SOURCE: “The Appelfeld World,” in Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature, Columbia University Press, 1984, pp. 203–38.

In the following essay, Mintz explores the defining characteristics of Appelfeld's work.

[Uri Zvi] Greenberg and Appelfeld are the two great writers of the Holocaust in Hebrew literature, yet their imaginative worlds are vastly different, so different in fact as to challenge the usefulness of notions of a shared language or poetics of a Holocaust literature. Temperament aside, the difference between Greenberg and Appelfeld comes down to a basic divergence in biographical circumstance: the situation of the bystander to catastrophe as against the situation of the survivor of catastrophe. Describing Greenberg as a bystander should indicate that the term implies nothing of aloofness. Who could have been more engaged than Greenberg? His poetry foresaw, preached, grieved, broke down, lamented, memorialized. Yet all these modes of engagement reflect the same truth about the...