deportation" of the Jews) before calling it die Ausrottung (extermination). Himmler announces that the genocide constitutes "ein niemals geschriebenes und niemals zu schreibenes Ruhmesblatt unserer Geschichte" (a never-written and never-to-be-written page of glory in our [SS] history) and declares that although he will, this one time, discuss it openly ("Unter uns soll es einmal ganz offen ausgesprochen sein"), nonetheless it can never be talked about in the outside world ("und trotzdem werden wir in der Öffentlichkeit nie darüber reden"). It is by public words, not by silence, that Himmler's boast is rejected, and in this sense, the retelling by other voices, voices of those who were never in German hands, crystallizes the continuing legacy of the Shoah, and confirms its wider importance as part of our collective memory. Secondly, even the most scrupulous first-person "factual" testimony does a certain injustice to the other victims, if only by making its narrator the primary observing consciousness of both the tale and the events, thereby slighting the anguish of everyone else to a certain degree. Since survival itself was largely accidental, and since far more prisoners died in the camps than returned, the testimony of anyone who survived is necessarily both partial and, in the harshest sense, unrepresentative. (Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved [1986], for example, is haunted by the awareness that his own earlier account of Auschwitz, If This Is a Man [1947], is that of "an anomalous minority," necessarily excluding the perspective of the vast majority of inmates who perished without leaving any record of their ordeal.)Moreover, since one of the Nazi mechanisms of controlling the prisoners depended on isolating each of them as much and for as long as possible to keep them ignorant of the full scale of their predicament, the testimony of any single survivor, no matter how vivid and thoughtful, will be fragmentary and in need of supplementation from other sources and narratives. Indeed, Levi points out that most of the survivor narratives he has come across have already been influenced, often unconsciously, by "information gathered from later readings or the stories of others." Even the seemingly strictest first-person narratives often bear from the outset the markings of other stories, other interpretations encountered after the Liberation, and bear those markings as part of the minimum necessity of being able to tell a story at all. As the Israeli author and concentration camp survivor Yehiel De-Nur (Ka-Tzetnik) makes clear, "even those who had been there did not know Auschwitz. Not even someone who was there two long years, as I was." But in its turn, each "supplementary" narrative, whether fictional or "documentary," will itself also contain stylization, figurative language, aesthetic ordering, and a distinct point of view, and thus provide, amid the shock of the information it conveys, a certain formal "seemliness." If the text succeeds in moving its reader at all, then these writerly choices must have yielded a kind of readerly "pleasure," strange though the term may be in this context. Irrespective of the genre, a reader necessarily remains someone who responds with emotions and ideas to words encountered in a printed text, no matter how imaginatively unsettling the subject matter of the narrative.

Indeed, I think it is fair to argue that one of the most pervasive myths of our era, a myth perhaps even partially arising out of our collective response to the horrors of the concentration camps, is the absolute authority given to first-person testimony. Such narratives, whether by camp survivors or by those who have endured rape, child abuse, or any devastating trauma, are habitually regarded as though they were completely unmediated, as though language, gesture, and imagery could become transparent if the experience being expressed is sufficiently horrific. Testimony wrung out of a person under extreme duress is thus seen as the most true, the most unmediated, the most trustworthy. In contemporary aesthetics, for example, the force of much "performance art" relies preciselyand I think precariouslyon just such a faith in the authenticity of first-person testimony. Indeed, it is not stretching a point to argue that recent American art in general has been marked by a strong, even if unconscious, Platonic suspicion of aesthetic mediation, imitation, and stylization. Often this mistrust takes the form of a new kind of Puritanism directed against style-as-artifice and against the imagination as being able to give shape to experiences not autobiographically grounded. But the severity of the suspicion at the claims of the imagination is balanced by an utterly naive faith in first-person narratives, as though they were "really true" and untouched by figuration and by the shaping of both conscious and unconscious designs on the speaker's part. Adorno's injunction against representing Shoah experiences in fiction because of the attendant stylization assumes that testimonial accounts have no such stylization, which is, of course, only a specific example of what has become an increasingly prevalent criterion of judgment. So deep-rooted has the anxiety of figuration become that even a recent memoir, A Time to Speak, by Helen Lewis, a Theresienstadt and Auschwitz survivor, is accompanied by a foreword assuring the reader that the book contains no novelistic "tricks." More surprisingly still, the foreword, which bristles with scorn at literary self-consciousness, is written by Jennifer Johnston, herself one of Ireland's more distinguished contemporary novelists: "All the baggage of the novelist is herejoy and despair, good and evil, death and survivalbut there is no fiction, none of the novelist's attention-seeking tricks, nothing is manipulated as a novelist would manipulate, the pattern is inherent not imposed. Helen Lewis . . . never invents; there is only Truth, witnessed Truth."Yet surely there is no reason to assume that first-person testimony about the horrific is more unmediated and complete than any other kind of speech. For example, concentration camp victims have many reasons, both conscious and unconscious, to amend and shape their narratives (guilt about having survived at all, shame for any acts they committed that may have been essential to their survival but which deeply violated the ethics of their ordinary lives, and even a degree of traumatization so severe as to make them incapable of recalling crucial aspects of their own experience). If, for instance, as the Israeli Supreme Court ruled on July 29, 1993, there is reasonable ground to doubt that John Demjanjuk really was "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka, then the misidentification by his surviving victims may be due not only to the long interval between "Ivan's" acts and Demjanjuk's arrest, but equally, to the very nature of the victims' suffering, which made them perhaps less able to identify their tormentor correctly, rather than, as the official myth has it, more certain of accurately remembering him. Perhaps the very need to find, and see punished, whoever made them suffer so terribly, persuaded the witnesses to identify positively a likely, but not necessarily the correct, candidate. It is important to admit, moreover, that even the survivor-witness's testimony moves us not just by its factual and evidentiary material, but by fitting that material into a specific ideological/narrative framework. Readers respond very differently to autobiographical accounts of the Shoah, depending to a significant degree on the way the particular survivor's philosophical, religious, and socio-political perspectives color the documentary testimony. Primo Levi's liberal and scientifically trained Italian bourgeois worldview is unmistakably different from that of an Austrian literary intellectual like Hans Meyer (who wrote under the name Jean Améry after the war), let alone from that of an Eastern European Hasid, a Russian Bundist, or a committed Polish Zionist. All of the Shoah's victims may have shared the same fate, but as James Young rightly notes, "each victim 'saw'i. e., understood and witnessedhis predicament differently, depending on his own historical past, religious paradigms, and ideological explanations." What we reconstruct through our reading is never the event as an absolute, but what Young goes on to call "the [contemporary writer's] understanding of themthat is, the epistemological climate in which they existed [for him] at the time." But so, too, every reader's response is shaped by the "epistemological climate" in which the testimony is read. As Jonathan Boyarin shrewdly observes, "in popular-culture representations of the Holocaust, the particular horror of the Nazi genocide is emphasized by an image of Jews as normal Europeans, 'just like us.' In fact we can only empathize with, feel ourselves into, those we can imagine as ourselves." But the affective force of identification through perceived similarity is as powerful in high art as it is in popular culture. Secular Jewish intellectuals often react negatively, for example, to certain ultra-orthodox accounts of the Shoah (especially the theological explanation that it was the pre-war violation of the ritual laws and commandments by the assimilated Jews of Europe that was being expiated in the camps). Similarly, more religiously observant Jews often find Primo Levi's secular humanism shockingly blind to the anti-Semitic tendencies in the authors upon whom he drew for moral sustenance in Auschwitz. One of my colleagues, for example, told me that when he gave a talk on Levi's Se questo è un uomo to a local Jewish community, he was bitterly attacked by several members of the audience for praising the scene where the author rediscovers his fundamental humanity by recalling Dante's description of Ulysses in Inferno 26. Dante, in their eyes, was one of the central authors of the culture whose anti-Semitism had "culminated" in the camps, and they regarded Levi's invocation of Dante in such a setting as an index of an alienation from his people so complete that even Auschwitz could not teach him the futility of assimilationism. It is also instructive, if not particularly encouraging, to see that Levi is now under equally severe attack from quite a different source, not because of his lack of Jewish faith, but because he is so out of step with current American academic pieties. So, for example, Dominick LaCapra, a prominent history professor and theoretician, writes with breath-taking condescension, "It may also be useful to quote Levi on silence, for his words are instructive despite their dubious indebtedness to a largely unexamined tradition of high culture, overly analytic rationality, teleological assumptions and restrictive humanism."

This disparity in responses should alert us to a fundamental paradox: all of the writers on the Shoah speak of its incomprehensibility and basic incommunicability; in fact, though, accounts of the Shoah, even more strictly than narratives of less extreme events, rely on the witness and his listener sharing the same code of values and explanatory models of individual and social behavior in order to render convincing the assertion that something "incommunicable" has been experienced. There is, in other words, no single order of memorable testimony, no transparent paradigm of representation, that can address the different narrative needs of all those gripped by the subject. Prohibitions of any kind inevitablyand futilelytry to erect the individual "legislator's" personal and ideological perspective as the only acceptable model.

Notwithstanding the extent to which theoretical reflection qualifies and ultimately rejects the insistence on purely factual narratives, the exploitation of the Nazi genocide in countless mediocre books and films is clearly a thoroughly depressing phenomenon. Revealingly though, the authors of many of the most clumsy fictionalizations are often at great pains in their prefaces or in separate interviews to insist that they have used the fullest available historical records and tried to be totally faithful to the facts as they have learned them through scrupulous research. In Thomas Keneally's Schindler's List, for example, we are told that the author has used "the texture and devices of the novel to tell a true story" and that he has wished "to avoid all fiction, since fiction would debase the record." Berel Lang, who has discussed this issue with particular lucidity, notes that while the belief that "literature has moral presuppositions and consequences is not startling . . . moral accountability has rarely been pressed against the writer for the very act of writing. . . . [Writers on the Shoah demonstrate a felt] obligation (morally, but also intellectually) to establish their right to address that event as a subject." Critical to establishing this right, as Lang remarks in a subsequent study, is "not so much [the writers'] success in achieving historical authenticity, as their acknowledgment of that as a goaltheir deference to the conventions of historical discourse as a literary means." Implicit in all such arguments is the sense that while no actual testimony could "debase the record," all "fictionalizations" inevitably do so.

Yet there is an unexplored absence of correlation between the argument against literary stylization, which says that the element of aesthetic pleasure contradicts the meaningless horror of the Shoah, and the argument against fictionalization, which says that the figuration of events not directly experienced by the artist debases all those who actually have undergone them. Both of these positions are equally vulnerable, it seems to me, to one or more of the counter-arguments outlined above, but the lack of any logical connection between the two principal injunctions against all representations not authenticated by direct experience is itself striking. Moreover, there is a phenomenon as depressing in its own way as the entertainment industry's commercialization of the Shoah, but which, because of the misplaced aura of wisdom with which we endow any survivors of such unprecedented suffering, has rarely been publicly discussed. I am thinking here of what George Steiner has described as the "disturbingly commercialized pathos of horror [that] has arisen around certain survivors and their all-too-eloquent and sometimes even theatrical witness." But if the biographical veracity of testimony does not guarantee its ethical significance, and if the element of stylization is inherent in any representation, fictional or not, then there is actually no single, global issue or injunction to be debated. There is only a series of specific works including poems, films, sculptures, drawings, novels, historical studies, and autobiographical memoirs, each of whose seemliness needs to be considered on its own terms without recourse to any overarching formulae. Instead of a single problem, there are the constantly changing questions raised by each new work that addresses the Shoah, and instead of a set of criteria determined in advance, only a kind of extreme localism of attention can come to terms with the variety of ways the Shoah is figured in our historical and moral imaginations.

We forgive the crimes of individuals, but not their participation in a collective crime.
Marcel Proust, Le Côté de Guermantes

"Patience, my dear, patience. If you listen to Bleiman you'll be warm, he's promising you paradise." "Is he promising a temperate climate too?" "No my dear, prophets don't talk about such petty details. They talk about the people, exile, and redemption." "All that has nothing to do with me," says Rita. "I need two warm blankets."
Aharon Appelfeld, "1946"

Although everyone's list will surely differ, it is all too easy to think of representations of the Shoah whose lapses into tastelessness and exploitation are deeply offensive and which, in their vulgarity, risk coarsening the collective memory. But rare though they are, there is also a handful of works that have been painfully and movingly illuminating, whether semi-fictionalizations like Heinz Schirk's film of The Wannsee Conference, or, in Adorno's sense, "stylizations" as different from one another as Primo Levi's meditations on his concentration camp experiences and Dan Pagis's cycle of poems Testimony, or entirely imagined narratives like David Grossman's remarkable novel See Under: Love, as well as many of Alain Kleinmann's paintings and Shimon Attie's photographs. The best of these, however, testify convincingly against an excessive insistence that only the gathering of facts has ethical validitya kind of fetishization that is all the more insidious because, as the Czernovitz-born (1932), Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld cautions, "the numbers and the facts were the murderer's own well-proven means. Man as a number is one of the horrors of dehumanization."

It is true that of the few authentically moving fictionalizations of the Shoah, even fewer are actually set inside the death camps, as though a kind of imaginative closure in the face of the horror made such scenes unrepresentable. The French writer Henri Raczymow, for example, links the twin themes of wondering about his right to speak about the Shoah as "neither victim, nor survivor, nor witness of the event"with the logically subsidiary debate that asks: even if representation by someone not directly affected is judged permissible, how far can that representation go, what can it be allowed to figure and what must stay taboo? Raczymow's decision, made with trepidation and doubly mediated by the device of a fictitious chronicle kept by his narrator's sister, is that the world of the Warsaw Ghetto may be legitimate as a setting for the language of fiction, but the actual operation of a death camp must be excluded categorically from figural representation: "I see nothing. . . . I should not see anything. To want to see would place me beside the S.S. man in charge of looking through the peephole in order to see the condition of those being gassed." It is hard not to sympathize with this distinction, but at the same time it also seems too arbitrary to be useful as a general rule. The method and setting of the genocide is not a very reliable demarcation point once the legitimacy of any literary representation has been allowed, and Raczymow's insistence on a strictly ethical criterion to determine where to place his narrator's eye may depend upon too elusive a distinction. If, for example, Raczymow himself had been a camp survivor like Tadeusz Borowski, whose collection of grimly sardonic stories, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, shows the untenability of any fixed categories for literature about the Shoah, would the description of the gas chambers in operation be any less of a violation? But if not, why should the question of literary legitimacy depend on the biographical circumstances of the author?

Raczymow's hesitation is in part justifiedand no doubt in part also motivatedby an awareness of how many recent works contain scenes set in the death factories in order to mobilize the emotions that such extreme situations elicit. The kind of frisson for which Pawel grasps by linking the births of Kafka's sister and Hitler bears a family resemblance to the way William Styron uses the Auschwitz scenes in Sophie's Choice to give his novel an intensity it would otherwise lack. And both of these in turn are not as far removed as their authors might think from the use of concentration camp settings as a staple of sadomasochistic pornography. But there is also another, and perhaps even more prevalent danger that haunts many readers of literature on the Shoah: that of becoming so caught up in the material that, compared with its intensities, other themes, ideas, and emotions seem insignificant. This seems to me an extraordinarily misplaced and even pernicious response, but it is nonetheless sufficiently seductive and widespread to require conscious resistance. Norma Rosen's article, "The Second Life of Holocaust Imagery," for example, is characteristic of this tendency. Rosen, who is not herself a camp survivor, insists that "for a mind engraved with the Holocaust, gas is always that gas. Shower means their shower. Ovens are those ovens. A train is a freight train crammed with suffocating children." Although she qualifies this grisly description with the scarcely less overwrought acknowledgment that "of course this does not always happen. Some days the sky is simply blue and we do not wonder how a blue sky looked to those on their way to the crematoria," it is difficult to read the texture and rhetoric of the whole passage except as symptomatic of an almost clinically excessive identification with the suffering of others. One of the more enduring of the many horrors of the Shoah is that it seems to give such identifications the justification of a highly developed historical/moral imagination about the suffering of one's people. Dubious as I am about Fackenheim's notion of making certain one does not "grant Hitler a posthumous victory," if the phrase has any real meaning, I would argue that its import is not to tell people what kind of Jews they must now be, but rather to warn against regarding hallucinations like Rosen's as in any way a fitting memorial to the murdered.

No writer on the Shoah has been more aware of the risks of representing the ultimate viciousness of the Shoah, or more careful to avoid feeding an appetitive fascination with evil, than Aharon Appelfeld. A child of wealthy, thoroughly assimilated Bukovina Jews who were murdered in the Shoah, the nine-year-old Appelfeld survived by escaping alone from the Transnistria camp. Thereafter, he stayed alive by hiding in the forests and occasionally working for local peasants until the Russian army took him along as an assistant cook and helper in their sweep westward. Finally, he ended up in a refugee camp on the Italian coast, from which he was taken to Palestine by the Zionist youth rescue movement. Appelfeld, beyond any other prose writer, is credited in Israel with having made the Shoah into a legitimate theme for novelists. Writers like A. B. Yehoshua acknowledge that "Appelfeld . . . opened up new possibilities for treating the Holocaust in literature," and Yehoshua reminds us how much resistance Appelfeld's novels initially encountered among an Israeli public that, before the Eichmann trial, wanted to hear as little as possible about the world inhabited by the murdered Jews of Europe.Central to the success of Appelfeld's writings has been the care he exercises in not allowing the violence of the killers to be directly represented in his novels. He has understood, as Henri Raczymow did not, that if one wants to avoid letting the details of Nazi savagery flood the narrative, then it makes little sense to allow one's gaze to approach right up to, but not enter, the gates of the death camps. From Appelfeld's perspective, the mass starvation, constant street murders, and beatings of the Warsaw Ghetto are as contaminated material as the gas chambers themselves, and in fact, there are hardly any Nazis in Appelfeld's books at all. His narratives of the Shoah take place among the secularized Jews of Austria and its eastern border states, and when the world of the surrounding Aryan majority is directly visualized, it is always in the form of peasants, minor officials, and morally compromised, but not blatantly sadistic fellow-townsmen, rather than through the typical bludgeon-wielding SS guards of Shoah exploitations. Since I intend to criticize a constitutive, and in many ways ethically vitiating, weakness in Appelfeld's writings, it is only just also to acknowledge here that his accomplishment in legitimizing the Shoah as a theme for serious Israeli prose fiction is enormous. As Appelfeld noted in an interview, he began to write about the Shoah as a survivor-immigrant at a time when no one in his adopted country wanted to hear about the topic, in part as a willed decision of collective repression and in part because during the early years of statehood "personal experience was simply not worthy of recall. Only if you had been a pioneer . . . a partisan. Suffering by itself did not merit attentionunless it served a collective purpose." (It is worth underscoring how different traditional Anglo-American criteria of judgments about literature are from those of Israel's pioneer generation of authors and readers. Until very recently, Western readers tended to cherish primarily, if not exclusively, the quality of personal experience and were suspicious of using that experience to serve a "collective purpose." But from the outset, and to an extent unimaginable in any other country, "Israeli Shoah literature . . . is not identified with first-hand testimony, with survivor's narratives.") Appelfeld has been among the most prominent voices for a complaint common to many other immigrant-writers who share the sense that for a large number of Israeli Zionists, the entire experience of Diaspora Jewry, and even more so the Shoah, was a source of profound national embarrassment. Indeed, for many Israelis the culture that the survivors brought with them to Israel had no place in the new homeland. For example, the Hungarian-born (1934), Israeli poet Itamar Yaoz-Kest describes having been treated as "the stooped, pale Gola Jew, a victim." He explains that "the condescending attitude of the Israeli towards the immigrant Jew is a direct offshoot of the revolt of Zionism against the Diaspora. The image of the Jew as victim is offensive and threatening to the Israeli ethos." Nor can such a description be regarded as largely a projection of immigrant anxieties. In a meeting with Ben-Gurion, the poet and critic Leah Goldberg, herself an immigrant who only arrived in Tel Aviv from Lithuania in 1935, described survivors of the Shoah as "ugly, impoverished, morally suspect, and hard to love." Since the Jews in Appelfeld's books are often unheroic, pale victims, morally suspect and extremely difficult to love, he ironically appears to have accepted the terms of the polemic in order to expose its logic, declaring himself the only author in Israel eager to be labeled "a 'Jewish' writer." As Alan Mintz notes, "in an important sense, Appelfeld's rescue [from the Italian Displaced Persons' transit camp to Palestine in 1946] was a failure. As an orphan survivor, the boy was educated within the institutions of the Youth Aliyah [immigration] . . . movements; the ideological indoctrination these adolescents received encouraged them to disassociate themselves from the past: to forget it entirely and to make themselves over as Jews and as men in the image of the sabra [the tough, native-born, "new Jews" of the Zionist ideal]." Tom Segev points out that "the task the country's leaders set for themselves was to give the survivors a new personality, to imbue them with new values. 'They must learn love of the homeland, a work ethic, and human morals,' said a Mapai [Israeli Labor Party] leader, and another one added that they should be given 'the first concepts of humanity.' One said, as if they were a huge ball of dough, that it was necessary to 'knead their countenances.' At one meeting of the Mapai secretariat it was said that they should be 're-educated.'" Appelfeld's whole career has testified to just how determinedly he seemed to resist the pressures of that "re-education," and with what concentration he has included the European Jewish world he was taught to reject at the very center of his fiction. This act of resistance required not merely great personal and imaginative integrity but also a kind of literary self-knowledge that, at its best, makes Appelfeld a crucial figure in contemporary writing per se, not merely in internal Israeli cultural and ideological debates.

Appelfeld's importance is centrally grounded in the fact that he is not only writing about the genocide as such, but rather, attempting to narrate the relationship between that catastrophe and the world it obliterated. But if the very act of representing European Jewry in its final months before the Shoah constituted both a thematic breakthrough and a polemical assertion of resistance in Israeli letters, the perspective from which Appelfeld treats his characters betrays an unconscious but thorough complicity with the sabras' contemptuous dismissal of the values and dignity of those Jews. There is a deeply troubling failure of historical and moral comprehension at the core of some of Appelfeld's most celebrated novels, and this failure is all the more disturbing since it is so strikingly at odds with the potential imaginative richness of Appelfeld's project as a whole. It is as though Appelfeld could only transgress the Israeli taboo against chronicling the unheroic lives of ordinary, assimilated Austro-German Jews, as well as the larger prohibition against any representation of the Shoah, by treating his characters as marionettes whose futile gestures on an absurd stage we watch, half in horror, half in anxiously bemused melancholy at their foolishness. We know they are doomed; they stubbornly refuse to know it, and in the interaction between our knowledge and their ignorance a fable of willed self-delusion unfolds whose motifs would have satisfied the strictest of Appelfeld's Zionist instructors in the youth movements.

I stress the element of "fable" in Appelfeld's narratives because this has been singled out repeatedly as praiseworthy by critics. By avoiding explicit reference to the Shoah, and more particularly, by refusing to allow the archetypal scenarios of concentration camp savagery to orchestrate the emotional force of his stories, Appelfeld succeeds in short-circuiting any possibility of the sadomasochistic identification that haunts literature on the Shoah. Similarly, whether triggered by the image of Hitler himself or by one of his stand-ins, ranging from Eichmann or Mengele to the unnamed but all-powerful SS thugs, the hypnotic fascination with pure evil can find no foothold in Appelfeld's books, focused as these are on the intricacies of Jewish self-delusion, class snobbism, and racial (self-) contempt. Robert Alter, in a review of To the Land of the Cattails (1986), notes that Appelfeld's "habitual strategy as a writer haunted by the Holocaust is to concentrate on its historical margins, either prelude or aftermath," and praises his "art of intimation" for rendering the terror of the Shoah "more powerfully than any direct introduction of violence." An "art of intimation" is exactly the right phrase to define Appelfeld's characteristic procedure, but this art is purchased at the price of a psychological reductiveness and a historical flattening that ultimately may not be much preferable to the lurid repertoire of horror scenes it was intended to replace.The best way to illustrate the cost of Appelfeld's technique is to look closely at Badenheim 1939, the first and critically most acclaimed of his novels to have appeared in English. (The Hebrew title, Badenhaym 'Ir Nofesh [Badenheim, Holiday Resort], does not contain the inappropriate specificity of the year, which was added for the American translation.) Badenheim is a typical Austrian spa town, where prosperous, thoroughly secularized Jews spend their vacations enjoying the restorative mineral baths, the rich hotel food, and the cultural life of an annual music and theatrical summer festival. In the novel, the town becomes a microcosm of the world of Austro-German Jewry with its cultural pretensions, its rejection of any overt signs of Jewishness, especially as embodied by the "vulgar Ostjuden " (Jews from Eastern Europe, whose style of dress, language, and religious observance exacerbated the unease of westernized Jews), and its hallucinatory refusal to confront the danger that was literally enclosing it from every side. Already a modern, if still unacknowledged, ghetto, Badenheim, in the course of the novel, is turned into a Third Reich transit camp by a series of ever-tightening legal restrictions imposed by the governing "Sanitation Department," until eventually, the final directive for a compulsory "resettlement" to the East orders the entire population to the railway station where "an engine coupled to four filthy freight cars" emerges to take them to their destination. Even at the end, although the Jews of Badenheim have been deprived of their freedom, their jobs, and their contact with the outside world, and have been ordered about like so much chattel (but without any overt physical coercion, which would violate the book's fable-like tone), they retain their by now clearly absurd optimism. Dr. Pappenheim, a renowned impresario and musical connoisseur, and the most fully described character in the book, ends Badenheim 1939 with the cheerfully encouraging comment, "If the coaches are so dirty it must mean that we have not far to go" (148).

But every reader of the novel knows the names of the stations where the train will disgorge its passengers, and if Appelfeld can avoid mentioning Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, or Mauthausen, it is only because of his certainty that the reader will do so in his place. The reader hears the desperate will to lie to oneself in Pappenheim's final words and understands how soon and how methodically that Panglossian confidence will be silenced. And what is of crucial importance, the reader understands this precisely from a deep familiarity with the kinds of Shoah texts and images Appelfeld is applauded for having excluded, so that in a sense everything that Appelfeld formally bars from his fictional world he invites back in by virtually compelling his readers to stage the horrific set-pieces in their own imaginations. Ultimately, there is less difference than either Appelfeld or his admirers would like to claim between a concluding sentence like "If the coaches are so dirty it must mean that we have not far to go" and Pawel's "in the not too distant Austrian town of Braunau, one Clara née Plözl, wife of the customs inspector Aloïs Hitler, had given birth to . . . a sickly infant whose survival seemed doubtful. He survived." Badenheim 1939 is so confident of its reader's familiarity with descriptions of Nazi bestialities that it never needs to mention them at all in order to have their specter loom in the interstices of every scene and dialogue. Thus, when Gabriel Josipovici interprets Appelfeld's "silence" about the camps as an implicit "condemnation" of writers who "mythologize" the Shoah and whose texts feed our horrified fascination with the details of the extermination process, he pinpoints the finest impulse in the novels but ignores the extent to which their power is only made possible by the popularity of all the narratives Appelfeld's restraint is supposed to rebuke. It is primarily with these texts and images that Badenheim 1939 is in dialogue, and what is lost thereby is the reality of Austro-German Jewish life, as well as an acknowledgment of the individual complexity on which genuine understanding depends.Thomas Flanagan, in one of the best of the book's many laudatory reviews, has described the atmosphere of Badenheim 1939 as one of "mild skies, strawberry tarts and fragments of idle conversation, the weather of European social comedy. . . . At times . . . the novella seems a pastiche of dozens we have readcool, shapely comedies of life in a genteel resort." Flanagan's link of Badenheim 1939 to conventional social satires seems to me much more accurate than the often invoked parallel with Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain . Both Mann and Appelfeld use resort settings as microcosms of a spiritually and politically diseased society, but Mann's characters are intensely aware of their predicament, and their conversations obsessively seek to diagnose that crisis. Appelfeld's vacationers just as obsessively deny that anything is wrong at all, and their conversations scarcely ever exceed the limited self-awareness typical of a comedy of manners. What Appelfeld has done, and it is a stylistically masterful decision, is to use the tonal resources of conventional summer resort comedies to construct an allegory of European Jewry on the eve of its annihilation. But as in the more typical of such mild satires, Appelfeld's tonal decisions make it impossible to take seriously the banal struggles and love affairs, indeed the entire inner world of his puppets, so that ultimately, the reader's shock at the gulf between the triviality of the characters' existence "on stage" and the gravity of the torment that awaits them after the curtain has set generates the only powerful emotion of the book.The expected, or, more accurately, the necessary importation of our knowledge about the Shoah is a particularly manipulative example of backshadowing because it seems so unemphatic and "natural." Moreover, it harmonizes perfectly with the tone of distant and aloof mockery used to describe the characters and their determinedly blinkered concentration on the quotidian banalities of resort life. But such an account of European Jewry only makes sense as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the Zionist interpretation of Austro-Hungarian Jews stumbling blindly to their doom, willfully ignoring ever-clearer warning signs of the untenability of their position, and concerned only to distance themselves as much as possible from any acknowledgment of a common Jewish identity. (Leo Strauss used to call such rhetoric reductio ad Hitlerum .) Nothing can break through the triviality of the vacationers' narrow egotism, and when they leave for the railway station and its "four filthy freight cars," it is not a real existence that has been terminated, but only a sham construct with no more substance than the elaborate pastries of the Badenheim Konditorei . Appelfeld's fable, for all its seeming lightness of touch, is as moralistic and judgmental as the sternest critic of Austro-German Jewry, and, just as with all backshadowing perspectives, its termination in the abyss of the Shoah is adduced to "prove" the meaninglessness of Jewish life in Aryan Europe.

Badenheim's air of unreality is deliberately maintained throughout the book: from the pharmacist's garden, Pappenheim and his musicians "looked like a mirage" (9); the inspectors from the Sanitation Department seemed like "marionettes in a play" (11); from the railway station the deportees "could see . . . the roofs of the houses like little pieces of folded cardboard" (145). But the holiday atmosphere of this cardboard theater is, from the very beginning, traversed by flashes of fear, hysteria, and eventually even suicide, without the characters having sufficient consciousness to realize that their story has switched registers and that they have been uprooted into an entirely different genre. Their obliviousness is the novel's final judgment on the Jews of Badenheim and by extension, on Austro-German Jewry as a whole, who went, to use the part-embarrassed, part-contemptuous phrase of Zionist rhetoric, Katso'n latevah (like sheep to the slaughter). The knowledge, shared by the author and his readers, of what will befall the Jews of Badenheim becomes disturbingly self-congratulatory, harsh as this description may seem, primarily because life finds it extraordinarily hard not to be on the side of life, and when we read a book like Badenheim 1939 or The Retreat, we are likely to be at least as angry at, as we are grieved by, the blindness of the characters. The fact that the historical consequence of the characters' blindness was death only makes the novelist (and hence the reader) more impatient with them and, drawing on the hollow wisdom of backshadowing, we are always able to tell ourselves that we would never have uttered such self-degrading assimilationist non-sense, that we would have been alert enough to flee in time, and that if we had been caught we would have resisted by any means available.

Other writers like Stefan Zweig and George Clare have described the quiescence of assimilated Viennese Jews, which continued even after Germany began to issue the Nuremberg decrees that stripped Jews of their citizenship and banned them from public life. Zweig describes the reaction of the majority of his acquaintances to the new racial laws being passed in Germany in the following terms: "Not even the Jews worried, and they acted as if the cancelling of all the rights of physicians, lawyers, scholars, and actors was happening in China instead of across the border three hours away, where their own language was spoken. They rested comfortably in their homes, rode about in their cars. Moreover, everybody had a ready-made phrase: 'That cannot last long.'" Clare's equally striking account of Jewish self-delusion is set in Austria's most famous resort town, Bad Ischl: "Less than eight months later we were proscribed, hunted, despised. But in August 1937 we sat cozily in that little inn chatting time away as if it were stretching before us endlessly and happily." Clare stresses that the misplaced sense of security that helped doom so many Austrian Jews allowed his family to enjoy their resort vacation in 1937. But his passage, which initially seems like an exact historical instantiation of Appelfeld's fictional drama, indirectly highlights a crucial index of how reductive such a vision can be. No doubt there is a bitter truth in some of Appelfeld's diagnoses, but that truth is compromised by the insistent backshadowing and allegorization that marks virtually every scene of Badenheim 1939 .In an earlier section, I praised works that let us hear with sympathy the reasonableness of those European Jews who made the fatally wrong guesses about their chances for a peaceful assimilation into Austro-German society. But as with all historical judgments, the crucial question is exactly when these optimistic projections constituted the bases for people's decisions. Although the precise date is subject to debate, there is little doubt that there came a time when such hopes ceased being reasonable and became, for whatever personal reasons, delusional, because it was no longer a question of some un-specified future peril, but of a pervasive and imminent threat happening all around. But by setting his novel when he does, Appelfeld effectively blocks any engagement with the question of a plausible versus a willfully blind Jewish misrecognition of their situation. The addition of "1939" to Appelfeld's original title is not only irritating but unnecessary, because it is clear that his novel has to take place after the German annexation of Austria in March 1938. Although Austrian anti-Semitism had been both widespread and politically powerful, the systematic registration, physical segregation, and deportation of Austrian Jews was a direct consequence of their sudden subjection to the Nuremberg decrees. Moreover, the Anschluss itself was accompanied by outbreaks of intense, widespread, and public anti-Semitic violence, as well as by official acts of terror aimed at the entire Jewish community. Almost immediately after the Anschluss, the Germans appointed Adolf Eichmann to drive all Jews out of Austria by any means possible. Austria's Jews quickly faced an official terror that, along with the casual brutality of much of the population, made their position considerably more precarious than that of the Jews still living in Germany proper. So effective was Eichmann's technique that a higher percentage of Austrian Jews emigrated, and hence survived the Shoah, than did German Jews. Hence, if the Badenheim vacationers, like the historical Clare family, might have stayed stubbornly blind to their endangered position in 1937, after the Anschluss no Austrian Jew could have entertained any more doubts that his life was in peril. Nor could any of them have sounded like Dr. Pappenheim, "cheerfully" answering the question, "What's happened this year?" with the reply, "Nothing out of the ordinary" (5).

This temporal difference is critical for understanding one of Appelfeld's most important, but hitherto unremarked, techniques: while he endows his characters with the false sense of security still possible in the late days of the Schuschnigg government (Kurt von Schuschnigg [1897-1977] was Chancellor of Austria from 1934 until Hitler's troops marched into Austria unopposed in March 1938), the actions of the novel require that state power already be exclusively in the hands of a Nazi administration. This double horizon makes the characters seem all the more foolish. For example, in one of the most dubious of the novel's barely disguised appropriations of Shoah imagery, no one reacts with any surprise or fear when the Sanitation Department "took measurements, put up fences . . . unloaded rolls of barbed wire, [and] cement pillars" (15). To the vacationers these implements, whose provenance in concentration camp literature both the narrator and readers know far too well, are only "suggestive of preparations for a public celebration" (15). Badenheim 1939 collapses two historically distinct time frames within the narrative, and then adds a third and authoritative one from outside the tale by which the others can be judged. The first, from well before the beginning of the Austrian Republic in 1918 to the Anschluss, is the epoch of a perhaps unhealthy but still possible assimilationism, a time when a significant number of prosperous Austro-German Jews sought to eradicate any characteristics considered "typically Jewish" in themselves and to repudiate them when they were manifested by the dreaded Ostjuden . The second phase, begun immediately after the German annexation, involved a swiftly accelerating isolation of all Jews from the rest of society through expulsion from most professions and schools, and included a series of threatening restrictions that culminated in an enforced ghettoization, which itself served only as a temporary measure before the physical extermination in the camps began. Each step of this process had its own distinct temporal rhythm and daily routines, and certain as they were of the Nazis' hatred, the Jews at first could not conceive of the enormity of the horror that was being organized to liquidate them. The two principal epochs, although chronologically close, are quite different moments, both historically and psychologically; collapsing them makes utterly unbelievable the consciousness of Appelfeld's characters, because it endows them with expectations and reactions completely inappropriate to their new circumstances. Our own distance from the events tends to foreshorten and flatten out our sense of the past and thus makes less noticeable Appelfeld's blurring of distinct time periods. Finally, it is also our knowledge of the Shoah, a knowledge that the author and reader share but of which the characters are entirely ignorant, that provides the novel's third time frame. It is this additional knowledge that makes us read the references to familiar phases of the genocide as so sinister, like the repeated invocation of a "happy" journey to a new life in Poland, or the barbed wire and cement pillars as normal props of a "public festival," and there is something almost cruelly manipulative about the way Appelfeld's narrator calmly registers these horror-charged images just to trigger the reader's feeling of dread. Consider, for example, the way Poland is regularly mentioned with an entirely different resonance for the characters and the readers: for example, "In Poland everything was beautiful, everything was interesting" (25); "'It will be completely different [in Poland],' said Pappenheim. 'You can't imagine how different it will be'" (90). The irony here seems to me stunningly callous toward the vacationers whose self-deception and blindness hardly merit this degree of mockery.

The allegory of Badenheim 1939 is created by making a single narrative out of the three temporal strands I have described, and for all its tonal success, it is a deeply troubling strategy. The textual simultaneity of what were distinct historical moments saturates every novelistic element with too much, and sometimes contradictory, meaning, until the very excess of signification erases the book's grasp of the real history of its story. We know, for example, that if Austria's Jews wrongly trusted the Republic to protect them from the Nazis, then as soon as that hope, along with the existence of Austria as an independent nation, vanished, they hurled themselves at every possible foreign embassy trying, almost always in vain, to get a visa for any other country. The behavior of the vacationers in Badenheim is not just blindly self-deceiving; it is also largely Appelfeld's own fantasy, belied by the pervasive terror that gripped Austrian Jewry within hours of the Anschluss . The terror ended the era of fawning assimilationism Appelfeld satirizes, and for all that epoch's miscalculations, class vanity, and even Jewish anti-Semitism, it merits a more nuanced account than the mixture of psychological caricature and chronological absurdity it receives in Badenheim 1939 .

At its worst, an approach like Appelfeld's inadvertently makes the issue of responsibility for the Shoah itself into a question. Saul Friedlander has highlighted a basic problem in many texts about the Shoah: the risk that "the perpetrator's voice carries the full force of aesthetic enticement; the victims carry only the horror and the pity." Appelfeld succeeds in avoiding this kind of "aesthetic enticement" by never mentioning the Nazis directly, but by representing the Jews of Badenheim as irredeemably selfish and petty, he commits the greater offense of leaving unchallenged the monstrous proposition that Europe's Jews are somehow "deserving" of punishment. As Ruth Wisse points out, Appelfeld's allegory can only work by "taking the real terror imposed from without by real human forces and internalizing it, thereby further obscuring its origins and meaning. . . . Fate sits in judgment on all the ugly, assimilated Jewsfate in the form of the Holocaust. The result is a series of pitiless moral fables more damning of the victims than of the crime perpetrated against them." The result described here has nothing to do with Appelfeld's intention, but rather with the logical and rhetorical implications of his formal decisions and with the vision of history correlate with those decisions.

One way to crystallize the general implications of Appelfeld's practice in terms of my earlier discussion is to see how the "overdetermination" of signification forecloses any chance at sideshadowing. Since the relentless glare of the Shoah is ever present, not merely at the book's end but throughout its unfolding, it floods the various scenes with its overpowering significance so that none of them can have a consequence independent of that all-dominant one. Appelfeld himself clearly recognized the aesthetic and moral problem raised by backshadowing: his determination to avoid directly representing the Shoah by ending the novel before the killings actually began is part of this recognition. But since he never tries to voice an alternative and less monolithic vision of history, his novel incorporates none of the openness of sideshadowing, and his decision remains an isolated scruple unrelated to achieving a more complete understanding of the world of the victims.

Precisely this lack of penetration into the lived moral world and choices of Appelfeld's characters is why the effect of their inevitable, if only partially narrated, destruction at the end of Badenheim 1939 differs so fundamentally from the equally foreseeable and calamitous fates of fictional figures like Hektor, King Lear, or Balzac's Lucien de Rubempré. There is a crucial and often unacknowledged distinction between the "inevitability" of an anticipated climax in classical epic and tragedy, or in densely "realistic" novels like those of the Comédie humaine, and the retrospective, backshadowing historicomoral judgments of a book like Badenheim 1939 . In works like The Iliad, King Lear, or Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, the grim ending is not used retroactively to constitute the primary source of judgment on the characters. What the characters in these works do is seen as good or bad, evil or virtuous, at the moment their actions are committed. Lear is manifestly wrong and morally at fault right from his first speecheven if Goneril and Regan had kept their pledges and even if Cordelia were to have lived happily ever after in France, Lear's tyrannical self-indulgence would be palpably reprehensible. But if there had been no Shoah, the assimilationists vacationing in Badenheim might be considered, from certain perspectives, as weak or lacking in ethnic self-dignity, but from many other points of view, which probably included those of the majority of European Jewry, their self-definition as "Austrian citizens of Jewish origin" (21) would be entirely reasonable. To focus on one's private family ties, love affairs, careers, or artistic longings, is completely unobjectionable by normal, quotidian standards; only in the light of the genocide awaiting all of the characters can these kinds of priorities be found inadequate. In other words, the Shoah looming at the novel's end is used throughout the text, instant by instant and scene by scene, to judge everyone's behavior, and it forces us to interpret that behavior as escapist, futile, and ultimately self-destructive. This is not the case in a text, whether epic, tragedy, or novel, whose ending, once it has occurred, may seem retrospectively to have been predetermined but in which the episode-by-episode, moment-by-moment behavior of the characters is significant in its own right. So, for example, Hektor may be doomed in the judgment of the gods to die at the hands of Achilles, just as Achilles in turn must die before Troy falls, but their decisions and deeds throughout the poem have such resonance precisely because they are shown to be of momentous significance to themselves, to their companions, and even to the gods, irrespective of the end that awaits both warriors.

It should be abundantly clear from this discussion that nothing in my argument contests, let alone seeks to dismiss, the power of a literary tradition in which the audience's knowledge of the ultimate destiny of the characters is a crucial component in a work's aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual effect. But deterministic historical foreshadowing, unlike, say, classical tragic or heroic destiny, allows the already known end to minimize, not intensify, the actual choices of the characters, and it is as unlikely to succeed as are other attempts, in a secular age, to substitute historicist patterns of inevitability for the certainties of a theological world view. In part, no doubt, backshadowing often functions as our secular, historicist equivalent to the way a god can see the inevitability and interrelatedness of everything that happens. But in fact, stories about divine concern with the fate of time-bound mortals, whether set in the pagan world or in the Judeo-Christian one, with its insistence on the centrality of human "free will," make clear the importance of alternative choices in order to sustain any ethical judgment or even narrative interest. (Think, for example, of the story of Job, whose "test" depends entirely on the freedom that he does not exercise to curse God for the injustice of his sufferings.)

Of course my examples here are from works that we do not necessarily read for their historical specificity or analysis, but as I argued in my earlier discussion of Danto and Habermas, the ethical implications of backshadowing are registered as powerfully in historical as in fictional writing. As we have seen, in a sense it is clear that without a knowledge of what followed them, it is impossible to grasp the significance and implications of decisive past events (e.g., the first anti-Semitic laws passed by the Nazis). But it is not the course of a particular historical unfolding that is at issue here; rather, it is a respect for people living at a time before that unfolding was complete who could not, and should not, be expected to have any knowledge of the future. Sideshadowing is not concerned to deny to either the historian or the novelist a retrospective awareness of important events; but it is concerned (1) not to regard the future from which the writers speak as the inevitable outcome of the past, and (2) not to let retrospection impose a hierarchy of significant/insignificant, fertile/futile, etc., judgments on the actions and thoughts of the characters in their narratives when the terms of that hierarchy are entirely determined by the story's ending.

But against my plea for the legitimacy of sideshadowing even in so unpromising a setting as Austria at the time of the Anschluss, it is understandably tempting to argue that "to speak of the dialectic between freedom and necessity is to speak necessarily of a very one-sided dialectic." Yet even at that moment in history there were other choices in Austria than denial of the impending catastrophe, as numerous contemporary memoirs detailing the flood of Jews seeking foreign visas makes clear. Even if most of the applicants were turned away, the trapped Jews were unlikely to have chosen to continue visiting vacation spas in utter indifference to the network of exclusionary and degrading legislation to which they were daily being made subject. Even if some Austrian Jews did refuse to acknowledge their perilous situation, the question of sideshadowing only indirectly concerns their likelihood of survival, which often was entirely out of their own hands; instead, sideshadowing seeks only to draw attention to the diversity of the stances they took toward their predicament and the particular ways they sought to maintain their existence and identity within their catastrophic new circumstances. It is crucial to recognize that the likelihood of success of any action is not the criterion by which a multiplicity of possibilities can be determined. Even if none of the available options has a very strong chance of succeeding, there are still differences among them (and since the issue here is one of saving individual human lives, surely even a small percentage is of enormous significance), and peoples' characters can be judged partially by which option they in fact attempt. This is a position Appelfeld himself logically, if not in the actual texture of his narrative, acknowledges, since otherwise he would not be able to ironize the assimilationist Jews of Badenheim. Clearly, if there actually had been no important individual choices left, then the Jews staying in places like Badenheim acted in the only way they could and are inappropriate targets for satire; but if there had been numerous different ways of reacting, as the historical record amply testifies, then Appelfeld's collapsing of the variety of Austro-German Jewish responses to Nazism into a single, monological model is too reductive to constitute a worthy or convincing satire.

I am claiming here that to acknowledge the validity of sideshadowing is not merely to reject historical inevitability as a theoretical model. Far more important, it means learning to value the contingencies and multiple paths leading from each concrete moment of lived experience, and recognizing the importance of those moments not for their place in an already determined larger pattern but as significant in their own right. This is what I have called a prosaics of the quotidian, and it is fundamentally linked to the historical logic of sideshadowing. At a crucial point in Badenheim 1939, the narrator sardonically observes that "the people were still preoccupied with their own affairsthe guests with their pleasures and the townspeople with their troubles" (20).This "preoccupation with their own affairs," as much as the denial of their Jewishness, is the unpardonable sin of everyone in Badenheim, and in Appelfeld's narrative it leads to consequences like the characters' general refusal even to discuss the fact that overnight "a barrier was placed at the entrance to the town. No one came in or went out" (38). Concern with the immediate and local, the familial and private, is judged inherently unworthy, an act of betrayal of others and of blindness to one's own deeper interests. Measured against the Shoah, as is everything in Badenheim 1939, Appelfeld's charge carries an intuitive plausibility, but it only makes sense if we agree to that standard of measurement; his scale loses its meaning if we consider, for example, that concern with one's ethnic identity, with the welfare of others in one's community, and with the nature of the political dispensation under which one lives, are themselves also local and personal matters, as much a part of prosaics as our "daily pleasures and troubles." In his contempt for prosaics, or, more accurately, in his linking of prosaics with pure selfishness, Appelfeld again rejoins the very ethos of the Israeli ideology that he thought he had rejected: "Personal experience was simply not worthy of recall. . . . Suffering by itself did not merit attentionunless it served a collective purpose." It is precisely distinctions like this that prosaics can not accept: a genuinely democratic, rather than a tyrannical, collective purpose can arise only out of the shared aims and hopes of the individuals who make up the larger group; such a purpose is the meeting point, not the liquidation, of the innumerable separate preoccupations and motives of everyone who agrees to work for the realization of the collective purpose.

Beneath the melancholy of its coolly appalled tone, the deeper irony of a work like Badenheim 1939 is that while it finds a new idiom in which to narrate the margins of catastrophe, it also finds itself entrapped in the very explanations it deems unacceptable as soon as they are spelled out more clearly. Appelfeld himself has spoken with passion and sorrow about "this anti-Semitism directed at oneself. . . . Even after the Holocaust, Jews did not seem blameless in their own eyes. On the contrary, harsh comments were made by prominent Jews against the victims for not protecting themselves and fighting back." (Appelfeld is presumably referring to Hannah Arendt, among others.) Although it is their assimilationism and lack of Jewish pride, not their inability to fight back, that is satirized, Appelfeld's characters collaborate so fully in their destruction that among those "prominent Jews" who make "harsh comments" about the victims of the Shoah, it is difficult not to include the author of Badenheim 1939 himself. Even the most assimilated and self-denying Jews were still sufficiently Jewish to be murdered, and so the contempt of a novel like Badenheim 1939 is just as "anti-Semitic" in its attribution of complicity as are the harshest judgments of the unnamed "prominent Jews."

What may seem like merely formal decisions about how much knowledge of the future to include in a narrative set in an earlier epoch, or about how much to let the narrative glance sideways and project forward to events that never happened, is already thematically charged and thereby morally significant. If it is absurd to see the "great world-historical event" of 1875 as Lenin's fifth birthday, and if we can smile at the idea of a secular angel arriving in Langres in 1713 to tell Mme. Diderot that she would soon give birth to a great encyclopedist, then we also have to learn to absolve from any blame those Jews who attended the summer festivals of Salzburg or Badenheim and went about dressed in Trachten rather than in the paramilitary gear of the Haganah or the tephillin of the orthodox. There is ample reason to find preposterous that it is now time to forgive the murderers. Recognizing the contingencies and uncertainties in human events can prevent us from blaming the victims for their disastrous choices, but it in no way mitigates the decisions and choices of their murderers. The consequences of evil actions may be unpredictable and continue long into the future, but they are committed by particular people at specific moments and can be recognized as evil as soon as they are performed. The murderers became such at the instant they participated in murder, and sideshadowing in no way minimizesin fact, it only emphasizestheir moral culpability. But enough time has passed for us to realize that it was always partially the shame of not having been there to help them survive that made blaming the victims of the Shoah so much a part of how the history of European Jewry has been figured since 1945. Sideshadowing eliminates neither historical responsibility nor moral judgment, but it insists we assign them prosaically: to individuals and individual actions where such judgments properly belong. It is these specific actions and choices made by individual people that constitute the history we inherit and with which our own actions and choices must ultimately come to terms.